UK: comparison of selected tariffs vs. iPhone tariffs on O2UK

What with all the hype and general excitement around the iPhone 3GS, I thought I’d take a look behind the iPhone tariff pricings, comparing a similar monthly spend across O2 (NYSE: TEF)’s three kinds of tariff (note – I compared these tariffs online, this does not represent what you may find in shops):

• Standard Pay Monthly
• Simplicity (SIM-only) Rolling Monthly
• iPhone 3G(S)

I decided I would pick on £30/month (£29.38 to be exact) as the figure to assess across the board (since each tariff option has a £30 option), and see what that bought me:

Standard Pay Monthly

• 18-month tariff
• 400 minutes
• 1000 texts (online only)
• unlimited o2 to o2 calls
• Nokia (NYSE: NOK) 5800 Tube (free)

Simplicity

• Rolling monthly contract
• 1200 minutes
• 2400 texts (online only)
• unlimited o2 to o2 calls (default bolt-on)

iPhone 3GS

• 18-month tariff
• 75 minutes
• 125 texts
• unlimited UK data (GPRS/3G) and WiFi access (via The Cloud)

I think those are the salient points, and it’s interesting to see how things stack up, isn’t it? I should be fair and say that if you were to go to the next tariff up with the iPhone, then you get  600 minutes and 500 texts per month – but the aim here was to compare what you get for your £29.38/month….

So what do we think?

You can find the tariff prices on the O2 site for Pay Monthly here, for Simplicity here, and for iPhone 3GS here.