(0)Telstra has come to the party and will also be releasing the iPhone on July 11. Unlike Vodafone and Optus, Telstra has also released its pricing plans. Contracts are for 2 years (pretty standard) and a $30/mo plan will allow you to pay $279 for the 8 gig model and $399 for 16 gig model. There’s no upfront cost if you go on a $100/mo plan. You won’t be able to buy an iPhone from Telstra without a plan.
Vodafone and Optus are taking pre-registrations too, but have not released pricing. It’s rumoured that you’ll be able to buy a phone outright (and get prepaid services), but this may be costly. It’s not clear, if this is the case, whether the phones will be unlocked.
No word from anyone about how much data is going to cost. I have a feeling it’s not going to be pretty. In Canada, a bit of consumer backlash occurred when local carrier Rogers released pricing for its plans. C$60/mo only buys 400mb of data. (US$70/mo buys unlimited data in the US.) It’s going to be even uglier in Australia, I reckon.
“Telstra consumer group managing director David Moffatt said it was an exciting development for the Australian mobile phone market…”. But remember that only a year ago, newspapers were reporting that “Telstra has all but ruled itself out of the running to carry Apple’s new iPhone mobile when it is released here next year with a senior executive launching a withering critique of the device. … There’s an old saying – stick to your knitting – and Apple is not a mobile phone manufacturer, that’s not their knitting,’ Mr Winn told AAP.”
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(0)Anwar Ibrahim has once again been accused of sodomy and has fled to the Turkish embassy for protection. Anwar is filing a civil suit in response. Here is the event timeline. This is all seems quite ridiculous and it doesn’t make Malaysia look any good. I made a post on the original conviction quite a few years ago.
Incidentally, along with Morgan Tsvangirai seeking refuge in the Dutch embassy in Harare last week, it is interesting to note that embassies have “extra-territorial status”, which means that the patch of land an embassy stands on is more or less treated as the sovereign land of the embassy’s home country. It’s almost like fleeing to the country itself (in a legal sense). Of course, you’re still physically in the host country, so while you may be protected from the host country’s government’s intervention (assuming it doesn’t want to cause a diplomatic incident), it only nominally protects you from other physical threats. For example, the Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Peru in the 1990s.
(0)Blizzard has just announced Diablo III!
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(0)Diamond-making technology is now at the point where synthetics are virtually indistinguishable from the real deal. “Cultured” diamonds, though, are still not cheap. A Smithsonian Magazine article reports on the diamond manufacturing industry.
Five years ago, I linked to this Wired article and this Atlantic article from 1982 on the same topic.
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