Mere seconds after last night's announcement of the new iPhone 3GS (arriving 19th of June) O2 released pricing details for the new 16GB and 32GB handsets. Monthly tariffs for the new devices are more or less the same as those that were available for the iPhone 3G.
The 16GB iPhone 3GS will cost £184.98 upfront with an 18 month contract costing £29.38 or £34.26 per month. The £29.38 monthly tariff offers 75 minutes, 125 text messages and unlimited data and Wi-Fi usage. The £34.26 monthly tariff offers 600 minutes and 500 texts along with the same data plan. The 32GB iPhone 3GS is available on the same price plans for a one-off cost of £274.23.
The cost of the old 8GB iPhone 3G has now dropped to £96.89 on the £29.38 18 month plan, and is free on all 24 month contracts. The iPhone OS 3.0 software will also be available to download through iTunes on the 17th of June, which will allow iPhone 3G users to make use of some of the cool new things available on the iPhone 3GS.
One of the many cool new things that OS 3.0 will allow you to do is to tether your iPhone to your computer or laptop. For those who don't know, but have figured out that this doesn't literally mean spear-lashing your handset to a laptop, 'tethering' allows you to surf the web on your laptop through your iPhone.
This effectively turns the iPhone into a mobile broadband 3G dongle, allowing you to hook up to the internet on the go. So if you needed to urgently file a report for work on the train on the way home, you could whip out your iPhone and tether away.
Tethering comes at a cost that unfortunately isn't covered by the data that comes with each iPhone contract. To get involved, you'll need to sign up for an O2 Internet Tethering Bolt On. £14.68 extra a month gives you 3GB of data, and £29.36 gives you 10GB. Whilst we think the ability to do this is pretty useful, it's not exactly cheap - if you were seriously thinking about doing this with your iPhone on a regular basis, then you might want to consider signing up for a separate mobile broadband deal with someone else.
3 for example are offering a 15GB worth of data usage for £15 a month - 5 times the amount of data available on O2's 3GB Tethering Bolt On for the same amount of money.