The battle shaping up among the iPhone, the Blackberry, and the Palm Pre is looking to be interesting indeed, with price an important part of the differential equation.

There will be a lot of smaller battles in the smartphone wars that are about to begin. There is the hardware itself: whose is the shiniest? There are the online application stores: whose is the biggest and has the best? There is the operating software: whose allows the better security and apps? How does it work in the field: which phone has the better wireless network? But we should not forget the battle of the prices. You can be sure that price is one of the battles that almost all prospective smartphone buyers will be watching.

Of all the other criteria, the price category is the most objective. The prices can be compared very directly, though with caution. Consumers will be doing that as the Palm Pre is released and goes head-to-head against the iPhone. A very interesting column in PC World today has a lot of the basic comparisons. One, the price for a phone without a carrier contract, does not really mean much. The Pre and the iPhone are within $50 of each other, but if you buying the phone without a contract, you’re probably not sweating the pennies, not at $550-$600 a pop.

The price that you’ll pay with a contract does make a difference, because that’s what almost everyone will do. With a two-year contract, both phones go for $199. That is a fairly hefty price tag for a phone, but not for a computer that happens to also be a phone, which is what a smartphone really is. On basic prices, they come out even.

When you get to the data plans, Sprint and the Pre win the battle by a few dollars when compared to AT&T and the iPhone. It looks like the Sprint plan will be about $50 a month cheaper if you get unlimited everything, and like it will be about $20 cheaper if you pare everything down to the bone. Bear in mind, though, that AT&T is just about to announce iPhone service price cuts, so the difference may not really be that great.

Besides, a knowledgeable user would probably rather pay more to get service through AT&T than through Sprint. Even though AT&T is almost certainly second best to Verizon in coverage and service, Sprint is almost certainly third. This is probably a battle that RIM / Blackberry wins, since they have thrown in with Verizon, generally acknowledged to have the best wireless network. Call this one a draw, since Apple and Palm both lose the battle.

If the price battle comes out to be a relative draw, we are back to the more subjective areas for guidance. In those areas, the iPhone shines. It is literally the shinier toy, uh, tool. The App Store is going to be very hard to match when it comes to applications. And don’t forget that no one knows much about the Pre. The iPhone is a known quantity, having made very few missteps. So far, it still looks like iPhone over Pre, 3 to 1.

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Entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 4:39 pm under Commercial Software, Firmware, Free Apps, Games, Hacks, Internet, News, Opinion, Rumor, iPhone.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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