Taiwan

6 reasons NOT to buy an iPhone: They are expensive, crippled and outdated

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With all the hoopla surrounding the Apple Iphone 3G, I took a look at the device which is available in Taiwan through Chunghwa Telephone company. But I was seriously dismayed and opted for my Nokia for a number of good reasons. The Apple iPhone promises so much in terms of customer benefits that I was surprised how poorly it stacked up against my Nokia phone.

1. Functionality: it’s crippled in many functions.

Everyone raves about the iPhone and how it looks. In reality, there are basic functions that any standard 3G phone can do that iPhone cannot. The iPhone in version 2 is still crippled by Apple in significant ways. There is no cut or paste function, no multi-media email function, no video function, it’s unable to multi-task with 3rd party apps in the background, SMS can’t be forwarded, no tethering either so you can surf from your notebook, no FM radio, no in-built flash… to mention the most obvious ones. That the iPhone is crippled is obvious (when many competitors can provide these services and functions), the real question is why.

2. Repairs: Can’t replace your battery yourself.

For most repairs, you have to return your phone to the manufacturer for repair. With Apple, you have to return your phone to them when you want to change the battery. This adds to the expense, you’re without a mobile phone for the time it’s away, and probably your data, too. Doubtless, replacing the battery will be more expensive, too, as Apple are the ONLY authorised reseller of batteries. Can you imagine Nokia, Sony, or Motorola requiring their phones to be returned to change the battery? The repairs alone for replacing the battery will be US$85, and they WILL erase all your data for you for free. Thanks, Apple. (oh, by the way, my Nokia battery is replaced by me WITHOUT any data loss)…

3. Tied one provider: And one only.

With my nokia phone, I’m able to go to any provider and purchase a mobile service. The typical deal with Apple is that there is one service provider who is authorised to sell telephone service in a particular market. But that company may not be the best service provider in your area, or even the most competitive. It’s likely that the competitor will provide less than stellar support as well.

4. Expansion slots: What are they for?

There are no expansion slots for additional memory: in other words, you can’t add a memory card with an extra 8GB or 16GB of memory. At a time, when even the humblest made in China phones come with memory slots for SD cards or minicards, Apple can’t even add one to the machine. But then Apple claim that they are doing it for the convenience of consumers. It’s really convenient NOT to be able to slip in an extra RAM card. Oh, yes. That’s right… you have to send it away to do any repairs. Good luck with that one!

5. Intransparent pricing: It sucks to be a customer.

When I went to the Apple Iphone website in Taiwan, I was greeted by a hugely confusing pricing table that included no less than three different pricing structures each with variations in the pricing. In fact, the iPhone 3G was quoted at over fifteen different price points on the same page. Amazing? Confusing? The irony: only two of those price points were cheaper than my Nokia phone. Oh, and each pricing plan required a different deposit.

It will cost you more, MUCH more than other phones… By my own calculations, it will cost a minimum of 32% to over 70% more on the first plan than my own service + phone package. The basic plans are more affordable, but the initial outlay is quite considerable. You are expected to outlay more than 2/3rd of the cost at purchase point.

6. Apps: Tight control by Apple?

Now Apple supporters will croon: but you can easily add apps from other missing functionality. And it’s true. But why should I have to suffer all of these software limitations when other devices can do all this and more, just as easily, more cheaply, and with less inconvenience for the customer, OUT OF THE BOX! Tell me. But worse, Apple will only permit certain programs on their system and will pull licenses or restrict software in the iPhone App Store that they deem unsuitable for their phone. If this were only for issue of safety and reliability, perhaps it would be less of a concern. But it’s not.

So, in reality, the Apple Iphone will cost you a lot more money than almost any other similarly powered device available today. It is behind the times in technical capability in a number of ways, too. And your tied in so many ways, it’s unbelievable that anybody would consider such a beast. So, save your money, save your hassle, buy a better phone than iPhone3G and tell Apple to do better ‘next time’.

So can anybody explain to me why people are queueing up to buy a black brick with a nice screen and a price that leads to serious sticker shock?

Taiwan banks reluctant to charge ‘account keeping fee’ – The China Post

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Most Taiwan banks have no plan to levy a “deposits account keeping fee” from customers who have only a small sum of outstanding deposits in their accounts, although some foreign banks have already taken such a move.Some foreign banks, including Standard Chartered Bank and HSBC (Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking), have started charging a monthly fee from clients with less than NT$10,000 of deposits in their accounts.

Taiwan banks reluctant to charge ‘account keeping fee’ – The China Post – this article is typical of the usual double-speak that English newspapers in Taiwan are guilty of. The story is quite simple: with limited sources of income available, banks are now resorting to charging fees on low deposits. Typically this behavior is being seen in foreign-owned banks, who have already had account minimums for quite some time (another fact that ‘escaped’ the author of this story). The real news in this story is hidden away at the end: “The move of collecting the fee needs to be discussed and approved by the bankers association, he said. The talk about the possibility that Taiwan banks may charge a “deposits account keeping fee” from customers has caused concern from legislators.”

In real speak, this means legislators and banking organizations are already considering where and how banks charge regular amounts for bank accounts with less than a minimum amount in them. With interest rates as low as they are, it’s unrealistic to expect banks to shoulder these costs in the long term. However, looking after people’s money like this will attract a lot of criticism: why? Because banks are expected to use this money to make more money, it seems unreasonable that they should then make money on ‘free money’ and charge for the privilege of looking after it.

 

A customer who’s charged such a fee will likely terminate their business with any bank that attempts to charge them such a fee. Worse, it may make it more difficult to market to these customers in the future when things get better, and everyone has more money. Customers will remember who tried to short-change them and who treated them with respect.

There’s one local bank I had to open an account with that I hated from the first day I dealt with them. They were unknowledgeable, unhelpful, unprofessional and discriminatory in their treatment of local foreigners. Oddly, enough, the credit card that I have with them through their credit arm has been the perfect opposite of that! Anyway, competition is heating up in the local banking market with local bank consolidating, and foreign players eager to get into the China market. Truly, Taiwan represents one of the few relatively untapped banking markets in Chinese Asia at the moment, still.

I’ve been consolidating and reorganizing both our personal accounts and business accounts for some time, as a result of the credit crisis. While I haven’t got that much money to move around really, I’ve tried to make sure that risk is more diversified between bank accounts. In other words, I wouldn’t want to be locked out of a supply of money due to bank run or temporary closure.

For personal finances, I’ve divided my money between one local and one international bank. For business finances, one month’s emergency cash was deposited in another branch of another local bank. The only weakness in the chain is that personal and business finances overlap in one local bank. I should really do something about that by moving some money to another local bank. Unfortunately, there aren’t many banks in our area at all: and none of the big Taipei city banks have branches here at all.

Why I quit Izea, Payperpost and SocialSpark

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About two and a bit years ago, I started working for a company that was called PayPerPost. In essence, it was a simple concept: get advertisers to pay bloggers for posts about products and services that interest them.

Over the past two years, I blogged on a huge variety of opportunities for PayPerPost (and much less so, SocialSpark). At one point, I even experimented with being an Advertiser and created several opps for InvestorBlogger Dot Com.

But business for PayPerPost has been up and down for me for the past twelve months. Some months I had a good run at the opps, but in the past six months, I have only taken a few opps. Mostly because I have been segmented out of these opps by virtue of being in Asia.

Then in September, I returned to the UK where I updated my address for comparison. I was shocked at all the new opps that were available to me just because I was now in “Europe”. So after returning to Taiwan, I had to consider what my course of action was to be.

At that point, PayPerPost suddenly dropped all the floors on opportunity pricing from $5.00 to 50c or less. While there were a lot of opps now in the system, in what was disingenuously called ‘an experiment’, most were for very little money at all. At that point, I called it quits. I wrote and requested to be removed from Payperpost and SocialSpark.

This post outlines my initial response, Izea’s reply, and my response to them (since I couldn’t login to post the comment to the author of the reply). I’m now posting it here instead.

Post 1: Quitting

Please remove my account. I’m done with SocialSpark and Izea in general. Sorry. I don’t do blog posts for 25c and links for 50c. I would rather find other ways to monetize my blog.

Post 2: Idea’s Reply

Jamie Kite, Official Rep, replied 2 hours ago

Hi Kenneth,

I am sorry to hear that you are leaving the IZEA network. Before you go, there are a few things I wanted to clarify for you. First, the minimum offer amount for a Sponsored Post in SocialSpark is $5.00. You may have noticed other Opportunities out there that pay less, specifically Affiliate programs, Blog Sponsorships and CPC Opportunities. None of these Opportunity types requires you to write a post.

Affiliate Opportunities pay per conversion, so you can earn the offer amount over and over again, as many times as a visitor to your site completes the advertiser’s requirements (this may be filling out a form, purchasing a product, or signing up for a service). The offer amounts on these vary from a little less than a Sponsored Post to many times the average offer amount for a Post, depending on the requirements for conversion. Payment for Affiliate Opportunities happens 30 days after a conversion occurs.

CPC Opportunities provide an even greater opportunity for monetization. You get paid each time a visitor, follower, or friend clicks a link to an advertiser’s site. If you’re on Twitter or Facebook this can be especially lucrative if you have many friends or followers. As always, we require disclosure on these paid links. And what’s better, you get paid within a few days (or less) after each click.

Blog Sponsorships may also have an offer amount that is less than a typical Sponsored Post, but they are payed per day. So if you take a $1.00 sponsored post for 30 days, you end up with a much bigger payout in the end. All you have to do is make sure you have ITK on your blog(s).

We’re sorry to see you go, but I did want to reach out and clarify the difference between the Opportunity types in SocialSpark so that your expectation wasn’t that you would get anything less than $5.00 for a Sponsored Post. If the other Opportunity types with lower offer amounts aren’t your thing, that’s okay…

Post 3: My response to Izea (since I couldn’t post it on their network)

Thanks for contacting me.

I saw the new opportunities on SS, but it’s been such a while that I found anything I could do. Despite having two fairly popular blogs with largely N.American traffic, I repeatedly found myself with the bottom of the barrel opps in both SS and PPP.

Even having a PR3 didn’t make things much better. Being based in Asia, I find that there is almost nothing I can do on PPP/SS these days. So, until things look up for me on Izea, I see little or no point in having the code on my blogs… It’s sad, but there it is. The system that Ted created for bloggers ends up excluding bloggers whose blogs are fairly decent. But then Izea spends undue effort removing all the splogs that can legitimately get into PPP/SS and legitimately take those opps.

I”m afraid I have much more success blogging for another company than Izea now. Each time I login to SS/PPP just reminded me of how I was segmented out of the running for 99% of the opps available. Even when opps are available in SS, I’m unable to take any of them for similar reasons: I’m based in Asia.

So for a trial I switched my PPP account to ‘uk’ region, my home and I was shocked at how different things were. I couldn’t legitimately take any of the opps because of the zoning issue. So I didn’t. That’s when I stopped blogging for Izea.

If you could understand my frustration, I have two good blogs (one pr3, one formerly pr2), both Alexa 1million and under, with over 5000 page views a month between them, and majority N. American traffic, and there is so little I can do, it’s not even worth the time logging in. Eventually, enough is enough.

Wishing you all well,
Kenneth

So that’s it. I already removed all the PPP/SS codes from all of my blogs, converted the links, and removed all traces of Payperpost except the archives. If you’re based in North America, then this may be a valuable way to make some money. You’ll certainly learn a lot. I did. I’m extremely grateful for the experience of blogging for Izea. But all good things must end, and indeed they have. It’s time to move on and find new ways to blog, new readers to read my blogs, new topics to write about, and new methods to monetize. Good luck, Ted and all at Izea. I’ll check back from time to time.