Erstellt am: 7. 12. 2010 - 12:46 Uhr

Today's Webtip: Transparency?

A few people are trying to bring it to the smartphone jungle.

Since the iPhone has come to other providers in Österreich, I have been getting questions from people about what the best package might be. I have been trying to get a grip on it myself. It's hard. The sheer mass of possible packages and prices is hard to work through, and what lok like obvious deals frequently hide costs that make owning a smartphone (any smartphone) more expensive than it looks.

I'm still trying to get a chart together with price breakdowns based on total cost of ownership until end of contract based on a singular fee and spread over the entire run of the contract.

It's a lot of work. And since it's taking longer than I thought, I decided to share some of the work others have done in that direction. None of them are complete, but they provide a starting point for anyone who might be thinking of making a jump.

smartphone-preisvergleich.at is my favorite so far. Despite the name of the site, the only phone available for comparison right now is the iPhone 4 16GB. That's too bad, especially since my current research has turned up some surprising results that are almost counterintuitive when it comes to the more expensive 32GB model.

It's also a drag because it doesn't make it easy to compare the iPhone against other smartphone models. But it's a site worth keeping an eye on.

Tarifagent provides some interesting tools for tracking mobile provider costs, and they also have one or two articles trying to get behind the numbers.

It's a bit of a pain to use though, and the tools don't make it easy to run a price check based on phone model, so you still end up having to slog through loads of information and combine results from multiple sites.

Macinfo.at has an older article that only includes the prices for T-Mobile and Orange, but there is a link in the comments to an excel file that is useful, and the comparison is supposed to be updated sometime this month.

In the meantime I will continue to get my file together, and maybe I can get it online in time for it to be useful to someone. And if anyone wants to help, let me know. I could use it.