Venezuela, the only Latin American country so far that hasn’t sold Apple’s iPhone 3G, now has it. Movistar (cell phone arm of Spain’s telecom company, Telefonica) began seeling them on Saturday.
• There are 3 monthly plans: 250MB, 512MB and 1GB data plans (no unlimited data).
• The plans allow for 100, 280 and 400 minutes of call time to other Movistar subscribers.
• The plans also allow for 20, 40 and 50 minutes of call time to other carriers.
• The plans also allow for sending 20, 40 and 100 SMS messages.
• The cost for each plan is BsF 89, BsF 135 and BsF 185 (US$41, $63 and $86).
According to Movistar’s press release, there are special iPhone bonuses that will substract BsF 36, BsF 49.5 and BsF 56.25 ($16.75, $23.02 and $26.16) from the monthly fee. New Movistar subscribers will have to keep the selected plan for a full year in order to receive the bonuses.
The prices of iPhone 3G units depend of the data plan selected:
• 8GB iPhone 3G goes for BsF 1.899, BsF 1.799 and BsF 1.699 ($883.26, $836.75 and $790.25).
• 16GB iPhone 3G goes for BsF 2.199, BsF 2.099 and BsF 1.999 ($1.022,79, $976.28 and $929.78)
In Venezuela, prepaid phone plans are extremely popular (buying cellphone credit cards and introducing the code in them before calls can be placed), however, Movistar only offers postpaid plans (charging to a credit card at the end of each month)
The news site Noticias24.com covered the Caracas iPhone 3G launch with a headline that translates to “iPhone madness comes to Venezuela.”
The text says, among other things, that one thousand persons waited for hours (some in line since before dawn) to get their hands on an iPhone 3G. Javier Soriano, Marketing VP of Movistar Venezuela was quoted as saying “my team has been working for 4 months to make this launch possible”, “we expect to activate more than 20 thousand phones in the next 45 days”, and “before the launch we had over 5 thousand reservation requests.”
Full article here.
Movistar Venezuela’s official iPhone page is here.
here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Saldin” for the translation and heads up.]
