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SMART Gets iPhone 4S And Will Be Available By December 2011

Manny Pangilinan
Courtesy of WikiPedia

Last week it was formally announced that the official carrier of iPhone 4S here in the Philippines will be SMART and it will be available before the end of December 2011. It looks like that Globe Telecom loses its exclusive love affair with Apple iPhone iterations this time. The information came out last week from one of my favorite online news for tech – INQ written by Doris Dumlao. Surely SMART is getting bigger and bigger.  If you are not yet aware, Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) is the main or parent company of SMART and with the recent merging of PLDT and Digitel Teleccomms – this now makes SMART the largest TELCO here in the country.  According to the report, Manuel V. Pangilinan, Chairman of PLDT announced and officially announced that he had a discussion and agreement with Apple to launch the latest and iteration of iPhone which happens to be iPhone 4S before the end of 2011.  It looks like Globe Telecom loses its chance to monopolize and acquire once again this latest iPhone iteration.  Well, this is the same scenario that occurred in some other first-world countries where Apple wanted to break the “iPhone or Apple exclusively distributed” idea.  Take Sprint for example which recently acquired Apple’s iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S and now considered as one of Apple iPhone’s carrier along with Verizon, Vodafone, AT&T,  and 3K.

iPhone 4S

 

Anyway, the sad part is this will be distributed first to SMART’s post-paid subscribers and take note of this – it will be offered first to their “high-end” post-paid customers.  Too bad isn’t it?  There’s no light shed yet as to when will this be publicly offered by SMART.  Most probably iPhone 4S will be offered by SMART with their high-end subscription plan as well and we’re talking about SMART Plan UnliData 4000 or All-In Plan 3500 with a 2 – 3 years lockup contract period.

Surely this will not be sole exclusive for SMART post-paid subscribers only, probably early next year even pre-paid subscriber would be able to avail Apple’s iPhone 4S from Apple.  And another thing is possible if that time comes – a much cheaper iPhone since there will now be competitions between GLOBE’s iPhone 4 (also there’s still the iPhone 3GS) and SMART’s iPhone 4S.  Not to mention the non-official Apple retailers like most of the mobile stores in ViraMall, Greenhills – iPhone 4S will come much cheaper.

Well, let’s all wait and see if SMART will be smart enough to beat GLOBE selling iPhones.

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