With worldwide reports of the iPhone suffering from losses, it looks like Philippines is included in the report of countries that will have a cheaper price for the handset. We saw some ads for the iPhone XS and XS Max now up in social media with a peculiar cheaper monthly ASF.
Here are the prices we noticed from our original report
| iPhone XS 64GB | ||||
| Plan | Inclusion | Old Monthly Price | New Monthly Price | Plan Savings |
| GigaX 1499 |
|
3,299 Monthly | 2,799 Monthly | 500 Monthly / 12,000 |
| GigaX 1999 |
|
3,499 Monthly | 2,999 Monthly | 500 Monthly / 12,000 |
| GigaX 2499 |
|
3,799 Monthly | 3,399 Monthly | 400 Monthly / 9,600 |
| iPhone XS Max 64GB | ||||
| Plan | Inclusion | Old Monthly Price | New Monthly Price | Plan Savings |
| GigaX 1499 |
|
3,599 Monthly | 2,999 Monthly | 600 Monthly / 14,400 |
| GigaX 1999 |
|
3,799 Monthly | 3,299 Monthly | 500 Monthly / 12,000 |
| GigaX 2499 |
|
4,099 Monthly | 3,599 Monthly | 500 Monthly / 12,000 |
As you can see, each phone plan saves up to 400 monthly and up to 600 monthly with up to 14,400 savings for the whole plan. This is just less than 6 months from the original launch of the iPhone last October in the Philippines. While this turnout is good, we think its quite unfair for original postpaid takers since they will shoulder the difference of more than 10k as compared to new postpaid takers today.
Fair warning if you want to consider this as Smart is currently charging their postpaid subscribers for open data access. Meaning if you’re out of the monthly data volume allocation, you’ll be charged for Php5 per 15 mins of data access, and there is no warning whatsoever for this charging until you get a long billing statement charging you. Imagine being charged 288 times a day or Php1,440 additional data a day for this. This is really a bill shocker and not to mention that you need to shell out 3x the monthly MSF to avail their postpaid line.