Apple's sour taste over iPhone customers

There's a recession on out there, yeah? It's the biggest global economic meltdown in living memory. We're all of us having to tighten our belts and cut back on non-essential spending. And yet one million people went out to buy the new iPhone that they decided they couldn't live without.

It's an astonishing success story - and testament to the 'must have' addictive brand of Apple. In the UK it's a remarkable story as 02, which has the exclusive carrier status, has managed to do as much as it possibly can to hack off existing customers such as myself. O2 took the decision to insist that if an existing customer wanted to upgrade to the new device, they would have to first buy themselves out of their existing contract then take out a new one.

For those of us with 6 months to run on our existing contracts, that's a no brainer. Why would I pay hundreds of pounds to be given the privilege of signing up again, for a handset that at first glance doesn't really seem to do much more than my existing 3.0 software-enabled one? Can I live without a compass on my phone? I'd imagine I can. But surely I'll miss the video recording feature? Not when I have an HD Flip that costs considerably less than the new iPhone would and results in higher quality video!

Not content with that customer faux pas, O2 then announces that if anyone wants to use the new tethering functionality of the new software on the iPhone that they're looking at £15 a month more on their tariff, which already promises unlimited data use on the device. Top that up with a threat to existing customers that if they use any get-arounds to use the handset as a modem without paying O2's fee, then the carrier will cut them off. “We have ways of monitoring the data our iPhone users are consuming,"says an O2 spokesman. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Now of course O2 are legally and commercially within their rights. If you signed a contract for 18 or 24 months, you signed a contract and O2 is under no obligation to give you a break. And the tethering option will eat up more bandwidth of course which will in turn eat into O2's profits. But is there any need to be quite so heavy handed and proactively threatening to your installed base?

Does no-one at O2 remember the wave of goodwill that occured when iPhone original customers were given an option to upgrade to the 3G model mid-contract as long as they signed a new contract? If I'd been given the option to do the same again with this release, O2 would now have me happily signed up to another 2 year lock-in. As it is, I have 6 months to decide whether I appreciate being made to feel that O2 is doing me a favour by agreeing to let me be a customer and give them money.