Globul kept their promise and released iPhone 3GS for sale today, on Jul 31st.
The prices are quite applealing. You can take the new iPhone 3GS (with 16 GB of flash memory) for about 300 EUR, if you are willing to pay about 40 EUR per month. Or you can take it for less than 500 EUR even with the lowest subscription plan, which requires about 7.50 EUR monthly fee. For comparison, the iPhone 3GS is now sold for about 800 EUR without contract.
There are two new subscription plans, which were not available for the previous iPhone 3G. They are more expensive than the old ones, about 25 or 40 EUR per month respectively, and they include more traffic, more call minutes, more SMS messages and even some free MMS messages (unfortunately only in the Globul network).In my opinion, the subscription plan for about 12.50 EUR per month remains the best option.
Another novelty is the option to buy an iPhone with a prepaid (b-connect) card, without contract. The prices for the new iPhone 3GS here are above 500 EUR, but there are no contract restrictions and the offerings for iPhone 3GS without contract (for about 800 EUR) become completely useless. Another good thing about this option is, that you can add data traffic the same way you add minutes – with a vaucher.
Overall the offerings seem pretty good to me.
Today, Jul 27th, is exactly two years away from my first post on this blog. I decided that this occasion deserves to be noted with a bit of statistics about the site.
For two years I published 41 different posts (this one is number 42) and two pages. There are 115 comments to those posts. Here are the most popular articles according to the official WordPress.com plugin:
I don’t know if you remember, but in order for the deal between SUN and Oracle to become a fact, two things must happen:
- The agreement must be approved by the SUN stockholders
- The deal must be approved by the regulatory institutions
Well, the first event already occured, SUN shareholders approved the deal:
In this presentation from QCon, Martin Fowler shares the experience of ThoughtWorks with Ruby. There is a transcript of the presentation, here.
For three years ThoughtWorks worked on 41 projects with Ruby (and Rails, primarily). Including one product of their own, Мingle.
For me personally, the main points are:
- With Ruby and Rails the programmers are more productive and they like working with it.
- From the performance perspective, Ruby and Rails are slow, compared to other similar frameworks. Just look at the hardware requirements for Mingle for 40-50 users!
- Ruby is not a mature technology. It lack developer instruments, for example. And I wouldn’t believe they are not needed.
I wrote recently, that iPhone 3GS should be available in Bulgaria on Jul 09. I sent Globul an inquiry yesterday in regard for this matter, and they pointed out what I was missing. If you look closely to the slide I was referring to (from the official iPhone 3GS introduction), you will notice that it’s not about Jul 09, but rather Jul 2009 (note the apostrophe before the 09).
So, the news today, published on the official Globul site is, that iPhone 3GS will be on sale in Bulgaria from Jul 31. Prices are not clear yet.
