HTC Magic pricing is out. Commence daylight robbery.

By Benedict Wee

Vodafone has posted the price of New Zealand's first smartphone to run Google's Android OS, and man is it expensive. 

The phone by itself costs $1099, $30 lesser than a 16GB iPhone 3G. If you look at it in a storage perspective, you can get 7.5GB worth of space for the extra $30 (the Magic's internal memory is 512MB and it comes with an 8GB microSD card).

Should you choose to sign up for a 24 month contract you'll be able to get a mobile subsidy of 

• $780 for $130/mth with 250 mins 600 texts and 500mb data (thus $319 for the phone),  
  
• $580 for $80/mth with 120 mins 600 texts and 250mb data (thus $519 for the phone), 
  
• $530 for $60/mth with  60 mins 200 texts and 250mb data (thus $569 for the phone), 
  
• $480 for $40/mth with  20 mins 100 texts and 250mb data (thus $619 for the phone).

This is the same subsidy and price plans the 16GB iphone 3G currently has. 

Pricing the Magic at this high a mark up could be dangerous for Vodafone. Should the new iPhone 3GS models be released with the same price point as the 3G models you'll be looking looking at the 7.5GB worth of extra storage space expand drastically to 23.5GB (with the 32GB iPhone 3GS) for just an extra $30. Thus my advice is to wait till Apple's next-gen iPhones to be released (somewhere around July) before considering getting a new smartphone.