Telecom 'in negotiations' for iPhone

Telecom's XT handset line-up will include its own brand R7, the Nokia E71, Samsung Loches and the Sony Ericsson W995.

Telecom is in negotiations to sell Apple's iPhone, says the telco's retail boss Alan Gourdie.

It announced the handset and plan line-up for its new high-speed 3G 'XT' network this morning, and Gourdie admitted that the iPhone may be in the pipeline for Telecom customers.

"We don't have the iPhone at launch," he said, "but we are in deep discussion with Apple."

The devices revealed this morning include several exclusives, as well as Telecom-branded handsets.

Several phones, like the own-brand R7 include Maori predictive text and spoken number dialling.

The line-up includes Samsung's S8300 'Loches', which boasts a high-quality OLED screen; RIM's BlackBerry Bold and Palm's Treo Pro smartphone.

Nokia phones on the network range from the $299 3120 to its newly-launched N85 flagship at $1499.

Sony Ericsson's $999 8.1 megapixel camera-toting W995 will be available soon.

Gourdie also announced a 'Bebo phone' aimed "at youngsters", which will allow customers to text other Bebo users and upload rich content without charges.

Plan changes

Sweeping changes were made to Telecom's plan selection, reducing the range from 60 to 14 available plans.

The new One Rate plans mean calls made on or off peak are charged at the same rate and calls will be billed at a per second rate rather than being rounded up to the nearest minute.

Penalty rates have been abandoned, meaning that if a customer exceeds their monthly call minute allowance, additional minutes will be billed at an identical rate.

Share Calling will be introduced when the network goes live next week - which allows customers to group multiple users onto one plan. For instance, if a family uses 500 call minutes between them, one 500 minute plan - with lower call costs than lower-use plans - can be chosen, with up to ten users connected.

Data charges are being kept hush-hush for now, but it was confirmed that a $1 a day casual rate the same as Vodafone's casual data rate will be available, capped at 10MB.

CEO Paul Reynolds said the new 850MHz network will be superior to Vodafone's 900/2100MHz offering because it is "not a patchwork quilt of technologies".

"That's what our competitors have got," he said, before boasting that Telecom's current CDMA network was already faster than Vodafone's.

He said the network will be capable of speeds up to 21 megabits per second by the end of this year.

Reynolds said that network interference issues - which earlier this month saw Vodafone try to block XT in the High Court - were almost completely resolved.

Vodafone said that the new network was causing serious interference for its customers - leading to dropped calls and quality problems. The conflict was settled out of court when Telecom agreed to install filters on its transmitters.

"On the filter installation issue - it's going extremely well and there are only a couple of sites to go," he says.

"It's a pretty small issue in the scheme of things."

Reynolds said that there are currently 483 devices in the marketplace that are designed to run on the 850MHz frequency, while there are only 115 available to run on Vodafone's 900 network.