14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, the rumor machine has started working again and this time I suppose the one sitting behind the wheel went on a crazy strike and released the news that Cingular is going to give each iPhone buyer no more and no less than 1.5 years of free service. Yes, no minutes to pay and no data charges!
I now this comes as a shock and it also was my case when I first read this while surfing some website on the Internet but relax yourself because the rumor has been killed while still young by a Cingular official. He said that "the report is nonsense. We've always said the only way you can get the iPhone is with a Cingular rate plan".
Exactly what I thought at the moment I heard about it but I have to say that for a moment, just for a single moment, I went along and gave that dreadful rumor's source the credit it didn't deserve. That happened even if I am not a potential Cingular customer and I just can't imagine what the people using Verizon's, Sprint's or other carriers' mobile services had thought about it.
Most probably, this piece of information, even if not true, started quite a riot if not on the streets surely in the mind of every person that had the slightest intention of getting an iPhone.
The thing that made me give it a chance of becoming true was the 50% profit margin Apple and Cingular will get out of every iPhones they will sell and, also, the fact that most mobile market analysts have already predicted some kind of price cut on the sale of the iPhones. These facts and me being a little too enthusiastic about the whole iPhone business ended up becoming an almost certain piece of information.
Luckily, the Cingular representative went on declaring it was just plain nonsense and this way, I stopped thinking about writing an article related to the Cingular and Apple doing the first nice thing throughout their long existence.
It seems now that the only that really got owned by this rumor getting all smashed up in a single day is Jim "Mad Money" Cramer, a guy that works for an investment website. Hopefully, this will teach him a lesson and he will stop making false statements about things he doesn't know about for certain.