Orange UK iPad data tariffs announced

Orange have announced their iPad data price plans for the United Kingdom.

I was bracing myself, but actually, it’s not too bad. In fact, provided I forget what I’m already paying for my data dongle, the pricing looks fairly reasonable.

First of all, you can pay-for-what-you-use. That simply costs £0.05 per megabyte. (Do you remember when, just a few years ago, you had to pay upwards of £4.00 per megabyte?) I quite like that plan. You’ll also get a £10 credit upon activation which, accordingly to my fag-packet calculations, will give you 20,000 megabytes or 20GB to use at any time.

Then there’s an iPad Daily bundle. That’s simply 2 quid-per-day and entitles you to 200mb of data valid for one day until midnight. So, unless you’re up early, it’s not really 24-hours. But you know, based on my usage of the iPad (in terms of taking it out of the home/office where there’s constant WiFi), that would work quite well for me. I could imagine using that quite nicely.

Then there’s the iPad Weekly bundle, valid for 7 days until midnight which costs £7.50 and comes with 1GB of data allowance. Again, not bad on the face of it.

And for those tempted by a monthly price plan arrangement, iPad Monthly 15 (£15/month) gets you 3GB of data allowance and unlimited BT Openzone usage.

And iPad Monthly 25 (£25/month) gets you 10GB of data allowance per month and unlimited BT Openzone.

I think it’s genius pricing. Genius. Indeed the whole arrangement is genius. The chances are you already have a data plan, dongle or similar with your operator, however the convenience of not having to arse around with sim cards will, I reckon, see a heck of a lot of people opting for these.

If I had to choose right now, I’d probably do the per-meg one, if only because I am tickled pink at the concept of being charged only 5p per megabyte. I think that’s a nice sweet-spot for me personally.

Which would you choose?

Are you even going to bother with an iPad?

And if so, are you going to get the 3G version?

Pre-order from the 10th of May…