There's no such thing as: $99 iPhones, free lunches, Santa Claus, etc.

Much ado has been made of Apple's new $99 price point for the iPhone 3G. You can safely ignore all of this. Rinse and repeat - there is no such thing as a $99 iPhone.

First, this number, like the $199 figure bandied about before, is the price on the American AT&T network: locked, after subsidies, on a two year contract, bought with an American credit card. Once the phone gets out of that little economic fishbowl, it becomes a whole lot more expensive - more on local prices after the jump:

The cheapest that you'll find unlocked iPhones for these days is around the Dh2200 ($600) mark, smuggled out of markets like Italy and Hong Kong where they are sold unlocked, with low markups, by super-competitive operators. Remember that in the UAE, a prepaid iPhone costs Dh2600.

I've been trying to get a comment out of Etisalat about this all day, with no luck. The best I have got is them saying that they are in talks with Apple about the pricing, and would also need approval from the telecom regulator for any price cut - although my guess is that approval will come very easily.  

Unless Etisalat decides to embark on a bold new low-cost strategy - possible, but unlikely - the best we can hope for is probably the iPhone 3G discounted down to the same proportions as what it is today. That means if the $200 US AT&T deal translates into Dh2600 over the counter in the UAE, then the $99 iPhone might end up somewhere around Dh1300. The other thing is, the pricing of Etisalat's plans - which subsidise the upfront handset cost in return for a 12-month committment - could get better.

But otherwise, it's safe to assume that the only person who will ever offer you a $99 iPhone is a Somali pirate.