Vodafone is attempting to steal some thunder from competitors by today announcing a prepaid ‘Unlimited’ data deal.

They are offering one month unlimited pre-paid data for $49.95. For users who are going to be using the iPad for on the go email, web and video browsing for business this is a very good deal. It is certainly going to put some pressure on Telstra to come up with some plans suitable for data hungry users. For those wanting to use their data over time and not lose their data allowance within the month, Vodafone have release two ‘long life’ plans – very clever. For $100 you get 6Gb of data that can be used over 180 days.

Other pre-paid deals announced by Vodafone are:

These plans can be purchased from the Vodafone Store – as usual Make Sure you check All Terms and Conditions before Purchase.

There has been much debate amongst technology journalists and bloggers about what the new iPad will cost in Australia.

As the USD$ pricing has been known and available for some time, many have tried to do multiple additions and subtractions to try to come up with a magic figure of what the various iPad configurations ‘should’ cost. Even the analytics firm iSuppli had their propeller-heads and engineers take apart an iPad and declare after much gawking and gesturing that the base model costs USD$260 to produce. OK.. great!

The principal from these various Aussie experts seems to be that Apple is going to rip off Australian consumers because — the basic US pricing after conversion to AUD (using some current exchange rate ) is $X, then add GST to that, but subtract various import taxes. Then you have to add an allowance for marketing, but obviously subtract technology costs as the item is already produced. Then we have to add shipping costs and storage, and of course there’s internal distribution costs, but they can’t charge for any software costs or gst on transport as they already ship other Apple products as well. Then there is the lunch money for the truck drivers, but, we shouldn’t add their fuel costs as they are subcontractors and that’s their own expense and not passed on…

We could go on with this stupidity, but we’ll let these experts do this for us.

The reality is that no one apart from Apple’s own analysts know exactly how much the iPad costs to supply in Australia and the appropriate wholesale sand retail margins to be added. And, even if they can come up with an exact figure, their actual pricing will be whatever they deem appropriate to the market and their forward plans. Oh, and the fact that they are a company and the purpose of a company is to sell products and services to make money..

The reality then is – the iPad will cost whatever it costs in Australia. We’ll try to bring you the pricing as soon as it comes to hand.