How Much a Cell Phone Cost When It Launched

It's one of the simplest questions, and it shows up among the searches that bring people here: how much did it cost? How much did a Nokia N70 cost when it came out, how much a vintage Motorola, how much any given novelty. The archive has a price history, but with a sharp boundary: it starts in December 2005. For older phones — the Nokia 8210, the Motorolas of the 1990s — we don't have the answer, and we'd rather say so.

For the ones that came out after, though, yes. Between 2006 and 2010 the archive counts 2,549 models, and for 658 of them we know the launch price: the first reading from the same year of release. They're not all the phones of those years — they're the ones the old site tracked on the market — but they're enough to see how pricing moved, and there's something unexpected in it.

The median price: a peak in 2007, then down

The median launch price, year by year:

• 2006: €228 (116 models)
• 2007: €247 (161 models) — the peak
• 2008: €189 (153 models)
• 2009: €181 (130 models)
• 2010: €163 (98 models)

From 2007 to 2010 the median drops by a third (–34%). The same movement shows up at the extremes of the scale. Phones that launched at €300 or more were 28% of the sample in 2006 and 40% in 2007; by 2010 they're 18%. Those under €100 go the opposite way: 12% in 2006, 19% in 2007, 28% in 2008, 34% in 2010. In 2007, then, four models out of ten started at €300 or more. It wasn't yet the age of the cheap phone: that would come later.

A few concrete reference points to get a sense of things: the Sony Ericsson K800i is listed at €410 in July 2006, the Samsung U700 at €359 in May 2007, the Nokia 5310 at €231 in October 2007.

3G never became cheap

The most interesting part comes from splitting the models into two groups: those with UMTS (3G, in the terminology of the time) and those with GSM only. The median launch prices:

• 2006: UMTS €308 (32 models), GSM only €199 (84 models)
• 2007: UMTS €346 (66), GSM only €151 (95)
• 2008: UMTS €294 (74), GSM only €108 (79)
• 2009: UMTS €257 (80), GSM only €84 (50)

From 2006 to 2009 the median price of a GSM-only phone collapses by 58%, from €199 to €84. That of a UMTS phone drops by 17%, from €308 to €257. The ratio between the two goes from 1.6 to 3.1: in 2009 a 3G phone cost, at launch, more than three times a GSM phone.

There's more. The sample, meanwhile, shifts toward 3G: UMTS models were 28% in 2006 and are 62% in 2009. A sample shifting toward pricier phones should have pushed the overall median upward; instead it falls, from €247 to €181 between 2007 and 2009, because prices drop in both groups.

Careful not to read more into this than is there: these are averages of two different groups, not the price of the same phone with and without 3G. But the gap between the two is present in all four years, and it widens.

From the Motorola Aura to the €19 Alcatel

The highest price in the sample is that of the Motorola Aura: €1,456 in December 2008, and it doesn't even have UMTS. Next come the HTC Shift, a hair's breadth from a thousand euros (October 2007), the HTC Advantage X7500 at €955 (July 2007), and two Nokia 8800s: the Carbon Arte at €949 (August 2008) and the Gold Arte at €939 (December 2008).

At the opposite extreme are the €19 phones: the Alcatel One Touch 103 (December 2009) and the Motorola WX181 (August 2010), followed by the Alcatel OT-208 at €21 and the Samsung E1170 at €22. None of the four has 3G. Between the most expensive and the cheapest there's a ratio of roughly 77 to 1 — in the same archive, in the same years.

The five most-represented brands in the sample between 2006 and 2008 are surprisingly close together: the median launch price is €182 for Motorola (29 models), €196 for Samsung (118), €198 for LG (44), €223 for Nokia (91), and €224 for Sony Ericsson (58). Just over forty euros separate the cheapest from the priciest: in this sample, brand explains little about the launch price.

How to read these numbers

These are real numbers, but with limits that are worth stating plainly:

• This isn't the whole market. It's 658 models out of 2,549: the ones the old site tracked in stores. For every model we know the year of release but not the month, so the first reading may come a few months after the real debut.
• It's a market price, not a list price. Before writing this article we removed 17 first readings that were clearly wrong — an iPhone 3G at €15, for instance — identifiable because the price in the following months was much higher. Even so, the medians change by at most €9: the result doesn't depend on those corrections.
• 2010 is the last year. None of the 1,037 models released from 2011 onward has a tracked price: the old site stopped following new arrivals. To tell the story of the rest of the decade, another source would be needed.

If you want to compare a specific phone, the month-by-month price history is in its technical specs page, when it exists; the list of models with the richest price history is in Prezzi cellulari.