Not in Germany. To get the iPhone 3GS for 1€ from Deutsche Telekom you have to sign their 60€ contract for 24 months. That’s 1,440€. The same contract costs 50

Not in Germany. To get the iPhone 3GS for 1€ from Deutsche Telekom you have to sign their 60€ contract for 24 months. That’s 1,440€. The same contract costs 50€ without a phone, that’s 1,200€ for 24 months or 240€ less. It’s not really worth it buying the 3GS new and unlocked from Apple (if you want that specific contract) since they want 370€ from you. It usually never is worth it, no matter the carrier. (That is, if those carriers offer a subsidized iPhone. Some MVNOs don’t, but you might still get away cheaper by picking a MVNO and buying the unlocked phone. MVNOs are often cheap and might have contracts that fit your needs better.) But there is always a difference in price between getting a contract with phone and one without. Some carriers don’t add to the price of the contract but let you pay for the phone in installments. In practice, though, that’s a small difference. (The nice thing about paying in installments is that the installments automatically stop. Your contract will cost you the same increased price, even after 24 months. You have to manually intervene if you want to pay less.) What you definitely should never do is buy your phone based on the subsidized price. That just makes no sense. You always have to consider the whole package. Deutsche Telekom offers a 20€ contract (30 minutes for outgoing calls, unlimited incoming calls, 0.19€ per SMS, unlimited data, throttled to GPRS speeds when you are over 300MB) and if that’s all you need you have to pay 480€ for two years of contract and 200€ for the 3GS. That’s less than half of the 1,440€ for the 1€ 3GS. (I’m sorry, I’m currently researching phone contracts for my sister so I have all this crap stuck in my head.)