Maxis made a mistake on their Deepavali offer for handsets. Apart from giving a free speaker for your phone, they advertised the Nokia N8 bundling with price starting from RM899 as shown above.

At first we wondered if this was a mistake considering the more info page showed RM999 for 24 months. Now just a day later, they have changed the price to RM999 which is the normal bundling price for the Nokia N8 over 24 months data contract. We wonder if Maxis honour the RM899 pricing for customers that wanted to take up the advertised price today.

Thanks to kenninaz for the heads up!

UPDATE: Maxis made a mistake with the pricing, the Nokia N8 is offered from RM999, not RM899 as advertised.

With the coming Deepavali Festival, Maxis is lighting it up with a special giveaway for handset bundling. They are giving out FREE NX1 Spore Speakers with purchase of Nokia N8, BlackBerry Bold 9700, HTC Wildfire, Samsung Galaxy S and Motorola Backflip.

Prices of handsets remain unchanged over 24 months contract except for Nokia N8 which is now on offer for RM899RM999. That’s additional RM100 off from the normal 24 months contract pricing. This offer ends 7th November 2010.

For more details, check out the Deepavali offer page.

After Maxis launched its Hotlink 365, DiGi has responded with its Reload Once, Stay Connected for ONE Year offer for a limited time period between 23rd July – 31st August 2008.

DiGi’s offer is simple and gives more value to its customers as it only requires a RM100 usable reload. This means every single sen spent for validity is actual credit or talk time that subscribers can use.

On Hotlink 365, its subscribers are required to pay a yearly fee of RM33 which is similar to paying access fee which subscriber can’t utilise.  On top of the RM33 fee, they would need to top up RM30 within the first 6 months of activation.

Comparison
Hotlink:
Spend RM63, RM30 usable
1. RM33 fee
2. RM30 top up (within 6 months)

DiGi:
Spend RM100, RM100 usable
1. RM100 top up

Which is the lowest to maintain?
Maxis and DiGi has step up to offer 1 year validity, but which one is the lowest to maintain? Strangely the answer is neither of them.

If you’ve read our review on Happy earlier on, you will noticed that Happy is still the lowest prepaid plan to maintain.

60 days credit validity regardless of top up amount
Top up more to stay on more? Not anymore. With Happy any credit from a minimum of RM5 will give you 60 days credit validity. To stay active for a full year, one would only need to top up RM5 every 2 months (approx 60 days) x 6 times which is only RM30 per year. With the same amount on other prepaids, you’d get around a month validity. This makes Happy the lowest prepaid to maintain in terms of top-up.

Happy:
Spend RM5x6, RM30 usable
1. RM5 top up ( Month 1-2 )
2. RM5 top up ( Month 3-4 )
3. RM5 top up ( Month 5-6 )
4. RM5 top up ( Month 7-8 )
5. RM5 top up ( Month 9-10 )
6. RM5 top up ( Month 11-12 )

There you have it! Happy costs only RM30 per year to maintain and you get RM30 usable credit. The only catch is that you have to top up the minimum RM5 every 2 months which could be more troublesome than DiGi’s and Hotlink one-off offering. Overall it depends on consumer usage to decide which prepaid is more suitable. We are merely just pointing out which offers the longest validity with the lowest price.

Conclusion
DiGi’s offering is to be commended as it scretches the validity longer without imposing access fees like Hotlink. However we are also hoping that DiGi will make this as a permanent feature rather than a limited time offer.

Apparently it was reported that MCMC has announced that telcos should offer prepaid plans with atleast 180 days validity period. To date, it seems that Hotlink is the only one with a permanent offer. We will see how would Celcom and U Mobile would react to this new regulation.

Celcom has been very quite lately, as they have yet to respond in terms of new prepaid or postpaid offering.

Links
DiGi: Reload Once, Stay Connected for ONE YEAR
DiGi’s new reload promotion
DiGi starts offering 365 Days Validity for RM100 top up?