I’m in the middle of this dilemma right now. I’m on Sprint, and my contract ran out in November. I stopped by their store last week to take the pic that ended up being the background of these comics, and looked at the phones on display. The one I want is PROHIBITIVELY expensive… unless I get a 2-year contract, and then the price drops to $150, with a $50 rebate.
I just detest contracts. Like most people. Not ready to saddle myself again yet.
Or maybe I am.
Argh.
ALL HAIL THE GREAT PO TA TO!!
E bay Australia has lots of unlocked phones for reasonable prices at the moment. If you can only get a water damaged Samsung then some electrical circuit cleaner and you tube can help.
I think the full range of emotions surging here eventually ends up in the “total resignation” realm when I realize that I’m going to have a phone for the rest of my miserable life anyway…the goofy contract as a rite of passage to a reasonable price for the hardware is now just a minor annoyance. Annoying nevertheless though…
Ting sells one or two decent phones in the 200-300$ range.
Is better than the GZone Boulder. Made of real rock. Maybe I will shop one up for you.
I bought a Tmobile “MyTouch4G” (the earlier HTC variant) at a pawn shop for $100 flat. I then walked into a Tmobile month-to-month contract.
That phone (also known as a “Glacier” in some areas) is pretty decent, and the first 4G phone Tmobile had. It’s lasted me two years so far. Android 2.3 is enough for my needs, and it can be a WiFi hotspot for my laptop.
If it breaks I buy something else used and cheap, swap the SIM card over, back in business.
New Zealand might have 4G by this christmas, I’d never even heard of it before. I use a 2G phone. It does SMS and calls, it does it pretty reliably, it’s fairly simple and hardy, it uses less power to connect to the 2G network (I charge it maybe once a week), and it costs less than a cheap bottle of bourbon. Let’s see a fancy smart phone do that.
so this! If you can make do without having the latest and greatest as a status symbol you can usually pick up a previous model used phone that will work great.
As an added bonus you don’t have to cry when you leave it somewhere or it shatters into a million pieces when you drop it!
Get a Google phone.
https://www.google.com/nexus/4/
I have a galaxy S-2 which i’m very satisfied with, but if I had to buy a new phone the Nexus 4 would def. be it.
The Nexus 4 is pretty sweet. I’m quite enjoying mine.
Get a nexus 4 from Google, get month to month unlimited plan from T-mobile. Problem solved!
thumbs up for the nexus 4 and straight talk/ net 10
I’d give my right arm (I’m left-handed) for a plain old dumb phone that was ONLY a phone. It would have to have the following “features”:
1. No voice dial mode to slip into accidentally.
2. No camera. When I want to take pictures, I carry my Canon DSLR.
Too bad none of the providers carry such an item.
Tracfone. I have a stupid phone that dials and texts.
It cost me $29 to buy the phone and I have a month-to-month “contract” that costs me ten dollars a month.
Had a Samsung pay-as-you-go flipper for several years, worked perfectly well, but then my job mandated that all us field techs turn in our company Blackberries and provide our own smart (sic) phones, since they didn’t want to deal with BES. Fuckers.
Straight Talk 45 bucks a month and get an unlocked phone off of ebay. Been working for me for 2 years now.
And if they hadn’t permanently run out of stock on iPhone SIMs, I’d be with them today. But you can get the same deal from Walmart Family Mobile or T-Mobile. Unlimited USA voice, text, and (within reason) data. The key to all these plans is to find a used, unlocked smartphone at a good price.
Just go to your nearest Boost mobile store and browse. They do prepaid only, have a decent selection of phones and the service is good. Customer service is also really good. No one that’s commented so far has talked about plans just phones (my Samsung Warp Sequent was only $100 from best buy.) It’s a 3g phone with gingerbread and a crap ton of native internal memory. Boost doesnt always have the latest and greatest but the plans make up for it. $50 A month for unlimited EVERYTHING talk text data literally everything and they don’t throttle 3g speeds until you go over 2.5 gigs in a 30 day period . I know I tested this , and it was hard as hell to get to 1 gig data usage lol. Check them out though.
Tech note on Tmobile:
Tmobile is the last major US phone vendor sticking with “GSM” phones. These are what Europe, Japan and the rest of the world uses.
Their 3G phones used an extension of GSM called “HSPA”. It wasn’t quite as fast as the Sprint/Verizon US-tech-only “CDMA” network but it wasn’t bad. But here’s the kicker. Verizon, Sprint and the other CDMA shops couldn’t boost CDMA up any faster. It was “stuck”. To get faster (“4G”) data they had to roll out an entire new network using a new technology: “LTE”. You’ve seen those letters in various ads.
Well the kicker is this: LTE isn’t backwards compatible with anything. So every device that does LTE also has to have a separate radio to do the old CDMA voice, 2G and 3G data types.
Two radios. (Well, on top of WiFi and bluetooth but we’re talking about cellular radios here.)
Tmobile had another option: upgrade their HSPA network to HSPA+, which has the ability to support HSPA 3G speeds plus the even older 2G and voice GSM standards – with one radio.
HSPA+ isn’t as fast as LTE. But it was cheaper to roll out in a broader fashion, and their older HSPA 3G devices could use the new HSPA+ network just fine at 3G speeds…users of Tmobile 3G devices are still getting coverage upgrades rapidly.
AT&T was also doing GSM and HSPA but their HSPA network wasn’t as good, so they switched their high-end data to LTE like Verizon and Sprint so yet again: two radios with the hit to battery power that implies.
Personally, I’m very happy with the Tmobile HSPA+ 4G class of data. Yeah, peak speeds aren’t as high but it’s still good enough for outbound video streaming, which is valuable as hell when doing election monitoring, copwatching, etc…criminally grabbing my phone and smashing it won’t lose me the video to that point. (And yeah, that happens…too damn often.)
Tmobile is also more “tether tolerant” than any of the other major carriers. And with HSPA/HSPA+, you can hold a data connection (including feed data to a real computer in “tethering”) while taking a voice call. With LTE, if you’re doing data you can’t also do voice at the same time.
Tmobile also is eager to do discounts on your monthly bill if you walk in with a phone you already scored at, say, a pawn shop…
🙂
See, the main reason I’ve stayed with Sprint is: I tether my laptop a lot, and their 3G can almost ALWAYS get a serviceable connection. Also, my plan really does have unlimited text and data.
But their 4G, so far, fucking blows. It blows a lot. I travel a bit each year, and here’s where I get consistently good 4G speeds:
– Downtown San Diego.
That’s it. Not at home, not at work, not at airports, not in various downtown metro areas. Considering I neither live nor work in Downtown San Deeg, the 4G is pretty much a pitiful thing. I’ve noted that T-Mobile’s 4G is considerably faster, with better coverage. If they can hook me up with a 400 minute airtime/unlimited text & data plan, and a phone that tethers easily, for less than $70 a month, I’m in.
I dunno. Should be able to. I don’t have that exact combination. Ask about situations where you’re walking into them with a phone you own already in hand.
Another thing…I’m looking at this as my next phone:
http://allthingsd.com/20130520/caterpillar-aims-to-make-splash-with-rugged-waterproof-android-phone/
Similar to what I’ve got (which is getting ragged as hell but still works) in terms of screen size/res and data speeds, HSPA+ so it’s 4G by Tmobile standards, and both water resistent (rated 1 meter for 30 minutes so rain is no problemo) and drop/shock resistant, for $350.
I’m a biker so if a phone is more likely to work post-crash, I have to look at that as a good thing, you know?
The ONLY use case for 4G that I’ve seen over 3G is that upload speed. Like I said, I can upload video from the phone in realtime. Like so:
http://photographyisnotacrime.com/2012/05/10/arizona-election-officials-call-cops-on-man-recording-them/
I call it the “Crotchcam 9000” :). I use an app called “Bambuser” to upload video to a server in Sweden in realtime. 3G can’t do this. Tmobile’s 4G can – barely.
Eventually we’ll have a faster bluetooth connection to micro-cams like the Looxcie – http://looxcie.com – and use the phone as an internet upload portal of sorts for that. That’ll be way cool.
I’ll say this for the iPhone: it’s fucking tough. I am a scuba diver who regularly travels through SE Asia and Central America with mine. That glass is capable of bending before it breaks (and cases make that a moot point anyway), and the care plan from Apple (NOT the phone company, the actual one from the Apple store) lets you use it for skeet shooting and still get it replaced no questions asked. And when you need to replace it, all the settings and whatnot just appear on the new one.
They have some sweet ballistics software on them too. iStrelock is a great free one.
The iphone 5 has both 3G and 4G, so if your local 4G sucks you are covered. The iPhone 4 is free with new contracts (or, like, $100 on eBay). Adapters/chargers/etc are a buck each on eBay. If you REALLY want to not get a contract, you can go that route.
But really, you only have 3-5 choices in phone companies, and almost certainly two of them will suck. What’s the harm in being tied to one? You know you will want phone service, they all cost about the same, everyone offers an unlimited text/talk plan now, and they all have easy ways to get out of the contract (pay a fee and they happily sever it. Tell them you are moving and have one of your readers in a far-flung place vouch for you, etc).
Contracts aren’t as shitty today as they were ten years ago.
Take a look at T-Mobile. If I understand the small print, there isn’t a contract. You can either buy the phone outright and just pay your monthly bill or you can make monthly payments on the phone.
Right. They de-couple the cellphone service from the cost of the phone. That lets you go totally ghetto with a used pawn shop phone or get something completely different.
Therein is the only sane alternative to being “locked in” with a contract.
With most U.S. mobile phone companies, payments towards the actual cost of your current device are factored into your monthly bill regardless of whether or not you’ve actually paid that amount off or not. At that point, there’s really no benefit to avoiding getting a new phone and the resultant contract extension. Keep in mind that, whenever they change the contract (which at least one major carrier seems to do every six months or so) you can get out of your contract without having to pay an ETF.
If I needed one, I’d probably do a Trac phone or Frawg. So far I’m satisfied with a ‘MagicJack’ house phone – that I could use anywhere I can tie into a LAN cable system or WiFi laptop.
I’m one of the few that doesn’t mind contracts. I mean, we’ve been with the same carrier for 15 years now, get new phones every two, and have a good data plan grandfathered in. Service has been universally excellent.
Stand strong!
Gordon & I have both outwaited our cell contracts with The Evile V. now it’s just a short wait till September to do the same for his laptop thingie.
And then..hm. What, I wonder.
Sans contract, will we be drifting rudderless on an open sea?
Dunno yet.
Oh and we hates the touchscreenses.
All that fingertip dab-dabbing, it grateth my nerves. Gimme buttons.
So have you any recommendations for which company we might migrate to? We don’t HATE Teh V, but would like to explore other lands.
BTW:
HAHAHAHA! Yep, there’s something about a potato that’s just always funny.
(is that a surrealist’s phone?)
Meh. I just got a non-smart cell phone last year. Trac Phone. Believe it or not it is possible to live without one. I managed
it for 55 years.
Virgin Mobile. Contract-free, iphones if you want, nice ‘droid phones if you don’t. I pay $50/mo, unlimited everything including hotspot, and I have a nice HTC Evo V 3d (which, sadly, they no longer sell) that I just adore.
Is that the potato with GladOS in it? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSk_37So0Xk
My phone was recently stolen, so I went to the T-Mo store to get the newer version of my phone. The new version was total crap with a $250 price tag on it…when MSRP is $175. “Fuck this noise,” I said, then went to ebay and bought a handset identical to my old phone for $70. Boom, done, no big deal and no $250 price tag.
In their favor, T-Mo did ‘edit’ my plan so that I paid for the phone in installments, but my bill wasn’t any bigger – they just shaved $20 off the data charge and replaced it with $20 for the phone. It was a good idea…too bad the newer version of my phone was crap -_-
A potato is better than a can on a string, right?
I really wish the USA went with the European model where the phone is expensive but the monthly service is much, much cheaper. Total cost of ownership ends up being much less.
FWIW, Virgin Mobile uses the Sprint network and is contract-free. I switched from Sprint to Virgin, paid $150 for a Samsung Galaxy Victory and dropped my monthly bill from $84 to $42.50 I’ve lost the employee discount, which was worth about $12/month, but I’m still a lot better off. That was 3 months ago. One more month and I’ll have covered the cost of the phone in savings.
No degradation (or improvement) in service either.
One question about the strip: It the potatophone more technologically advanced than a bananaphone? (And yes, I laughed. A lot.)
As someone who also lives in the DFW area, I suggest you go to T-Mobile. They’re doing amazingly well, and the GSM standard beats the piss out of CDMA. Especially since Sprint has a real split-brain when it comes to wireless standards. Their two main 4G standards are WCDMA and WiMax. Which one you use will depend upon the phone you get.
With GSM, you can use both voice and data simultaneously. With CDMA, you can only do one or the other — unless you have a WCDMA connection. But if you’re back to EV-DO or 1xRTT — you’re fucked in that regard. Any of the GSM data connections — GPRS, EDGE, HSPA+, etc. — will work while a voice channel is open.
In addition, T-Mobile does do the ‘cheaper on a contract’ thing. But here’s the nifty part: if you pay off your phone subsidy early (and yes I know it’s ultimately more expensive than just straight buying the phone), you are out of your contract.
I dont know if you have seen this but i thought of you and I think this is right down Omar’s ally http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/new-ammo-cancels-free-ticket-to-paradise/