I received a lot of wonderful Christmas presents this year. I keep coming back and looking at these, however.
They are gloves that let you operate a touch capacitive screen. With the weather we are getting here in the Northeast, they are actually pretty handy (sorry, that was an awful and unintended pun ... but it's too late to go back at this point). If you are looking to get some on the cheap, +CNET posted this article a couple of weeks back.
It's not the concept of the gloves that brings me so much joy; it's the packaging.
I think more products should be designed with this feature in mind. These gloves work great!
My phone is a Nexus 4. The joys difficulties of purchasing this device have been described in a previous post. If you prefer to relive some of the highlights in all of its auditory and visual glory, feel free to numb your mind with this:
There is a reason I went through all of this hassel ... I was tired of paying a butt-load significant amount of money to Verizon Wireless each month.
My Verizon Bill
My wife and I shared a plan that included data for each of our smartphones. The total was about $174 a month, or over the course of a two-year contract, a grand total of about $4,160. I don't call that many people; why was I spending this much money? I'm a teacher; how could I afford to pay this much money?
Recently there has been a lot of buzz about getting away from mobile phone contracts and going the prepaid route. Even +TIME ran an article this past summer. I researched a number of options, from MetroPCS, to Straight Talk, to Ting. Every plan has its pros and cons, most notably being network coverage. If you are thinking about making this switch, look in to how good the networks are in the area(s) you will be using your smartphone.
I seldom go over a 100 minutes of voice in a month, and my wife does not use nearly as much data as I do, so being potentially throttled after 2GB would not be an issue for her.
So here's the math. At a total of $90 a month, we would be saving $84 a month from what we were paying Verizon. That comes out to us paying $2160 over the course of a typical two-year contract, or an overall savings of $2000!
Making the switch was an obvious choice once I put down my calculator. I still harbored some hesitations, however. First, we still had six months left on my contract. Canceling our service with Verizon would cost us an early termination fee on each of our two lines, totaling about $300. If you look at the $84/month potential savings pushed over the six months remaining on my contract, it is still a good deal.
My second, and bigger concern, was the need to pay full price for a smart phone when going into a prepaid plan. This is why AT&T and Verizon contracts look so enticing. They subsidize the cost of phones, so they only charge you $200 for an iPhone or Galaxy S3 that would otherwise cost $700+ off-contract. When expanded over the cost of two phones, they are offering a savings of over $1000 for premium devices. If you want a lesser smartphone, well they are almost giving those away. It is not until you consider how much AT&T and Verizon are overcharging for their actual service before you understand why they will sell you the phones for such an attractive price. They are making up for their costs (and much more) in the end.
I like my toys, so I knew I needed to buy high-end phones if I were to be happy with any changes. The thought of shelling out $1400+ so that we could make the switch to T-Mobile was not very appealing, even though my calculator assured me that we would be saving money in the end. When Google announced that they would be selling their Nexus 4 phone for $350 (16GB version), my sticker shock at buying two new phones went away. I could buy two Nexi (Nexuss? Nexuses? Nexusus? Nexum?) for the cost of one iPhone5 or S3. This sealed the deal. I won't argue that a Nexus is as good of a phone as either of those two devices, but I dare you to tell me that either an iPhone or an S3 are worth twice as much as a Nexus 4.
So I made the jump! Here is the money comparison of how much we would pay if we bought two new phones and stayed with Verizon, versus getting the two Nexus 4s and going with the T-Mobile prepaid plans.
Click to make larger.
So I'm happy with saving our household about $1400 over the course of the next two years. My next step is to get my wife off of the $60/month plan and switch her to the $30/month plan I use. As I mentioned before, 100 minutes of talk time is not a concern for me.
My T-Mobile Account Activity
I am almost half-way through my first month, and I have only used twenty nine twenty-nine minutes of talk, and that was during the holidays! My wife does spend more time on the phone, but is still very reasonable. Her use is usually between 150-300 minutes a month. T-Mobile charges ten cents per minute of overage. So if she goes on the 100 minute plan, she could get charged $20 of overage fees on her chattiest of months, or a savings of $10 per month of what she is now paying on her unlimited talk plan with T-Mobile. So next month, we will be cutting even more off our mobile phone bills.
My final piece of information comes for those who have gripes about the Nexus 4. Yes, it's internal storage is capped at 16GB. That seems to really affect those that play a number of different games on their devices. With the amount of high speed data I can access each month, cloud storage of documents, pictures, music, and movies works great for me. I've even pinned about six gigs of music onto my phone so that I won't be streaming my favorite playlists while navigating, and there is still a great deal of room left over. I guess if you need to have Madden, FIFA, and GTA on your phone, then you need a different device.
You are correct if you think that the Nexus 4 does not get an LTE signal (what Verizon and AT&T call 4G). The HSPA+ signal I get from T-Mobile is plenty fast enough for me, and it beats the pants off the 3G signal I got off my old Verizon phone. I just set my personal record with 14.4mbps down and 3.7mbps up (admittedly at a very off-peak hour).
If you have no idea what those numbers mean, you can see from the picture above that the top speed test of my phone taken from T-Mobile's wireless signal are not far off the bottom set of numbers on my list, taken from my Comcast wifi router. You will just have to trust me when I state that these tests were all taken from inside my apartment, and at a distance of about ten feet from my wireless router.
So let me conclude this very lengthy post by stating this: you are probably paying too much for your smartphone service. Do some research into monthly, prepaid plans and check how good the service is in your area from a variety of different providers. Check into the costs of unlocked and unsubsidized phones or see if your current phone can be or is already unlocked. Finally, check to see how much it will cost you to break your current contract. My guess is that the numbers add up if you are willing to make a switch.
I am a Google fanboy ... I have admitted as much several times on this blog. My heroes at Mountain View recently put my faith to the test.
My first smartphone was the original Droid. I had been a Verizon customer since the company first merged in 2000 and absorbed my contract. I was tempted by the early iPhone, but when my cell provider was going to offer a smartphone that would seamlessly integrate with all of the Google products I was using already, I took the jump.
The phone was great, and I eventually upgraded to a Droid 3 when it was time to re-up my contract. Over the past few months, however, my phone was hanging a great deal. It couldn't handle all of the processes that I was asking of it, and it's 3g speeds were feeling a bit stifling. I have lost count of how many times I had to pull the battery out of the back in order to force a reset.
While my technical frustrations were mounting, I became more aware of just how much I was being gouged by Verizon on the monthly family plan that I shared with my wife. It became clear that dumping Verizon and going with a pre-paid plan was going to save us a ton of money. The hitch was that I was still under contract, so I'd be on the hook for a pretty hefty early termination fee. Also, a prepaid plan requires one to pay the full (unsubsidized) price for a phone. I'm not one to skimp on my toys, so I was looking at forking over around $700 for a premium device. I would then have to double that figure because I probably could not get away with getting a great phone for me and a brick for my wife. So the cost of two new phones and early termination fees were keeping me reluctantly handcuffed to Verizon.
Then Google announced the Nexus 4. I will admit that it is not an iPhone5 nor a Galaxy S3 (depending on if you're into werewolves or vampires), but at $350, I could buy two for the price I would have to shell out for just one of those other phones. The Nexus 4 would certainly be a huge improvement over the Droid 3 I was ready to throw against the wall at any moment.
So that was the nudge I needed to jump from Verizon. At that price, I would actually be saving money by getting new phones and switching plans. I doggedly tracked Nexus news online and was ready to pounce when it went on sale.
Rumors came out that the phone would go on sale at midnight Pacific time, on November 13th It would only be available from Google's online store, however. I'm on the East Coast, so that meant 3am for me. I knew there was a lot of buzz about this phone, so I set an alarm and was ready to mash the refresh icon on my browser. (I wanted to live like an iPhone fanatic for a while.) The rumors turned out to be partly true .. the phone went on sale in England, Germany, and Australia, but not in the U.S. Just as it became clear that I got up at a God-awful hour for no reason, something weird appeared to be going on. The Internet was glowing with reports from where the Nexus was on sale; it sold out in just minutes. How was that possible?
Another bit a news popped up before my groggy eyes that morning. The U.S. sale of the Nexus was scheduled to open at noon Pacific time later that day, 3pm for me. I knew it would be a race.
I was at work and slipped into my desk at 2:55pm. I gave myself a few minutes to get comfy, load the page, and start the refresh process. The problem was that Google's servers were already overloaded. They put the phone on sale early. I didn't have a chance, and before I could even get Google's page for the Nexus to actually load, it had sold out. I was a little bitter at Google at that moment. It wasn't really their fault that I got up so early, but clearly they were having trouble with the online retail side of their operation. They also had a fair amount of warning from what happened in smaller markets earlier in the day. It was hard to believe that Google, of all companies, could not get an online market to handle a high demand and did not have enough product on hand to at least last an hour.
It took two weeks for Google to get the Nexus 4 back in stock and make it available for order once again. It was to be November 27th, again at noon Pacific time. There was the same buzz online as before. People were bitter that they could not get their phone when it first went on sale, and it was clear that there would be another rush when the gates opened. Google, however, had weeks to revamp their servers and handle the flood.
So let's see how it went.
I got to my desk (even earlier this time) and Google had not released the phone, yet. After clicking and refreshing for over an hour, however, it became clear that Google could not handle the demand for this phone once again:
I had never been so frustrated trying to buy anything in my life. All I wanted to do was give them my money, and they would not let me (Sorry, I'm not that big of a Futurama fan, so I'll leave the obligatory meme photo out.)
The best thing I did that day was to eventually get the phones I was able to click on into my online cart. I could not process the order, but I had to walk away from the computer and actually address the rest of my life. When I went back to my computer around 8:00 that night, I saw from my news feeds that the Google store had eventually calmed down and was now accepting orders. I went back to my cart and ordered the two phones, and much to my relief, I was able to pay. Better yet, I was placed on a 2-4 week shipping notice, instead of the 9-10 week notice some people were reporting.
The phones arrived two weeks later, on December 12th, and I was pretty excited. I still cannot shake how distasteful this whole experience was, though. Hours of my life were wasted to get my hands on these things. What is amazing, is that the phone is STILL SOLD OUT. If I were not so determined to get these things, I'd still be throwing money at Verizon and using a clunkier phone.
