when i first got a cell phone, i got it through cingular's gophone. and i
got it strictly for work purposes. i don't talk much. not in person, not
on a phone. i had been happy with what i had until i went researching for
providers after i had been thinking of getting an iphone. it wasn't going
to be at&t, they were charging $30 data plans on top of voice plans, voice
minutes i was never going to use. so i look at what t-mobile had to
offer. they had a flat data rate plan. cool, i'll go with that. but
doing a little more digging, i find that in their prepaid plans, they
offered rates as low as $.10 a minute. i was happy with cingular/at&t
prepaid rate i was using of $.25 a minute, but i would be crazy to pass up
$.10. when i went to the at&t store to get my account number so t-mo
could port over the number i had for years with at&t, the reason i told
him i was going to t-mobile was at&t didn't offer $.10 a minute prepaid
plans. i would stay with at&t if they did that. they aren't, but i'm
just sayin.
so for the last year i had both of the phones on t-mobile service, one
prepaid, one on a data plan. going in i knew that the fastest the iphone
would go would be edge speeds. i didn't care, because for listening to
streaming radio and surfing the web at work when the wifi went down, it
was good enough. then thursday i bought the new samsung vibrant. oh my
god. i would honestly say this phone is t-mo's answer to the iphone line,
especially in light of the problems the iphone 4 has with reception and
the fact that at&t's 3g network is crap. plus at&t ended officially
unlimited data plans. so much for that if you use an iphone. i would try
to find as many wifi hotspots as possible because that thing is a data
hog, especially for the apps that work best with the 3g data lines. the
samsung is fast. blazing fast. i haven't seen such downloading speeds
since i was using the dorm internet network connection in college. the 3g
is faster than the dsl we have at home. and on the 21st it is supposed to
get faster.
but that's not all. that same thursday i had a problem with service. i
was not able to use the 3g connection with the vibrant. and i could not
change my plan online to get it to work. so i call up t-mo customer
service on my prepaid phone. bad idea, i kept getting rerouted to the
prepaid tech support, and even then i couldn't talk with a real person.
so i called using the vibrant itself. when i got with a customer support
person, the girl/young lady on the other end could not have been any
nicer. she got me straightened out. she switched my plan to the android
internet plan (didn't know there was such a thing) which was the same
price as before and threw in unlimited texts for nothing. i had gotten a
300 text plan when i quickly realized that people send me and i send
others more than 25 texts a month. i got charged $.25 a text either way.
it was more economical to get the 300 text plan even though i didn't come
close to 300 texts. she saw that and upgraded me to unlimited. the only
thing she didn't change was the voice option which was $.45 a minute.
when you have a cheap prepaid plan, you don't need a voice plan on that
device. so with a discount i get for working at mcdonald's, i have an
unlimited data plan and an unlimited text plan for the same price i had
been paying on an annual contract- $45 a month. it is much cheaper than
the unlimited talk-text-data plan t-mo offers and it is the perfect plan
for me, something at&t should have been offering people from the start.
verizon is expensive with a technology using a dying standard in cdma.
sprint is hemorraging customers using a dying standard in cdma. at&t has
a poor network with a popular phone and expensive plans. and t-mobile has
cheap plans and before thursday had crappy phone selection. the vibrant
will do some things. it may not bring in as many customers as the others,
but it will hold up to the iphone, especially when you have unlimited data
usage on it.
viva t-mobile
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