I am a middle-class twenty-two year old college student and I have never owned a cell phone. Really. I’ve just never felt like I needed one.
But I’m beginning to think that I really need one, because I’m getting more responsible with the passage of time, making more friends, meeting people places more, and so forth.
What I would like is this:
To be able to make frequent short calls.
To send as many texts as I would like.
What I might like, but do not insist on, is this:
To be able to take photographs with my camera.
To use the internet with my phone.
I was thinking I would go for a low-minute plan with unlimited texts, but I’m not settled on it yet, and I have no idea how much data I should go for.
By preliminary investigations, it seems to me that phone companies trap you into 2-year contracts by offering you fancy smartphones. I am yearning to know if this is worth it, or under what circumstances it is worth it.
I’m also noticing that T-Mobile seems cheaper than Verizon, at least by a little bit. Is there some reason for this?
Once I’ve settled on a service provider, how do I choose the right phone?
There might be a wide range of questions I should be asking but that I do not even know to ask–considerations I should be making but am not.
If your parents have a cell phone, you might consider being an additional line on their plan. It costs us almost nothing to be the third line on our son’s plan. He can’t buy a plan that doesn’t have far more minutes than he and his wife use.
This does mean a major compromise in privacy. Our son gets a list of every call we have made. We have nothing to hide from him. We call his sister, maybe my brother once in a while, people I am delivering stuff my service club sold, some of the girls at the blind school, the lady that supervises the puppy we are fostering, etc., etc.
You also need to look at things like Virgin mobile, boost mobile and cricket wireless.
I would really try to think about how many texts you will really send. I recently went from unlimited texts to 250 texts a month with Verizon at a savings of about $15 a month.
If your parents have a cell phone, you might consider being an additional line on their plan. It costs us almost nothing to be the third line on our son’s plan. He can’t buy a plan that doesn’t have far more minutes than he and his wife use.
This does mean a major compromise in privacy. Our son gets a list of every call we have made. We have nothing to hide from him. We call his sister, maybe my brother once in a while, people I am delivering stuff my service club sold, some of the girls at the blind school, the lady that supervises the puppy we are fostering, etc., etc.
I’m retired, and my only use for a cell phone would be to call 911 if my car went into a ditch.
Is there any phone I can get that won’t cost much if I never use it, or do they all come with use-it-or-lose-it minutes that you have to renew each month?
A co-worker of mine uses Virgin Mobile because they don’t insist on a contract. She is happy with it.
If you care only about texting, get the cheapest plan with unlimited texting. You don’t need (at least for Verizon, which I have now) a data plan. And even look at unlimited texting - I have it now, but could probably get by with 200 texts / month.
Now, if you plan to get a smartphone in the foreseeable future - not only will a data plan possibly be necessary, the contract discounts on a nice smartphone might make a 2-yr contract worth it. The Verizon discount on smartphones with a 2-yr contract looks to be about $200; you can look into a bunch of providers and phones to decide whether this is worth being locked in for two years.
The Bith Shuffle, sounds like you want a “featurephone” or as some providers call it a “messaging phone.”
brocks, you probably just need a basic dumbphone (and I don’t mean “dumb” in a derisive manner.) you might look into a pay as you go (PAYG) plan like Boost mobile offers.
I used to have T-mobile. Honestly, it’s cheaper because you don’t get coverage everywhere and you waste minutes calling people. Very few people have T-mobile.
When you pick a carrier, I’d see what free phone you get. A lot of the free phones have built in cameras and are able to access the internet. You don’t need a smartphone for that.
I’d be careful about how much text you buy. You’re 21. If I’m understanding this right, you won’t be in college that much longer. In college, I used texts a lot. Now a days, I don’t. I still have unlimited, but am thinking of going to a cheaper option. Many of my friends no longer text. I think texting is very popular among the younger crowd and students.
Thanks for pointing me to Virgin Mobile. Their prices seem so cheap that I wonder how they can afford what they offer–is there some nuance I’m not missing?
Something else to really watch out for is service coverage. Where I recently moved to, Verizon is the only thing that works consistently. Where I just moved from, AT&T was the best. Ask people that you know that live and work in areas near you to get a feel for which carriers will work consistently.
No, it’s for real. I switched from TMobile a few months ago and it’s exactly as advertised. 300 talking minutes, unlimited text and internet. You’re better off not getting hooked into a 2-year contract with a carrier right off the bat, so a prepaid service such as VM is a great alternative. It’s awfully handy to be able to check your email when you’re out, too, even if you don’t think you’re going to need internet. If you find you are using more minutes of talk, you can move up to the $40, 1200 minute plan.
With a contract, generally you get the phone for no or very little additional cost. They expect to make enough money on the contract to pay for the phone. You can get a relatively fancy phone with a prepaid plan, but you’ll pay for the phone separately up front.
The sticking point in all of this is that you really have to figure out what your usage might be. Prepaid plans are perfect for occasional/emergency use, but they wind up being more expensive than contracts if you use them a lot. Prepaid may not fit your needs, but I think you should at least look at them.
Given what the OP wants: Almost all phones nowadays (including the ones you’d get for free with a contract) have a built-in camera, and unlimited texting doesn’t generally cost all that much. Internet, though, will be a significant jump in price, both because you’ll need a fancier phone to be able to do that, and because you’ll need a data plan. You may or may not consider it worth it. Of course, the fancier phones that support internet usage will also have other features that you might consider worthwhile.
For the “frequent short calls”, I don’t think any of the major companies distinguish between many short calls and a few long ones-- Minutes is minutes. Also, when you’re deciding how many minutes you need on your plan, keep in mind that in many plans, calls made in the evenings and on weekends, and calls to other users of the same network, are often free (don’t count towards your minutes). Depending on your usage patterns, this might save you a lot.
Sprint owns Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile, so you should essentially the same coverage on all three on CDMA. The IDEN phones are on a different network. I was happy with the coverage on Sprint, but I wanted a cheaper plan, so I switched to BM with shrinkage. For what you want, Virgin Mobile sounds like a better deal. Everything I read says that the customer service at Virgin bites, but if things are working correctly, you might not have to communicate with anyone for years, which is far as I’m concerned is the ideal situation.
One thing you should be aware of, is that since you aren’t on a contract the phones prices aren’t subsidized, so you may have to pay $200 for a Android phone.
I thing I didn’t realize when I signed up for Boost Mobile is that since Sprint owns them, transferring my old phone number from Sprint was totally painless. My old phone number was working on my Boost phone before I walked out of the store.
brocks, for you, prepaid is the way to go. I have a pretty basic phone through TracFone, I think $35 to buy and it costs me about $6/mo. You add minutes to your account, which go away when you make calls. Your account also has an expiration date, which extends each time you add minutes, but you can also sign up for a service that automatically extends it for $6, but doesn’t add minutes.
My wife has Verizon prepaid, and it’s $100 per year. We figured that was the cheapest way to get a full year of service, buy $100 worth of minutes which expires after 1 year. Verizon doesn’t offer an auto-extension option, your minutes expire per their schedule.
My daughter is a college graduate, in her 20’s, and she didn’t get a cell phone until about a year ago. She didn’t want one, but all her friends told her she had to get one. So she started off with a tracphone, then upgraded to something she bought at Target. She buys minutes online someplace. Point is, she started out reluctantly and then upgraded and now buys hundreds of minutes and has turned into one of the millions who are looking at their little machines every three minutes.
and that’s all I got…except I would like a cheapie cellphone for emergencies, too.
Any of the inexpensive prepaid plans would work for you.
We got T-Mobile phones for our kids 2 years ago. Initial investment was 30 bucks (and there was a special where that came with 25.00 in prepaid minutes). Neither kid uses their phone much. The top-ups would expire 90 days after they were added, until we hit a total of 100 bucks or so, now they last a year. Ideal for sporadic users. Verizon’s prepaid wasn’t as good a deal; the money expired MUCH faster and we’d have had to add (and waste) money far too often. That may have changed since then.
So anyway - with such a plan you wouldn’t be out more than a few bucks at any given time.
Yep, that’s their modus operandi. They have contracts even on non-smartphones as well.
My thinking is that a contract for a dumb phone is non-optimal for most people (probably including us!). The plus side of a contract phone is that you have access to things like “free nights and weekends”, and “free calls to other subscribers to this company”. If you were on a prepaid phone, all of those would use up your minutes.
So we would use a fraction of the contract allowance (e.g. 100 out of our 450 a month), but then make a lot of calls that didn’t count (to each other, or evenings / weekends). I never did a detailed number comparison to see if that left us better or worse off than a prepaid plan.
The contract phones usually have more features, even dumbphones, than the cheap prepaid ones.
For your situation, my gut feeling would be go with prepaid while you’re figuring out how you’re likely to use it. This lets you dip a toe in the water without locking you into something that might not be a good fit. You can always port your number up to a better phone with that provider, or to a different provider.