<p>Okay I’ve put my husband in a snit and now I am supposed to figure out what we want.</p>
<p>He thinks he wants a nexus or an iphone.
He thinks he wants a data plan that is good anywhere.
He thinks I want text messaging, I don’t see why since neither of my kids seem to text me, and almost none of my clients do. I’ve never sent a text.
He thinks he wants text messaging.
He probably would like some cool games.</p>
<p>I think I’d like a nexus or iphone.
Really I just want a phone that hangs up when I hang it up.
That doesn’t hang up when I pull it out of my purse
That has basic PDA capabilities. I use the calendar and notes. If I had a GPS or maps I’d probably use them. I don’t actually need to connect with the web on the road otherwise. I drive to clients and then I go home. I don’t hang out in coffee shops or airports.</p>
<p>We have two kids - so I think a family plan is useful.
It’s really confusing as to whether they need to get the same fancy phones we have. (They didn’t have to with current phones, but we don’t have the data plan now.)</p>
<p>It would be a plus if the phone worked in northern Vermont and southern New Hampshire. T-mobile almost does the former, but for some reason doesn’t do the latter at all.</p>
<p>Problem with data plans is that they are per phone…4 phones, 4 data plans at $30 per on Verizon. I asked if they would ever be bundled as a family data plan, like the voice plans, and was assured that they would not… (:</p>
<p>Wow, thanks for starting this - I need a new phone (nobody I know would throw jeans in the washer without checking the pockets for cell phones… no, that wouldn’t happen in my world…)
I managed to hold off by buying a temporary phone at Target and activating it on my old (survived the washer) SIM card.
So - how do I decide if it’s worth the $30/month to get an iPhone? If you have one, please tell me how you use it. I love the concept, but doubt I would get full usage…</p>
<p>I noticed that your location is near NYC. Be aware that there have been numerous reports of “dropped calls” regarding the iPhone in the NYC area. Actually, my younger son used to love his iPhone. Now, he can’t wait for the contract to be up so he can switch back to Verizon and get a different phone. His annoyance level regarding dropped calls came to a head during his last drive home from college. He pulled over to call us because he said that the Garmin was taking him on a different course than previously and he wanted to confirm with my husband if he was on the right road. It took him at least 8 tries to get through to us because his iphone kept dropping the call. </p>
<p>His previous Blackberry rarely dropped a call.</p>
<p>Let’s say you have Verizon. If you have a family plan, you pay for 700, 1400 or 2100 minutes and add lines at $10 per. You can add texting for $5 for something like 400 messages a month to any line - $30 for unlimited. (I’d check the website to see.) A data plan is, as noted, $30. </p>
<p>Let’s say you have a family plan now and none of your phones are up for new phone pricing - meaning you’ll have to pay full price. The gimmick they use is to add yet another line for $10 and then sell you the phone for the new buyer price. The difference can be $500 for a new Blackberry.</p>
<p>This actually happened to us; a daughter now needs email and some web on her phone because that gets her work. Her current phone is a year old so we added a line and a data plan - $40. The sad part is that insurance on the expensive phone is an outrageous $10 a month. </p>
<p>We were able to cut back on the minutes of our plan because Verizon - like everyone I think - lets you pick 10 numbers from anywhere that are free. (And ATT rolls over minutes so if your usage fluctuates …) So the net cost of adding a useless line was $20 a month plus the cost of the phone, which after rebate is like $70.</p>
<p>Funny story lergmom if I am following it. We have a family plan but are past the 2 year contract. We have smallest contract and never use our minutes. This might change when S2 is in college. </p>
<p>I’m not sure whether they are going to give us the deal on the new phones or not. mathson thinks apple is evil, so that’s a consideration, he doesn’t care about phones though he lives his entire life on the computer and now makes phone calls via computer too apparently.</p>
<p>There are some pockets in Westchester that don’t get coverage, I’ve occasionly had dropped calls, but I think it’s usually my client’s phones that are at fault. We definitely find t-mobile better than Sprint in our area. I know AT&T isn’t too great in VT. (We’re up a mountain road when we are there.)</p>
<p>If your contract is done and you don’t mind changing carriers, you can get free phones for all on amazon (at least you could last time I went through this). Costco also has some pretty good rebates and knowledgeable sales staff.</p>
<p>I am against data plans on principle, unless you really need it for work. It just creeps me out to think of myself or my kids that tied to email, and they’ve both admitted that although all their friends think it’s cool, they don’t think it’s that wonderful to be connected all the time. Features that have been of most value to us are (1) getting a family plan for the 4 of us and (2) getting unlimited texting. The kids text more than they call. In fact, the one at college texts so much that I wonder how he ever attends class. A phone that has a full keyboard allows for easy texting, so that’s a feature to look for. That means the phone minutes are pretty minimal. Which lets my H talk all he wants.</p>
<p>I would be interested to know who has email/internet on their phones and feels it is worth the $30 per month? I know there are certain times when I travel when it would be handy, but am not sure it would be $360/yr worthwhile.</p>
<p>Somemom, I find it worth it to me to have email on my iPhone because I’m no longer able to check my personal email from my work computer (I work for the federal government and they block a lot of websites on our computers ). At least now I can check it on my phone while I’m at work. And the convenience of having internet access at all times is worth the $30 to me. I don’t use it that often, but if I were in a situation where I needed directions or had to look up a phone number, etc., I could do it.</p>
<p>There is so much to consider. I actually feel fortunate that I live remotely enough that we really only have one provider that we can get reception from. People I know with iPhones do love them (but they don’t live near me!). I think we went through the fairly typical no texting, to limited texting, to unlimited texting as the kids grew older. I text my kids much more often than calling. Some of my friends and I even occasionally text (like sitting at a hs football game reporting a score when it’s too noisy to chat, or just in a situation where you want to communicate but have to be quiet). And I do like having my personal e-mail account and internet available. I also switched us to an unlimited data plan just a few months ago. Really the thing we don’t use enough are the actual talking minutes. (Ironic?)</p>
<p>As to a decision tree, I think pick provider first. Then look into family calling plans. Getting the next step up rarely seems to be many additional $$ (adding texting or data). Let people pick phones with features they like. (For me a qwerty keyboard was important. I had one that had red letters on black which my eyes were really too old to see well, so switched to a nifty little black-and-white with raised buttons jobby that fits my hands well). I can also tell you I’ve found very good deals on eBay to upgrade phones if you don’t want to wait a year or two for something spiffier. And I only recently found out from a co-worker that government employees get a 15% discount from my provider. Hurray!</p>
<p>I am very pleased with my iPhone, purchased last September. I had been on a Verizon family plan for years with my daughter, who switched to an iPhone last summer as soon as her contract was up (she is working so it was her financial decision to make). Verizon was throughly obnoxious when I switched to a single-user plan, charging me more for less and refusing to allow me an upgrade on a minimally functioning phone. (Although my daughter had been the primary user of the family plan in terms of minutes and unlimited texting, obviously when she was a student she was not the payer, a point that Verizon conveniently and repeatedly ignored when I pointed out to them that my husband–who has his own Verizon cell phone account–and I were longtime customers and that it would be nice to be treated as such).</p>
<p>Although I use my cell phone relatively little, I do use it at times and think of cellphones as useful things to have on hand in case of emergency as well as the occasional social call. I was annoyed enough with Verizon and displeased enough with the old phone’s limited function to break my contract with Verizon and enter into my own contract with ATT on my new iPhone. It ended up not costing me that much to leave Verizon because Verizon had continued to bill us incorrectly after my daughter was no longer on the plan; they were inefficient and unhelpful but after literally hours on the phone with various service representatives and supervisors the matter was resolved.</p>
<p>The data package seems to cost ($30) the same whether you have a Blackberry and use Verizon or an iPhone and use ATT. But I would have had to pay at least as much for a bottom of the line Blackberry if I wanted to stay with Verizon. Apple and Verizon both have stores in my local mall; after being told at the Verizon store that I could not get any sort of upgrade without paying a lot for it, I was able to set up a personal shopping appointment at Apple and get walked through the iPhone process by a very polite and helpful young man (NOT on commission, incidentally). So from the very start, customer service was quite different.</p>
<p>The iPhone is perfectly adequate for my phone calls: the extras are what I really like. </p>
<ol>
<li>I am now texting somewhat more, since I was pleasantly surprised by the reasonable price of a 200 text messages a month pacakge, since I had previously been paying Verizon 20 cents per message. </li>
<li>Customer service (not really an extra–should be considered a basic) has been notably better than Verizon on the two or three occasions when there has been an issue. 3. Camera is quite good and ability to send photo in a text message as well as an email from the phone is fun.</li>
</ol>
<p>I would recommend an iPhone to anyone as long as you live in an area with decent ATT coverage–and my sense is that if ATT coverage is spotty, Verizon likely will be too.</p>
<p>I have ATT and a Blackberry. I love it. Both of my Ds have a Blackberry.
My kids and friends text me daily, and I use the internet and email throughout the day.</p>
<p>My D lives in NYC and the phone works well in the city. (Except for a spot near the financial district that she doesn’t get great reception.</p>
<p>Another advantage (if you would use them) to an Iphone is the apps you can download. The apps allow your “phone” to be so much more than phone, messenger, web connection.</p>
<p>I can not comment on the coverage in your area, but I love my iPhone. Yes, my family is totally connected; the other 3 have a Blackberry so we have 4 data plans. The true laziness-I was lounging on the sofa with the puppy asleep on me; I couldn’t reach my laptop and wanted to check my email, so I picked up my iPhone and was able to read and return email! </p>
<p>I do not NEED my access to the internet all all time, but boy do I love it. You never know how many times you need to check the weather or your email, or play a game while waiting in line, or check Wikipedia or IMDB for the answer to some question you are discussing while out with friends, or the score to the big game that you are missing because your wife or mother made you go out to dinner; I am just saying!!</p>
<p>While my adult kids have Blackberries, they are always grabbing my iPhone when we are out together to look something up as the browser is so much better as are the games. Blackberry does have applications, but my phone is more fun. Actually when my phone disappears at night I know my husband has it to play Word Warp!</p>
<p>Blackberry user here. I’m an independent consultant so I use it to keep connected with emails when I’m traveling…much better than lugging around a laptop. I do use the browser too to check weather, sports scores (for dear H usually) or to find a review on a restaurant or movie when we’re away or even traveling somewhere in a car. I love that the BB has a full keyboard for texting.
That said, I REALLY want an iphone. My contract expires this spring so I will evaluate it then. I have to be sure that ATT will work OK in this area. And I need to make sure I’m not losing any email capability.
Now, I got my son a BB last year and he DISABLED the email cause he said he was annoyed with the junk mail coming through. I just gave him an old phone and downgraded the package…when you get a BB, you are stuck with the data package even if you don’t want it!</p>
<p>Before I got my iPhone the kids told me I would not be able to text on it without a lot of errors; boy were they wrong! I actually find it quit easy to text on the iPhone, something each of my family members do all day. Obviously we needed the unlimited text package; the kids don’t use near the talk minutes they used years ago so we were able to reduce our minutes.</p>
<p>While iphone has the most aps now - lots of them are really silly. I’m guessing nexus will catch up. But of course you can’t always predict these things…</p>
<p>I like the idea of choosing carrier first, but even then the choices aren’t obvious. Both AT&T and t-mobile claim similar coverage in our part of VT, but I know our wings with t-mobile work slightly better than my brother’s iphone. (Neither work well.) Verizon doesn’t work at all. I know t-mobile doesn’t work at all at my parent’s house though if I walk five minutes down the road I’m fine. The iphones have no problem. So in my eyes - they are pretty much equal. Perhaps slightly more useful that phone sort of works in VT where there is no landline.</p>
<p>I have a ton of apps - and my daughter has a bunch on her ipod touch. There are many very useful ones and I’m not counting the great games.</p>
<p>According to the people who actually test the network (per CNET) - meaning the companies that have cars out all over the country making text and voice calls automatically - ATT actually has the fastest network. Most of their network for data uses an older standard than 3G but Verizon’s implementation of 3G is pretty slow, the two standards just about come together at the top of the old and the bottom of the new, and the tests show ATT overall has more throughput. There are a couple of issue with the iphone and those mostly center around a few cities where it seems there are issues with capacity - particularly NYC, SF - with density of buildings (particularly for data transfer) and maybe even with the iphone’s sensitivity.</p>
<p>Santa brought us two iPhones, and so far I’ve been very impressed, even after the fact that I had to take mine back to the ATT store and replace it (for some reason, it would not go to sleep and would drain the battery in 1 hr). I’m such a speedy texter now that D prefers to communicate with me that way :)! I have not downloaded any apps yet, but I love the fact that I only have one gadget for making calls, checking my bosses’ frantic e-mails, and listening to music!</p>
). At least now I can check it on my phone while I’m at work. And the convenience of having internet access at all times is worth the $30 to me. I don’t use it that often, but if I were in a situation where I needed directions or had to look up a phone number, etc., I could do it.</p>