If you’re going to be buying the iPhone 4S, it’s probably time to evaluate what kind of deal you’re going to get by signing a new contract. With three carriers now, people actually have a choice if they want to get involved with Apple’s baller marketing/demon magic team. Here’s a quick breakdown of the three carriers and who you should go with if you are free to choose.
Plans:
How much you pay is going to depend on how much data and how often you text. If you’re going from a dumb-phone, it’s pretty easy to look at your bill and see how many texts you send. It’s a lot harder to see how much having the internet in your pocket will change your life.
Sprint offers an unlimited texting and data plan for $80 with 450 voice minutes. Simple. Easy. If you use 5 MB of data a month or 50 GBs you’re still going to pay $80. If you send 30 texts or 3000 it’s still going to be $80. Both of the other carriers are a touch more complicated, but you can pay a decent amount less if you plan it out properly.
If you just want your brand new iPhone to look cool (and let’s be honest with ourselves here), AT&T offers a 55$ a month plan. You don’t get any texts (there are free apps for that), 200 MB of data (just don’t watch videos), and 450 voice minutes. 55$ a month is cheap as fuck for a smartphone plan. Seriously. However, if you don’t want to go through the hassle of a third party texting application, texting isn’t cheap at AT&T. There are only two options: unlimited for 20$ a month or 20 cents per text. So if you’re going to send 100 texts (you will, you slore), you have to buy unlimited.
If you use more than 200 MB of data per month or send more than 75 texts per month it’s cheaper to go with a competitor. That’s where my boys over at Verizon come in. They’ve got a plan that gives you 2 GB of data, 250 texts per month, and 450 voice minutes for $75 a month.
Basically, if you don’t use data much at all, you probably want to go with the tried and true AT&T iPhone. If you’re a pretty average user, Verizon will most likely be your best bet. Then, if you’re a data fiend who is watching Netflix everyday while Hanging with Friends, Sprint should be the way to go.
A data plan with a 200 megabyte cap gets you about 1,250 Web pages, 350 photo downloads, 50-60 songs, 11 YouTube videos, 6.5 hours of Pandora, or just under an hour of Netflix videos. A 2 gigabyte plan gets you 13,000 Web pages, 3,500 photos, 600 songs, 125 YouTube videos, 2.5 days of Pandora or about 9 hours of Netflix.
I did some pretty quick calculations for those data plan numbers, so if you know better, please say so in the comments.
