I finally went to a non contract phone. I was tired of the big bill ($80+ monthly) that comes with a individual contract smart phone (at&t and iphone). The service was not worth the premium. In fact the service was terrible. So when the iphone got destroyed by water last year, the two year contract was thankfully up.
Consider that "free" phone is pretty expensive, especially if you keep it longer then the contract, because you are still paying for it as long as you use it, the bill doesn't get lower after the phone has been "paid for". For example, my brother has a iphone 3gs, which is an old phone. So he has basically paid for it about 3 times now.
I decided, no more contracts, there is nothing in it for the consumer, outside of not having to buy a phone at the beginning of the contract. Most people don't consider that contract phones aren't actually "free" and the over all higher price of the monthly plan reflects that.
I now pay less then half of what I paid before. I ended up with Virgin Mobile, which doesn't have its own system but uses Sprint. Amazingly, the data works better with my non contract phone then my expensive contract one. You have to buy the phone at the beginning. I didn't have the $650 for the latest iphone, but they have older iphones at lower prices (they are still new phones). I ended up with a iphone 4 since it does everything I wanted, and was still newer then the iphone I broke. Just because they aren't the "newest" phones doesn't mean they aren't fine, it was still a new phone out of the box, never used.
So instead of paying over $1,000 for smart phone service this year, I will pay less then $400 (I bought the iphone 4 last year so it is paid for).
