You don’t have to go far in the PCMech community to find people who don’t own a smartphone, citing that they "hate smartphones".
Smartphone haters hate two things primarily:
- Wireless plan contracts of any kind
- The ridiculous prices of the phones themselves
It’s never the actual phone that these people hate, because if it did sell for a fair price, and the wireless plan was no-contract and priced fairly, they would buy it.
In the United States there are only two ways I know of to get a no-contract smartphone that in my personal opinion is fairly priced.
To note: If you have an alternative, please feel free to leave a comment. But remember, it has to be no-contract and the phone has to be priced fairly.
Tracfone with triple-minutes-for-life
This is yet again another one of those instances where I will mention Tracfone, as they do offer a few true smartphone models all for $50 or less.
The 3x-minutes-for-life is a fair deal. Buy a 60-minute card either in person or online and that instantly turns into 180 minutes. Buy 90, that turns into 270, and so on. No guesswork involved, no promo codes needed, no special things you have to do. If the phone says it’s 3x minutes for life, it really is 3x minutes for life out-of-the-box for the life of the phone (meaning the 3x doesn’t expire) and is applied the moment you add minutes to the phone.
MetroPCS
Technically this is a contract-based phone, but it’s only month-to-month. What this means is that the contract is active for 30 days, and you renew it each month. If after a particular month you want to drop the service, you do and there’s no ETFs (early termination fees) involved.
MetroPCS does have unlimited-everything for almost everything you could think of, and they have Android phone choices and they have 4G LTE-capable options to boot.
Prices of phones vary and you get a lot of choices with MetroPCS, starting at around $40 for a phone and it goes up from there depending on what features you want.
Got another prepaid smartphone option?
If there’s anything you know of that matches or beats what Tracfone or MetroPCS offers, again, feel free to post a comment and let everyone know.
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I got my wife a phone from PlatimumTel. No contract. You get refurbished phones as low as $29.99
http://platinumtel.com
I want to try this if you say that MetroPCS is better than iphone or something like this !
Actually, there is an advantage to non-smart phones. Since the screens are smaller, the phone can be smaller. Since they are smaller and do not draw more power in order to stay connected they can also have a smaller battery. This also means they means weigh less.
I have a really small “dumb phone”. Sometimes I cannot tell it is in my pocket, unlike a big smart phone clunking around in there.
This is for those who REALLY don’t need (or want) a smartphone. You can get a feature phone from STI Mobile for around $40, with $20 worth of free minutes. You pay somewhere around 9 cents per day whether you use it or not (less than $3 per month!). You pay on a per-minute basis around 8.7 cents per minute. You can set up automatic refills for your account. You set the amount at which they add minutes to your account and how much they add when you’re down to that minimum.
I end up paying the $2.70 per month and maybe $5 or so for the air time I use (on a per-minute basis) and that’s all I pay. I don’t have to buy refill cards to “recharge” the minutes on my phone account. It’s a lot less for me than any other type of prepaid or contract phone account.
Here’s where it’s really nice. Unlike any other prepaid account I’ve researched, your minutes NEVER expire. AT&T’s Go-Phone minutes expire after 90 days, as do most of the others. With Tracphone and T-Mobile, there are ways around that for an extra cost, or for buying 1,000 minutes up-front, but with STI, there’s no hoops to jump through.
One thing to understand about the free $20 worth of minutes they give you when you buy your phone: Those minutes expire after 90 days. Any minutes you buy don’t. Of course, if you don’t use your phone, your account is reduced by just short of $3 per month to keep the account active. But that’s cheap compared to a contract deal, unless you talk a lot on a mobile phone.
I only use my mobile phone for MY convenience. My friends know this and are instructed to call my land line only, and that if they leave a message on my mobile phone, I may not get it for days.
http://www.SmartTalk.com (a division of Tracfone but only available through Wal-mart) has a true ‘droid smartphone. It runs on the Sprint network and gives unlimited service (no contracts) for $45/month.
The downside is that I think it works on a subset of Sprint’s full coverage zones. But if the coverage area works for you it’s a sweet deal.
If you only hate the price of a smartphone package, Boost Mobile has a flat rate $50 (per month) plan. Pay your bill on time for 6 months and it goes down by $5, and does so for each 6 months until you’re down to $35 per month. You do have to buy your phone, though. But you’re not paying for it in your monthly charge. And there aren’t hidden fees as far as I know. They have used and refurbished phones, too, so you don’t have to spend top dollar for your phone. They use the sprint network.
But don’t forget that feature phones will work when smartphones don’t. The touch screens on smart phones won’t work when they get down to a low temperature. They’re also cheaper to replace.
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