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I love my gadgets...
Sep. 4th, 2008 02:28 pmTo be honest, I've been lusting for the iPhone as of late. Partly because I'm going to have expendable income soon, and partly because I haven't had a new toy to play with in a while. I considered the Crackberry for a bit, with the upside of it already being on my current network and only costing an additional $30 on top of the current family plan. The web browser wasn't quite what I was hoping it would be.
I did the math on the iPhone. At a $199 start-up cost for the 8GB phone and $69 for the cheapest plan (I don't talk on the phone a lot), it comes out to a bit over $1000 the first year and over $800 for the next year.
The current plan I'm on with Verizon comes out to an average of $125 a month (I should stop texting so much) and currently costs about $1500 a year. BUT it's a family plan and there are three phones on it altogether, making it about $500-$600 a year for my own phone. Upside is the parents are paying for my phone bill right now.
While the iPhone is shiny and all, I find it hard to justify the $500 increase in phone expense. Not to mention the iPhone is on the AT&T network, the very network I fled from to Verizon. Not to mention, most of my friends are on the Verizon network.
There are various ways to hack the phone at this point, including tricking it into a data-only plan with AT&T's pay as you go. But that voids warranty. Or there's the iPod Touch, which would function better as an MP3 player and be able to access the internet via Wifi. Because I work for a university that's perpetually wired, I will have no trouble hitting a hotspot, BUT there are computers everywhere on campus already.
I guess I'll just wait and see if AT&T comes out with a data-only plan and how expensive that would be. Or maybe I should just forget the whole thing and not let gadgets rule my life!
I did the math on the iPhone. At a $199 start-up cost for the 8GB phone and $69 for the cheapest plan (I don't talk on the phone a lot), it comes out to a bit over $1000 the first year and over $800 for the next year.
The current plan I'm on with Verizon comes out to an average of $125 a month (I should stop texting so much) and currently costs about $1500 a year. BUT it's a family plan and there are three phones on it altogether, making it about $500-$600 a year for my own phone. Upside is the parents are paying for my phone bill right now.
While the iPhone is shiny and all, I find it hard to justify the $500 increase in phone expense. Not to mention the iPhone is on the AT&T network, the very network I fled from to Verizon. Not to mention, most of my friends are on the Verizon network.
There are various ways to hack the phone at this point, including tricking it into a data-only plan with AT&T's pay as you go. But that voids warranty. Or there's the iPod Touch, which would function better as an MP3 player and be able to access the internet via Wifi. Because I work for a university that's perpetually wired, I will have no trouble hitting a hotspot, BUT there are computers everywhere on campus already.
I guess I'll just wait and see if AT&T comes out with a data-only plan and how expensive that would be. Or maybe I should just forget the whole thing and not let gadgets rule my life!
