Picking Your Wireless Carrier part 04: CDMA MVNOs

First of all, I would like to say that I am not a fan of CDMA carriers (Verizon, Sprint, and their MVNOs). The reason is that you are forced to buy their phones, which are branded and controlled by them. Plus you cannot use your phone anywhere else other than the operator your pick. Imagine buying a car where you can only fill up your gas at one gas station company. Imagine buying a computer where you can only use with one ISP for internet. With GSM, I can buy an unlocked GSM phone and use it with any GSM carrier I want to, worldwide.

Having said that, CDMA is pretty prominent in the US. The biggest carrier, Verizon, is using CDMA (and recently LTE). Let’s take a peek at their prepaid plans. Verizon only offers two plans, $60 and $70 a month. $60 gives you 500MB data, $70 gives you 2GB. Unlimited minutes and text. Compared to their own post paid plans, it’s not bad. However, your phone selection is severely limited as Verizon only offers three old smartphones on their website (2 Android phones, and 1 Blackberry, all 3G only). Plus, you are limited to 3G EVDO. No LTE access. And once you compare prices with the plethora of MVNOs we have seen so far, $60 a month is a lot of money, especially when you cannot use the phone that you want.

There is a Verizon MVNO called PagePlus. They will activate Verizon phones (you still have to buy the phone somewhere, and since CDMA is provider locked, most of the time you have to buy them at full price from Verizon). *EDIT: I guess I was misinformed, another reason I hate CDMA. PagePlus is not activating Verizon phones, more like people are flashing their Verizon phones to be usable on PagePlus.* Prices are a bit more reasonable. $30 a month gives you 1200 minutes, 3000 text, and 250MB data. $40 a month gives you unlimited minutes and text, but dialed down the data to just 200MB. $55 a month bumps the data to 2GB. If you already have a Verizon phone, this is a good alternative to save some money. Do note that you will be using EVDO 3G, not LTE. EVDO 3G is slower than HSDPA (which is the 3G technology used by GSM carriers).

Next, let’s look at Sprint. Being the “little” guy against Verizon, Sprint is akin to T-Mobile, offering better values and more MVNOs. They only have one prepaid plans for smartphones, $70 a month for unlimited everything, including data, but no tethering. Also, Sprint only offers two Android phones. The plus side is they offer an LTE phone. The downsides are Sprint’s LTE coverage is extremely limited at this point, and their 3G EVDO speed is slower than even Verizon’s (which is already slow).

Sprint’s MVNOs are more interesting. First, there is Virgin Mobile. $35 a month for 300 minutes, $45 for 1200 minutes, and $55 for unlimited. Text is unlimited. Data is “unlimited,” up to 2.5GB at 3G/4G speed. Tethering/portable hotspot is $15 extra, and will give you an extra 1GB of high-speed data. 4G here means Wimax. It’s no LTE, and it’s not going to be expanded any further as Sprint decided to adopt LTE instead, so caveat emptor. On the bright side, Sprint’s Wimax coverage is a bit better than Sprint’s LTE right now. In addition, Virgin Mobile’s phone selections are more varied, including iPhone 4S and 4 (CDMA iPhone, thus slow 3G EVDO speed). A good option if you know what you want and get.

Another Sprint MVNO that is offering an ala-carte style plan is ting. This is a very interesting model. Unlike most plans, you have a plethora of options on how many minutes, text, and data you want to pay per month. Even more interesting is if you exceed the pre-determined limit, ting will simply bump your plan up to the higher one, and will bring it down on the next billing cycle. So no crazy overages. How is this interesting? Well, since ting will bump your plans up automatically, one can simply pick no minutes, no text, and no data, and just pay $6 access fee per phone. That way, if you are a light user, you will be paying the minimum amount possible. They even include tethering at no additional charge (the way it should be as tethering is a feature of your phone, not the network). Of course, if you look at the upper end prices, it can be very expensive (3000 minutes by itself already cost $52, while other operators are offering unlimited minutes, text, AND data for less than that). ting allows you to bring an existing Sprint device (except for iPhone). They also offer a more “up-to-date” lineup, including the Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy S3, and Galaxy Note 2. Catch is, it’s still CDMA, and it’s Sprint. So if your area has no LTE, you’ll be getting the slow EVDO 3G.

Again, I’m not a fan of CDMA in general as I have pointed out in the beginning. GSM opens a lot more choices in terms of phones. If you have to go CDMA route, ting and Virgin Mobile offer very good prices. If you must have Verizon coverage, and you want LTE, then paying up to the nose for Verizon’s post-paid plans is the only choice.

Next I would explore tips and tricks in picking your phone and operators.

 

iPhone 4S Keynote Impression

Well, the iPhone 4S Keynote is available now, for download and for streaming. Here goes my impression:

First, we have Tim Cook, looked and sounded subdued for whatever reason, talking about the new Apple stores in Hong Kong and China. For some reason, he kept talking about the glass staircase, saying how only Apple could do that. Hmmm, maybe Apple patented glass staircases now? 😛 The Hong Kong stores look great though.

Then he talked about Lion. Errr, I thought this was iPhone keynote? 6 million downloads of Lion. Tim Cook is comparing Lion to Windows 7, and how it took longer for Windows 7 to reach 10%. Well, 10% of Windows users is a heck lot more than 10% of Mac users. :roll eyes: Just the typical statistic spin of Apple. Mac outgrows PC… well duh. It’s easy to grow from 1% than 99%. 😛

Next he talked about music, iTunes, revolutionize, blah blah. Guess what Tim Cook, I still cannot buy many J-Pop and Eurobeat tracks from iTunes US as they are only available in iTunes Japan. So much for “revolution.”

iPod sales. With the death of the Zune player, it’s a clear win for Apple. As such, being the dominant player, things are slowing down. It’s a given ever since Apple jumped the shark and added a camera to the nano. The classic has not been updated, again. And, well, no updates on the iPod lineup at all. We’ll talk about this later.

iPhone 4 (finally, he’s talking about iPhone), best selling smartphone, “ever.” Well, considering it was selling out in countries like Singapore at the beginning of the year, yeah, it’s selling a lot. Mobile phone satisfaction…. yeah yeah, this BS talk is getting old.

iPad sale. You know, for a keynote that secifically said “Let’s Talk iPhone,” Tim Cook sure did talk a lot about everything else. Everybody loves iPad, sure, blah blah. Watch for the Kindle Fire. Tim Cook sounded like a really old person. Steve Jobs had so much more energy, even at the later days where he’s so skinny.

Next, Scott Forstall. Good, as he sounded more energetic than the tired Tim Cook. Blah blah apps blah blah app store blah blah number one blah blah billion.

New app, Cards. You can create and mail cards directly from the iPhone. Yeah… when the last time you send a card to somebody? There’s something called email and Facebook. Push notification when the card is sent. Sure, knowing how “reliable” the USPS, this is not anything you can rely on. $2.99. Meh.

iOS5. Urgh, just a recap from WWDC. 200 new features, notifications, iMessage, Reminders, Twitter integration (yup, no Facebook here), Newsstand, Camera, Photos, Game Center, Safari, Mail, PC free (it’s weird the he didn’t talk more on this other than what we already know from WWDC). October 12th.

Eddy, iCloud. Again, more rehashes from WWDC. *yawn Something new though, Find My Friends. Yeah, an official stalking app. I’m guessing a more controlled version of Google Latitude. 5GB free storage for documents (music and photos are not counted against the 5GB). iTunes Match, $25 a year, the service to legalize your downloaded music. Not something I’m interested as most of my music are not available in iTunes anyway. Same ship date as iOS5.

By the way, Apple is very good in making these videos of their own products to show the features and whatnot. I mean they have an iPhone downloading music automatically while a dad is taking care of his baby in the background. Talk about subconscious marketing.

Phil has been downgraded to talk about nothing new on iPods. LOL. Big icons on the nano and more skins for the watch feature. Whoop dee doo. Previous nano users should be able to get all these new features via an update as nothing has changed hardware wise. Phil said how people are using the nano as wristwatches by themselves. No Phil, Steve Jobs actually hinted at it when he said one of the board member was going to clip it to his arm band as a watch. It has been planned all along by Apple. Slight price drop, 8GB for $129 and 16GB for $149.

iPod Touch, nothing new. Only a white version and price drop on the 8GB version to $200. Nothing else changed, not even the prices of the 32GB/64GB Touch. Sad. What’s the point of trying to push the Touch as a gaming device if you don’t even put the A5 in it? This is another sign how innovation slows down to a halt as Apple has virtually no competition in this market.

Well, Phil finally talked about the new iPhone 4S. Sound similar? Yes, Phil also did the keynote for iPhone 3GS. iPhone 4S has A5 chip (dual core), like the iPad 2. Who knows if it’s clocked as fast as the iPad 2 though.

Mid intermission, Epic Games was showing Infinity Blade 2. Ooooh, Koi in the pond. Phil doesn’t look too amazed though.

Okay, back to iPhone 4S. 8 hours 3G talk time. “Fantastic battery life.” Sounds good, right? But what Phil didn’t mention is the standby time is a lot less than the iPhone 4, down to 200 hours from 300 hours. New switching antenna. LOL. Now you don’t have to worry if you hold your phone wrong. HSDPA+, 14.4Mbps down, fake 4G. World phone, meaning there’s only 1 version of iPhone 4S, having both GSM and CDMA radio. Question is, will it be unlocked? Nobody knows.

New camera. 8MP sensor, backside illuminated CMOS (sounds like the one Sony was talking about), f/2.4, software features like face detection (something that is commonly available in point-n-shoot digicams), faster than Droid Bionic (getting a cup of coffee?) and SGS2 (well, better be). One of the sample photos showed no barrel distortion, something that is a problem in most compact digicams.

1080p video recording. Meh, I hope it can be scaled back down to 720p. Also I find it funny that Apple never supported their own iFrame format in their own hardware. The big thing is video image stabilization. If this works, it will be a God send. The camera features themselves imo is worth getting the iPhone 4S.

Airplay. Meh, I don’t have the Apple TV.

“Most amazing iPhone yet.”

Oh, Phil forgot something. Yup, as rumored, Siri personal assistant, built-in to the iPhone 4S. The idea is mind blowing. Yeah, it’s Star Trek’s computer that you talk to. Scott Forstall doing the demo. The problem with voice recognition is recognizing the words for a non-perfect-English-speaker. Hopefully this will work, because currently the voice recognition of iOS4 is mediocre at best (I cannot have it do anything). Siri + wikipedia + wolfram alpha = ultimate exam machine. God, I wish we had this technology when I was in school. 😀 This is going to freak out a lot of old school teachers that think you have to memorize everything on earth. Now in beta. Can’t wait for the technology to enable automatic real-time translation, just like Start Trek’s Universal Translator.

More videos. Where’s Johnny Ive?

Black and white, 64GB option. Apple also keeps the 3GS and iPhone 4 (downgraded to 8GB). Subsidized price for 8GB 3GS is $0, or $375 unlocked. Yeah, it’s the first time Apple made an unlocked 3GS available in the US. It took them like what, 2 years? iPhone 4 8GB subsidized price is $99, $549 unlocked. Subsidized price for the 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB 4S are $199, $299, and $399 respectively. No info on unlocked price yet, but looks like it’s going to be $649 for the 16GB version (and adding $100 for the next size up). New carriers mentioned, Sprint for US and KDDI for Japan. My biggest question is, since the 4S is a world phone and (maybe) unlocked, does it mean users can jump from AT&T to Verizon to Sprint and back willy nilly? I hope so, but US carriers are notorious for their anti-consumer and anti-competitive business practices of provider locking. Hopefully Apple can lead the way to a world without provider-locked phones in the US.

October 14th, shipping to 7 countries. October 28th, pretty much everywhere else. Compare this to Android OEMs that are dragging their feet in releasing their phones in the US. Yeah, I’m looking at you Sony Ericsson, Samsung, taking 6 months after releasing their phones in Europe/Asia to the US.

Keynote ended with an old and tired sounding Tim Cook. I hope he’s just nervous. He needs to be more upbeat and energetic like Scott Forstall.

Well, there you go. And yes, I’m going to get one as to me the camera and A5 alone are huge improvements. Besides, I’m a sucker for new gadgets anyway. Gotta cath-em-all!

PS: I’m typing this entirely on my iPad (with a bluetooth keyboard of course, the touch keyboard on the iPad sux). Just trying to live in a post-PC world. 🙂