1. Up yours ATT, you didn't drop my plan price after my contract was up saying the benefit was I could leave at any time... and that was after I had explained to them why it should be cheaper after the contract was up.
2. T-Mo I'm coming your way. I'm sick of this crap the others pull over on us.
3. As far as being subsidized, T-Mo has explained you can get financing... i think it's 0% paying $20 a month until the phone is paid off, with a down payment of $200 (for an iphone). So basically it's the same thing, but they keep things separate so you know what goes where and when it's paid off, it's paid off.
Edit: I'm on straight talk and looking forward to leaving it. Yeah it's cheap, but i've had my fill of problems, more than I've had when I'm on a "name brand" network.
You and I could sit and have a long, long talk. I feel the exact same way because I'm in the exact same position. My first few bills were upwards of $85... When I had AT&T, they thought I was privileged to be staying with them post-contract.
I talked them down to $65 with two discounts shortly in to my contract, but I only had 200mb of Data, 200 texts, and 450 minutes a month. After 2 and a half years with an iPhone 2G, I signed up with another contract when I got a launch day iPhone 4. (I wouldn't have even done that if my iPhone 2G's Wifi didn't stop working, but it was impossible to keep on that plan.)
After a very lengthy debate about overage text charges through using the AIM app (I still don't know how they got my AIM message-exchange data) I got them to drop a bill, and my contract went down to $62. (OOH!!!)
When that contract was up, I immediately got Straight Talk. It was a huge fiasco to get MMS to work after 3 months without it, I had to switch over to YouMail because there is no native Visual Voicemail support, and I still constantly have to toggle Airplane mode on and off at least once a month because it errors out when connecting to cell data. At least that was $45 for unlimited everything.
The only reason I'm not on T-Mobile yet is no Visual Voicemail support. Not even YouMail works on a relative's T-Mobile iPhone 4. At this point, I don't care at all. For $30 a month, I can get 100 minutes, unlimited text, and unlimited web. If they carry the iPhone, they will either implement Visual Voicemail or provide a solution for those that have the iPhone on a prepaid plan. Until then, for $30, I can call my voicemail like I used to.
This major contract bull with AT&T / Verizon / Sprint is for the birds. My parents got Virgin Mobile long ago and have been happy. When I call them, the quality of their $20-$40 flip phones is no different than if they had a $200 smart phones, and they aren't paying an arm and a leg each month. Heck, they don't even have a bill each month - it's $20 every 3 months.
T-Mobile has me as a customer as of February 1st. No more contracts, no more major carrier games, no more obscene fees. Each year the new iPhone comes out, I get the previous year's iPhone at half the price, and put it on a cheap prepaid plan. No headache switching over to the Lightning connector when I have a collection of 30-Pin docks and cables, and no huge upfront cost or marked up high-demand in the Marketplace here. A year old phone on a prepaid plan, upgraded to the next phone each year. Suck it, carriers.
Holy crap, my posts are always long-winded.