things i miss about america, part 4

my current phone is slowly dying, so i have been in the market for a new phone as of late. even though there seems to be more competition than ever, especially thanks to the huge market of unlocked phones (which you can then use on any provider, even if said provider does not sell your phone). then you add the ability to buy pretty much any phone from any country and the possibilities seem endless.

while i usually tend to prefer phones that are a bit more upmarket, this entry still stands. one thing i miss is being able to get a free (or very cheap, as in $50 or less) cell phone.

cheap cell phones

while the phone i have my eye on would be just as expensive if i bought it in america (i'm comparing out of contract prices since that is how i will be buying this phone), if you are willing to sign a contract you can get all sorts of discounts. don't get me wrong, there are discounts here too. though a quick search of vodafone's site tells me if i wanted to sign a contract for two years, i only have one free phone and three phones for $49 to choose from. (granted there is a currency exchange involved and these prices are in nzd but the next cheapest phone is $149 which is way more than the aforementioned $50 us.)

however, if i switch back to t-mobile's site (which is who i had my contract with in america and i wouldn't think of switching carriers), there's two free phones, two phones that are $29.99, and one more that is $49.99 - and i'm just looking at the android phones for this. if i look at all phones there's a whopping 13 phones that are free, two for $9.99, and it just goes on from there. basically, tons of options.

unfortunately for me, vodafone nz does not want to carry my phone it seems (though vodafone australia has for a couple months now, strangely enough) and t-mobile is selling a neutered version of it i don't want, especially when it's about as much as the full version is.



isn't that phone hot? it can do all sorts of stuff i won't talk about here as it's not relevant to this entry.

of course, with cell phones also comes the cell phone plan. unless you're only going to use your phone to browse the internet (and do other data-type things) on wifi only, you're going to have to pay to talk, text, and use data when not on wifi. new zealand seems to really be getting the short end of the stick here. i remember when i got my first cell phone, i actually had to pay $1 a month to have caller id. boy have we come a long way since then. though nz, not so much.

i'm not one to use hundreds of minutes every month, so we're going to go with a cheap plan. we will again be comparing t-mobile us to vodafone nz since those are the carriers i would use. plus telecom doesn't seem to be that much different pricewise.

t-mobile offers 500 minutes a month for 39.99 usd. that's the smallest package you can get in terms of minutes. it's ridiculous for me because i never come close to using that many, even when i use my cell phone to make (and receive) every call i'd get i don't even use 100. anyway, to get this, the closest i can find is a 600 minute plan for vodafone. the cost is a whopping...are you sitting down? $229.80 which works out to $172.58 us. yikes.

now, there's no such thing as unlimited data in new zealand so we won't compare those plans. but to get data through t-mobile, you sadly also have to get texts. oh well, i do prefer texting over talking anyway but i still don't text enough anymore to warrant unlimited texts. so 500 minutes with unlimited texting and 200 mb of data is $59.99 a month. there's no unlimited text to choose from with vodafone so i'll pick a plan with the 600 minutes again. you get 600 minutes, 600 texts, and a very generous 3 gb of data. the price is $255.55 - $191.92 us. yiiiikes. i'll just stick to a pay-as-you plan, thanks. it works out to be even more when you price per minute, but i rarely need to use the phone as it is, i'd only need something like a comical 15 minutes per month plan.

last year the prices vodafone and telecom charge here made the news, and i think it's only a matter of time before the prices do start to slowly come down. it might not be very noticeable, but i think eventually they'll realise times have changed, technology's improved, and they don't need to charge as much. the fact that it's already happened in australia makes me optimistic.