metroPCS Alternative
And now, for something completely different. Up until a month or so ago, i used to have metroPCS mobile phone service… you know, the ‘$50 a month unlimited everything’ deal. It sounds nice and all, but there were a few little things that made me feel as if I wasn’t getting such a great deal.
If you do get service with VIRGIN MOBILE, use the following KICKBACK during online activation, top-up, or charge (you must add a minimum of $20 to your account):
ULWdcWd0It’s like a promotion code, but better (make sure to input that code on the ‘kickbacks’ field) because you will get 1 hour of talk time absolutely free! (and me too by the way).
For starters, the phone itself had been on the expensive side of things (around $150 new), and after using it for 3 months and so, I went back to the store to get a different phone in hopes that this would spice up my relationship with metropcs and I would stay longer with them. The shocker came when I was told that I could only receive a $5 trade-in for my phone in mint condition. I was a little taken back by this, since many of the beat up phones they were selling for metropcs service were $60 and upwards… scratched and READY TO FALL APART.
That is not all, since metropcs unlimited includes web surfing too, but uses an archaic system that basically takes too long and looks like garbage. Honestly, I probably used the unlimited web about 3 times for a few minutes… and most of that time was spent waiting for pages to load. Slooooow service I am telling you.
“I wanted to pay no more than $20 a month…”
I am not much of a voice talker, but I do a fair amount of texting, and altough metro offers both with their service, I frequently experienced slow and late delivery of my messages. Picture messages took way too long to be delivered too. But the important thing is that I was using very few minutes every month to justify the cost I was paying, and I wasn’t about to start talking much just for the sake of it. I wanted a plan that adjusts to me, not the other way around.
Well lo and behold, after a good day of research, I came to know about Virgin Mobile’s ‘texter’s delight’ plan for less than 60% of what I was paying with metro.
It goes like this: unlimited text and picture messaging all the time. Not to mention that one can send both text and pictures to actual email addresses (and receive emails on this service too), and all this on a 3G network (unlike metropcs crawling dialup). On this plan, one must pay for each minute separately, but at $0.10 a minute it turns out to be very affordable for me, since I do a lot of texting and very little talking.
I got me a very affordable phone: A UtStarcom ARC. I believe it was $40 at wally world. It’s a basic phone with a VGA camera (see the following pics), and most excellent for those like me used to T9 texting. Made of plastic coated with some foamy and soft material that I am sure can take a good beating and keep on working.
In short, I highly recommend the texter’s delight plan from Virgin Mobile to those people out there wanting a very affordable, no-contract phone with unlimited text and picture messaging on a high speed network. By the way, it appears that SPRINT now owns virgin mobile, so only good things (network speed, connectivity, coverage) can come out of this deal.
If you do get service with VIRGIN MOBILE, use the following KICKBACK during online activation, top-up, or regular charge (remember to add at least $20 to your account for this promo code to work):
ULWdcWd0It’s like a promotion code, but better (make sure to input that code on the ‘kickbacks’ field) because you will get 1 hour of talk time absolutely free! (and me too by the way).
