And you are here why?

GigaOm drills into the shared-data plans from AT&T / Verizon - which are, to put it mildly, entertainingly complex.  First, to cut to the chase ...in general if you’re looking to connect more smartphones, AT&T comes out on top, but if maxing out data usage or connecting a lot of non-smartphone devices is important to you, Verizon’s plans fare better Now that that is out of the way, what is it with the "used car salesman" approach to pricing?  I know, I know, snow the buyer with a ton of data, and work on the principle that if consumers overpay, its their fault because after all, they had all the data right? (Lets pretend that the logical conclusion of this - the financial crash of 2007 - never happened) Still, here is the beginning of how the AT&T plan works First, you need to select a data bucket. The following prices are for shared data between any number of devices either directly connected to the carriers network or tethered via Wi-Fi or cable. Fo...

The Mobile World Congress just ended in Barcelona, and as you might imagine, there have been a bunch of new phones announced.  Check out the some of the phones ZTE Era - 4.3" Huawei Ascend D - 4.5" Fujitsu - 4.6" HTC One X - 4.7" Samsung S3 - 4.8" (ok, this is a leaked spec) Panasonic Eluga - 5" Seriously - are we getting a little ridiculous here?  Or are we getting a lot ridiculous here?  Because clearly, this is ridiculous.  The old saw about walking around with an iPad pressed to your ear is becoming more and more likely... I actually - briefly however - had one of the phones to the right, and it used to be so cool.  The point being that one should never under-estimate the Idiocy of Cool

John Wilson writes on GigaOm (mostly reproduced below) that carriers should Have 5 years contracts Allow customers to get phones for free every year  Me, I think there is a much better model out there - what they currently have in Europe/Rest-Of-The-World, Carriers have contracts These contracts do not include phones Customer bring their own phones The monthly bill is vastly lower Decouple the Phone market from the Plan market. Customers that want new phones every year can get their own phones every year - and e-bay is always there to sell their old phones. They are 'auto-subsidized' - the plans are significantly cheaper (hello competition!) This *could* happen - it already exists as a model, and phone companies are notoriously bad at tryign somethign that has not been tried before... What do consumers get? Carriers need to rethink the current model of phone ownership. It’s not working for them or consumers. So let’s propose a new one: phone leas...