Holy Crap $49 for the Verizon version.
I’m holding out for the next Evo, which went on pre-order today. I wanted the Nexus, but the delay from the time it was announced to the time the Sprint version was actually available allowed HTC to convince me to buy one of their phones. It’s a fine phone, especially at the price point Amazon is offering them.
Yes, but if you order the unlocked version of the Nexus from Google Play, you get to pick from a variety of prepayed providers, and that is very nice.
As the owner of an unlocked Nexus One that I bought directly from Google: That’s not as good a deal as it once was.
I paid $499 + tax and shipping. I did that because I was on a grandfathered plan with unlimited data @ $15/month. My total bill is about $55/month, tax tag and title. Two years ago, the cheapest bill with unlimited data if I’d bought a smartphone from them would have been about $100 after taxes. The extra $400 I paid for the phone was recouped within about 9 months.
You can’t even get unlimited data now, unless you go with Sprint. If, like me, you’re on AT&T with the grandfathered plan, they throttle you so badly that it becomes useless. (I averaged 3-4gb/mo before the throttling started, and peaked at 8gb two months in a row.)
If you go with Sprint, you’ll have the $149 up front cost, plus $80/month for the cheapest unlimited data plan.
The unlocked Galaxy Nexus from Google is $399. There is only one plan listed in your link that offers more than 5gb of data, and it is $60/month. You make up the difference in a little over a year. They also have a $40/month plan, but who wants data speeds that are only twice the speed of dialup (ask you folks, kids)? Might as well use carrier pigeons.
If you go with Verizon and the $49 nexus, you get a $90 phone bill with their 5gb plan. That’s a $30/month difference, but it still takes a year to recoup the cost.
Going prepaid isn’t a bad idea, but it’s not the totally awesome deal it was just a couple of years ago.
Right, I’m not saying prepay is the only way to go. Your requirements are very different than mine, so we should be looking for different plans (I’m a heavy data user… over wifi. About 20 GB a month, but only about 2GB from cell towers). I do really like the flexibility to change between the two networks and from a handful of subproviders if one pisses me off.
“You make up the difference in a little over a year.” “That’s a $30/month difference, but it still takes a year to recoup the cost.” The contracts are all for 2 years, aren’t they? Any reasonable discount rate makes this a bad bet.
I think I just have a visceral reaction to limited data plans. Colors my thinking a lot.
You are right. If I were a normal data user, a pre-paid Nexus would be the way to go. Actually, in that case I’d go with the Samsung Galaxy Note
I was actually kinda holding out for the Note to be on Sprint, but alas it looks like it’s not happening in any reasonable amount of time.
[…] starting to strongly consider the advice commenter a leap at the wheel gave me last month. Since the great AT&T throttling, I’ve gone from ~5gb/month average (8gb peak) to […]
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