“Sprint Nextel Corp. is set to become the second U.S. mobile-phone carrier to offer Apple Inc.’s iPhone on a pay-as-you-go basis,” Thomas Gryta and Greg Bensinger report for The Wall Street Journal.
“Sprint will announce this week it will offer the popular smartphone on its Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go brand as soon as July 1, according to people familiar with the company’s plans,” Gryta and Bensinger report. “The Overland Park, Kan., carrier follows Leap Wireless International Inc. in selling the device with prepaid service.”
Gryta and Bensinger report, “Offering the iPhone may help Sprint satisfy its commitment to Apple to buy $15.5 billion of the phones over four years, an aggressive bet as more carriers are getting access to the once-exclusive device. Sprint’s prepaid service, which also includes the Boost Mobile brand, has been the carrier’s lone area of growth as contract customers have fled… Pricing for the Virgin Mobile iPhone couldn’t be learned, and it wasn’t clear whether Boost would ultimately carry the device… Sprint’s network, used by Virgin, claims to cover about 278 million people or almost the entire [U.S.].”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If true, there’s yet another reason to choose iPhone rather than settling for inferior knockoffs.
Loosening the smart grip on iPhone could also be a smart move right about now
I stopped by T-mobile HQ this morning. I heard crying.
Having a $40 per month all-you-can-eat data/text plan (plus generous voice allowance of 1200 mins), I’d ditch my crappy LG android in a nanosecond and get whichever iPhone model Virgin Mobile is allowed to offer. If the pricing ends up being along the lines of what that other prepaid carrier got (some $550 for 4S), this will be by far the best possible deal out there.
Been a Virgin Mobile customer for a few years now, and am currently stuck with a crappy ‘droid phone. I’ll be one to jump as long as the price is right…
I love Virgin Mobile but I want to crush this Kyocera phone almost every day. As a physical object it is good, frankly for what I paid for it, $25, it’s great, but the human element, the computer programming of it, is poor.
Loved my Virgin Hotspot, right up until they joined the throttled program.
Me too, I left virgin mobile for Clear, unlimited 4g, no throttling, and I bought it during a special, $25 a month, no contract!