Comments on: It’s official: Virgin Mobile USA to offer prepaid Apple iPhone 4/4S on June 29 starting at $549 and $30/month

By: Coal Cracker

Coal Cracker — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 19:16:07 +0000

Copy editors on summer vacation? Just kidding …

By: Predrag

Predrag — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 17:18:52 +0000

And by far the most beautiful part of this contract is: you don’t have to wait for months until your contract is over in order to get a new phone. They announce new iPhone 6 (or iPhone HD, or whichever), you buy it right away and put it on your $30 per month plan! You go ahead and unload the old device on CraigsList / eBay (for quite a lot of cash, apparently, as they keep value quite well), and you’re all set! If a new model arrives in six months, you can repeat the process.

With subsidy, people tend to treat iPhones as if they are worth $200 new and much less when they’re two years old. I would venture a guess that at least half of iPhone repeat buyers don’t bother getting any value from their old models because they think it just isn’t worth it. A two-year old base model was always worth at least $250-300 (currently, a 2-year old iPhone 4 with a bad crack on the back is going for $220). This Virgin deal is simply spectacular. I’ll be the first in line for it.

By: quiviran

quiviran — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 16:40:32 +0000

I’ve always thought there was a little bit of the Steve in Sir Richard. Good customer experience is a terrific goal for a company. Not the negative statement “Don’t be evil” but the positive statement “Insanely Great”. I’ll save $40 per month off of my oddly structured 3 phone ATT Family Plan. Contract is up in September.

By: Van Jay

Van Jay — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 16:16:24 +0000

The real savings begins if you keep the iPhone 4S for year two! On my current AT&T without the cost of the iPhone would be $1560 a year. Virgin Mobile with 1200 minutes a month would be $480. Over a $1000 a year in savings. So I hope people realize that even though it is more expensive at first on Virgin it so pays for itself after a few months. The 4th month is the break even point.

By: Predrag

Predrag — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 16:09:19 +0000

This is by far the least expensive deal out there. Vast majority of people need less than 1200 minutes per month. For them, $40 per month for, what essentially looks like unlimited-all service, is about $60 less than any two-year contract plan with competition. In less than eight months, the difference between monthly rate will have paid off the difference in phone purchase price ($200 vs. $650). And if you don’t talk much, and 300 minutes of voice calls is enough, that saves additional $120 per year.

As a Virgin user for the past year, I can say that their coverage is fairly solid (in NYC), penetrates building and elevators better than GSM (AT&T or T-Mobile) and the only thing where it lacks is data speeds (compared to AT&T or T-Mobile). Their 3G is much like Verizon’s 3G — rather slow (at most 1.5 — 2Mbps).

Less than a year ago, Virgin raised their rates (from $25 – $40 – $50 to $35 – $45 – $55). It seems like they might actually lower them now for the iPhone by $5 (with autopay option). I’m still on the $25 plan, and I’m hoping they let me keep it once I get that iPhone.

By: Van Jay

Van Jay — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 16:04:01 +0000

This is awesome! It will be Virgin’s best phone and for $30/mo who can beat that?! LOL love that it is coming out on June 29th exactly 5 years ago from the first iPhone which also sold for nearly the same price at $599 for an 8GB version. They probably will not have options to get the higher capacity versions of the iPhone until they see this as a success. Right now I pay about $130 a month for my AT&T iPhone. After a year of monthly payments and the cost of $400 (64GB) for which I bought it for, my total cost will be $1960 on AT&T whereas on Virgin it could be as low as $1009. Pretty awesome savings!

By: Predrag

Predrag — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 15:58:46 +0000

No. It must be locked to the carrier. Besides, Virgin is CDMA (Sprint’s network); unlocked iPhone is a GSM phone and can only be used on GSM networks. There is no way to bring an outside CDMA phone into a CDMA network the way you can bring a GSM unlocked phone and use with any carrier’s SIM card.

By: Zmarc

Zmarc — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 15:49:06 +0000

What if you already have an iPhone? Can you switch networks and use it via Virgin?

By: thanxal

thanxal — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 14:21:13 +0000

Anyone know/guess if you can get a 32gb iPhone for this? I have Virgin and a crappy Android and am super excited to hear this, even with shelling out the $649 for the 16gb phone. Would pay $749 for the 32gb.

By: SeekerOfTruthAndJustice

SeekerOfTruthAndJustice — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 14:02:48 +0000

The USA and Canada etc get severely stung for mobile compared to Europe. I have a 1 month rolling contract which I can stop at anytime, including free cross network calls, free text and unlimited data including hotspot etc. I stream movies, sport etc everyday through Xbmc on iPhone 4s to appletv2 all for £25 uk a month with 3 mobile and no slow downs on data!

By: blaargh

blaargh — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:50:01 +0000

$301 a month doesn’t sound like a good deal

By: mxnt41

mxnt41 — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:49:02 +0000

I can just abou tunderstand why a company wouldn’t allow hotspot tethering on an unlimited plan IF (big if) that plan was unlimited. They could end up with a lot of customers who were hammering their system (but were willing to accommodate with a single device), hammering them way more than they could support. On a plan with a data limit, or even a fair usage policy it really irks me that you have to pay more to connect more than one device.