Remember that high school crush that would send butterflies to your stomach? Not being able to sleep at night? Or the impossibility of focusing on anything else? Well, at 27, I am going through it all over again. Except this time, it is over a phone. Enter the G1, a new smartphone collaboration between T-Mobile, HTC, and of course, the all-powerful Google. Finally, a genuine iPhone competitor has arrived. Is it better than the iPhone? Yes and no. Setting biases aside, I would say they are on par with one another, each one has a feature or two that the other doesn’t have. However, they both have huge, glorious touchscreens, 3g networking, and an application store where you can download incredible applications to your phone (these are the only 2 phones with access to a custom store that I know of).
How are they different? Well I won’t bore you with technical details; you can find a million of those online. But keeping in mind that this blog is finance related, there is one major difference I wanted to bring up: the price. The purchase price is actually pretty comparable with the G1 being set at $179 and the iPhone at $199 (that is the new customer price with a 2 year subscription). The difference comes in the monthly plan.
For my family plan with T-mobile, we have 700 shared minutes, 400 texts each, unlimited nights, weekends, and in-network calls, and on my line I have unlimited data. All for $90 a month. For a similar plan on AT&T, that would be $130, without any text messages (although both lines would have data instead of one). So by using T-mobile, I am saving $40 x 24months = $960 over the course of the 2 yr contract. Almost a thousand bucks for the same service! (AT&T won’t let you just add 400 texts on a family plan, you need to add unlimited which would be an extra $30 per month…an additional $720 over the 2 years).
Did I mention the G1 will scan a barcode on a product you want to buy and find you the cheapest price online or locally? Or you can hold the phone to a speaker and it will identify the song being played and offer you the chance to buy it on the spot? Those are a couple of my favorite applications… I could go on forever, but you can go here if you want to learn more. I just wanted to take a moment and share the love.