Most people start by deciding what they want to do with a phone. If you just want to make calls and a few texts then you don’t need a smart phone.  On the other hand if you like applications (Apps) including surfing the web and email on your phone you are a candidate for a smart phone.

In choosing both the phone and the plan the considerations include cost, features, and quality. Perhaps the most important feature to is that it can receive calls (and texts and web) at the locations that you frequent. That is why the first thing you need to do is check coverage maps and rule out any carriers that don’t have coverage at your places of home and work.  For example, perhaps you’re interested in a 4G LTE network for its super fast speed. Sprint may have a very good bargain on HTC phone, but it won’t do you any good if there’s no 4G LTE coverage in your area. For a quick explanation of cell phone generations, click here.

The next choice in acquiring a cell phone plan is its intended use. Are you a bells and whistles person and want the latest apps? Or do you just believe phones are used for just calling and perhaps a few texts?  Are you looking to stream a lot of videos and, consequently, want 4G LTE speed? Or, if you’re just looking for basic communication, any of the major carriers have 2G networks that should suffice.

When considering cell phone plans there are some aspects to consider:

1. Coverage areas: the best phone plan deal on earth is useless if you can’t receive calls and/or texts and/or web in places you need to.
2. Cost; is it less expensive to go individually or to be on a family plan? It used to be that network contract plans were the only way to get a really good plan with good features, but no contract, prepaid phones are a good deal for a lot of people these days.
3. Call minutes: is this just an emergency phone that you only need a few hundred minutes a month, or is this the replacement for your LAN line, and you really need to have unlimited minutes?
4. Texts, do you only do a few text so that $.20 a text is not a problem, or do you have a number of people texting you regularly and you need unlimited texting as part of your plan?
5. Web use; what is the data cap?  When you are out using your smart phone on the web are you just going to occasionally use it to look at your e-mail, or perhaps find store locations or product information online while you’re shopping? Or perhaps you like to look at videos in your downtime. If that’s the case, you might need multiple gigs a month of cap space,
6. Operating system or lack of: Apps are all the rage these days. But the available apps depend on which operating system is on your phone:
   1. Apple sets a very high standard for its product and has its own unique operating system with a big fan base
   2. Android, which comes in various versions, is very competitive, and recently, has offered features, like talking and texting at the same time, before Apple has them.
   3. Windows, a late comer to mobile operating systems, nevertheless has a good feature set.
   4. Hybrid systems; some phones are not android, nevertheless have their own proprietary e-mail, web, Facebook and/or other apps
   5. there are phones that don’t do anything but take calls, and perhaps text
7. remember that some features, like GPS, other apps, and ring tones, may require additional cost above and beyond the initial cost of your plan

Once you’ve decided the bells and whistles, or lack thereof, you are looking for in a phone, the next step is to look for a phone of good quality that does the job you need at a reasonable cost.  The easiest way to go is to find the carrier that you are interested in, and look on their website for phone deals. This is why it is important to have researched cell phone carriers first, because you only want to look on sites that have networks that will work with your needs. Then you’re going to need to do some research. Places like CNET and PCMag review phones as well as you can often find phone reviews on YouTube. Another choice is to look on Amazon.com. Amazon has proven itself to be useful not only in providing products at very good prices, but in providing customer feedback so you can get a good sampling from the users of these products.

There are a number of aspects of phones to consider, but I recommend that you pay attention to references to the following items when you look at reviews.

1. Call quality:  Is a phone call easy to hear both on your end and the listeners? Call quality can vary so if you find any references to call quality with a weaker signal that is very useful. Call quality is dependent on a number of things including the weather, network traffic, ambient noise, and your carrier.  I found this useful, but somewhat dated article on smart phones with good audio quality here.
2. Is the phone and operating system stable? When you read multiple reviews of a phone that needs rebooted, (yes, phones may need to be reset as smart phones are minicomputers), that’s a good indicator that you might not want this phone
3. How hard is it to type on the phone?  There are a multiplicity of ways these days to type on phones including QWERTY keyboards, slide out QWERTY keyboards, number only keypad, and the increasingly popular on screen touch QWERTY keyboards.  There are a number of different technologies used for touch screens, and not all of them are created equal. Look for references in reviews that the screen is hard to type on.
4. If the phone has speech recognition technology, is it really workable? There is a great variation in speech recognition these days. So be careful in room viewing phones that have speech recognition for comments on how well it worked for the particular phone you’re looking at.
5. What apps come with the phone?  I read a review the other day about a common application that the user thought was included with the phone only to find out that it was free for 30 days, and seven dollars a month after that. I forget which application it was but it was a frequently used app and he was not happy to learn that he would have to pay $84 a year for that one application.

An alternative to buying a phone on the carrier’s website is buying your own unlocked phone and using that with your desired carrier.    See the carrier’s website to see the rules for using your own phone.

My wife and I just signed up to use the Walmart Family Plan using used unlocked Apple iPhone 3GS phones we bought on Ebay.  The monthly service cost at $75 per month is less than the 550 minute/month plan we had with AT&T after we each did a few texts and a little web use (and all the fees.).  Our needs are satisfied with the basic plan with 3G speeds we get with new carrier, and the used iPhones are far superior to the old dumb phones we were using.

A comparison of unlimited calling plans costs for mostly no contract calling plans is located here.

© copyright 2013 Mark W Smith, all rights reserved.