Rethinking the iPhone Issue

My many year old phone is starting to randomly shut itself off, which is raising the phone replacement issue.  I am thinking of getting an iPhone, cutting costs by not getting a messaging plan since we don't text.  Here is the Verizon schedule -- there are two data plan types, without and with mobile hotspot:

The lowest cost you can get here is 700 min for $70, the $30 data plan and no texting, for a montly total of $100 (plus taxes). An extra line beyond two phones is $10.  I've done a survey and many iphone 4 users seem to be able to stay under 2GB/month. We currently using around 600 min./month [I need to double check this and look at some history, here I'm just extrapolating the last 10 days of our usage up to a month] and we should be able to stay there if we call each other's cell phones without using minutes (90+% of my phone calls are to my wife, mother and monther-in-law). 

Getting 2 iphones might make sense at an extra cost of about $50/month over our current cell phone plan.   I was thinking of tossing in a 3rd non-smart phone for kid #1 if I can get it for free, but my wife opposes that.  I'd need to pay for an additional phone if we get it before the two year contract runs out. So now we start waiting for the iphone 5 to come out, most likely in October (with some waiting for availablity? Lots of people are waiting for it.)

The surprising thing here, for me, is that people are able to stay under 2 GB/month of data.  2 GB is not much, I can easily shoot 8 GB of photos in a day.  On the other hand, the laptop I'm on now, with decently heavy use by three adult users (including my heavy use of a blog reader and reloading 7 newspaper pages repeatedly) has used 0.5GB in three days, so staying under 2 GB in a month seems reasonable. 

Finally, the iphone components costs and origins, via The Economist.  Note that the cost of an iPhone with plan, $200, is about at cost. 

Comments

[David]

Unlimited texting is a better deal than it first appears. Once you have it, you'll start texting all the time (naturally), and I find that texting is quicker and easier than other methods of communication in many instances. I was very anti-texting at first and completely changed my mind on the issue. A phone call can be an intrusive thing, and an email is too easy to ignore. Texting thus fills a useful niche.