Today, T-Mobile made their UNcarrier changes official. We’ve been seeing leaks for these changes over the past month or so. Everything from the new plans, to new device costs, and even which cities LTE would be launched in. Today, T-Mobile’s CEO John Legere and a few other executives from T-Mobile took the stage in Manhatten and introduced their new marketing campaign which is “Simple Choice” changing from “Stick Together”. So what exactly is T-Mobile’s Simple Choice?
Break from wireless industry norms, the Simple Choice plan eliminates restrictive annual service contracts and seeks to take the pain and confusion out of the wireless experience, by moving to one simple rate plan with unlimited text, talk and web – allowing customers to upgrade their devices anytime they want.
As far as their LTE network goes, they are flipping the switch in 7 cities starting today. LTE is compatible with the Galaxy Note 2, HTC One, Blackberry Z10, Galaxy S4, and the T-Mobile Sonic 2.0 Mobile Hotspot LTE. Their LTE network is now live in Baltimore, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Jose, and Washington DC. The Nexus 4 isn’t officially supported, but if you’re still on Android 4.2.1 you should be able to connect. Although it might not be the best experience.
Their rate plans were also explained, which are the same as what we saw pop up this weekend. So you can get unlimited minutes, and text with 500MB of data for $50/month for an individual line. You can then add $10 for every 2GB of data, or $20 for unlimited data. But it appears that they have taken away the choices for anything more than 2GB of data, which were on their site over the weekend. Now for family lines, each additional line is $10. So for 3 people it would be $90 to start out, or $150 for unlimited everything. Now that’s a huge chunk of savings compared to other family plans on other carriers that also make you sign a contract.
T-Mobile’s new device prices are pretty self explainatory as well now. We’ll use the Galaxy Note 2 in this example. It’ll cost you $199 up front, then you’re paying $20 per month for 24 months to pay off the device. Or you could pay the full price which is $679.99. So for those that thought you’d have to pay full price for your phone, you won’t. Well at least you don’t have to.
As a T-Mobile customer, I’m really excited for these changes. I also can’t wait to see what else they have up their sleeves. How many of you are thinking about switching over to T-Mobile now?