Dialing into less costly wireless

Want to save on your monthly bills? Then you’re a target customer for two of the newest combatants in the Philadelphia Phone Wars.

After years of house-to-house combat between Verizon Communications and Comcast for landline customers, the region’s air war has been heating up since the arrival in July of MetroPCS and in March of Cricket Wireless. Read more

MetroPCS, CricKet intro special plans for data-driven phones

Recently MetroPCS introduced two high-end phones. One is the well-known BlackBerry Curve, available on all the national carriers but never before seen on an unlimited provider. The other: an “iPhone killer” Samsung, the Finesse, made specifically for MetroPCS to support the newer, “AWS-band” parts of their network in places like Philadelphia. Both phones, in addition to high prices outright (to be expected from a provider who doesn’t require a contract and provides unlimited service on their own network), require a special $50 plan to quench their hunger for data.

CricKet will also be launching such a plan, albeit as a $15 feature addon, with the advent of their first touch-screen, the Motorola Evoke QA4. The rationale in both cases: if a phone can browse the real web (as the QA4, the FInesse and the Curve can), data usage is going to be a lot higher than a mere “dumb phone” might generate. Read more

Motorola Evoke to go live on CricKet June 3rd

Wanted to get CricKet service, but wanted to get a touch-screen phone with said service? Starting around June 3rd, you’ll be able to do just that, provided you have enough cash on hand. The phone in question is the Motorola Evoke QA4, a luscious slider with a whopping 2.8-inch screen and a slide-out numeric keypad for those who get queasy at the sight of an all-touchscreen unit.

Previously, touch-screen phones could be had on CricKet service, but they’d have to make the jump, via complicated “flashing” techniques, from other carriers, an iffy process to say the least. This one is so far exclusive to CricKet, so everything should work great out of the box, including high-speed 3G internet on CricKet’s relatively new AWS band, which serves places like South Texas and Chicago. Read more