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The True Cost of a Motorola Droid

by Flexo on November 9, 2009

in Consumer

I have been looking forward to replacing my Blackberry 8830 World Edition for several months now. The phone, even with ample extended memory, is sluggish and does not have the same capabilities other modern phones have.

With the release of the Motorola Droid, I decided this was a good opportunity to upgrade. On my way home from work on Friday I stopped by the Verizon Wireless store, confirmed I was happy with the phone, and walked out of the store with my purchase including some accessories.

It was an expensive evening, but I’m happy with the purchase so far. The good news is I’ll be paying less per month for a while. But here’s a breakdown of what it would cost to own a Motorola Droid on Verizon Wireless.

The first thing you will notice is the price of the phone. If you start or re-start a two-year contract with Verizon Wireless, the phone costs $299.99 with a $100 rebate available. If you buy the phone in person, you will have to send in your receipt to receive the rebate in the form of a debit card, but if you buy the phone online, the rebate is instant. I also had my “New Every Two” rebate, reducing my cost by $50.

The phone comes with a regular charger but if you want a car charger, Verizon sells the necessary micro USB charger for $29.99 in the store but you can find less expensive options are available on Amazon.com. Verizon also wants you to buy a multimedia docking station. I did not find this necessary, but I did buy the car mount, $29.99 at the store. The navigation features on the Droid rival the best GPS devices, and the car mount makes those features convenient.

The cheapest monthly plan at Verizon Wireless is $39.99 for unlimited nighttime and weekend minutes and 450 anytime (any other time) minutes, but any “smartphone” requires a data plan in addition to the voice plan, so you’ll pay another $29.99. At this time, using the cell phone as a computer modem is not supported on the Droid. I did have “tethering” with the BlackBerry, so I will be saving $30 per month by canceling this feature until Verizon offers it on the Droid early next year.

Verizon Wireless wants to ensure that Droid users don’t abandon the network before the end of their contract. Phones are sold at a loss by the company with the expectation that they will make back the cost of the phone, and profit, through monthly fees. Full retail price of the phone is $559.99. To protect itself further, and to encourage customers to purchase sooner rather than later, on November 15 Verizon will be doubling the early termination fee on for Droid purchasers to $350 from $175. This fee drops by $10 every month of the contract, but it is still a gutsy move when early termination fees have already been judged illegal in California.

Total cost of owning a Motorola Droid on Verizon Wireless

Assuming you don’t go over your minute allowance, here is what buying a Droid could cost you.

Motorola Droid after $100 rebate $199.99
Car charger accessory (optional) $29.99
Car mounting accessory (optional) $29.99
24 months voice plan 450 minutes $959.76
24 months data plan $719.76
24 months 500 text msgs (optional) $240.00
18 months tethering (optional) $540.00
Total $2,719.49

You’ll pay more if you want more accessories, like the multimedia dock or a Bluetooth headset. Many of the applications you can install on the phone require a small fee, and some, like the visual voicemail app, disappointingly carry a monthly charge. However, Google Voice is a good, free option, and it integrates seamlessly with the Droid. There are many other useful apps that are free.

So far I like the Droid. It is a major improvement over the BlackBerry 8830. For those who like AT&T, check out the true cost of the iPhone 3G.

Photo credit: allaboutgeorge

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Take Back the Beep Campaign

by Smithee on July 31, 2009

in Consumer

If you were to start adding a comment to this blog post, but we first made you wait fifteen seconds after pressing the “comment” button to make you hear some extraneous instructions, you’d be terribly frustrated. Now imagine if every Web site had the same problem, and imagine further that you were being charged for every second of time you spend online.

That’s basically the problem (well, one of the problems) with America’s big mobile phone companies. Anytime you want to leave a message for, say, a Verizon customer, you hear this:

At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press 1 for more options. To leave a callback number, press 5.

We’ve heard these messages so much that we could all do bang-on impressions of them. For the most part, I usually just roll my eyes and my sense of the phone company’s collective intelligence goes down one more notch.

But David Pogue, technology columnist for the New York Times, sees a more serious problem: mobile phone carriers are using this extra-fifteen-seconds-per-call in a disgusting attempt to get more money from each of us. These seconds count towards our airtime usage. If you’re paying as you go, you see the problem right away. And even if you have a monthly plan, just four messages a month means a minute that you shouldn’t be using up.

But Mr. Pogue has an idea for fixing this (not to mention shocking data on how big the problem is). He’s started the “Take Back the Beep” campaign, wherein you and I send e-mails to the four biggest mobile phone companies, politely demanding that they quit this at-least annoying and at-worst money-grabbing activity. From the article:

cell executives admitted to me, point-blank, that the voicemail instructions exist primarily to make you use up airtime, thereby maximizing ARPU (Average Revenue per User)

If Verizon’s 70 million customers leave or check messages twice a weekday, Verizon rakes in about $620 million a year.

I’m heartened by stories that start out as a single complaint on Twitter, and end up getting a huge corporation’s attention, who is then obligated to rectify the matter. This should be even bigger than that. I took the time to send my complaint to AT&T. Won’t you?

Maybe if this is successful, we can then get mobile phone operators to admit that what we’re doing is just making phone calls, like we always used to do, and therefore, if you are the recipient of the call, you shouldn’t pay for it.

Take Back the Beep Campaign, David Pogue, The New York Times, July 30, 2009

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