Verizon Wireless has charged people with their America’s Choice plan $5 per month extra to use it, along with airtime minutes, notes Gizmodo.
Now Verizon is dropping America’s Choice altogether. The new Nationwide plans will have Mobile Web included, without a $5 monthly charge.
But instead of charging airtime for web and other data use, you will get charged $1.99 per megabyte of use. But you won’t get charged for data use if you are downloading songs from V Cast Music Store, or sending and receiving picture or video messages, though they still cost 25 cents a piece.
Subscribers to V Cast video service (starting at $15 per month) will get unlimited data use for Mobile Web. It’s $20 for unlimited text messages and $40 for everything.
Their BroadbandAccess data service (using laptops rather than cell phones), still costs big bucks ($60-$80/month). But at least their “unlimited” service isn’t a bald-faced lie anymore:
“We are pleased to have cooperated with the New York Attorney General and to have voluntarily reached this agreement,” a company spokesman told Associated Press. “When this was brought to our attention, we understood that advertising for our NationalAccess and BroadbandAccess services could provide more clarity.”
The new INpulse Core, INpulse Plus and INpulse Power plans, charge customers a daily access fee only on the days of use. Key to the new plans is the ability of customers to pair the service with V CAST-capable phones and purchase over-the-air directly from the V CAST Music library.
In other news, Sprint has agreed to provide departing Sprint PCS customers with the code necessary to unlock their phones’ software. It’s a part of a proposed class-action settlement and allows the phones to operate on any network using CDMA. Verizon Wireless and Alltel use CDMA networks, although the Sprint handset would still have to meet those networks’ technical standards to work.
The codes won’t work for Sprint’s Nextel-branded phones, which use iDEN technology, and don’t allow switching to AT&T or T-Mobile, which use GSM technology.
Meanwhile, The Touch (right) is a slim smartphone with a large touch screen, not to be confused with the iPod Touch. It runs on Sprint’s EVDO Rev A wireless network.
The phone uses Windows Live to synchronize files with your Windows desktop. It also has Sprint TV and Radio as well as wireless access to the Sprint Music Store.
The phone looks like a typical P.D.A.-style mobile phone until you slide your finger from the bottom of the screen upward. The unique HTC TouchFLO interface appears, allowing you to “slide” to different functions, including music and video playback, contact lists and the Internet. It will be available this month for $250 with a two-year contract and $100 rebate.
PhoneScoop has a quick video tour of the Shadow for T-Mobile.
The HTC-designed Windows Mobile 6 slider has a keypad/keyboard when opened, 2.6-inch, QVGA (240 x 320 pixel) resolution display, WiFi, a microSDHC slot for storage expansion and a 2.0 megapixel camera for picture and video. Here are T-Mobile’s voice and data plans.
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