Buying unlocked phones in US

Since the announcement of iPhone's price tag (and other events, like Nokia opening up flagship stores), many have been wondering: will users shell out for an unsubsidized (and locked) phone? It's a fair question. Much of Moto RAZR's recent success has been attributed to massive carrier subsidies, despite its initial price tag of $499.

According to Boardtracker, there were 66K+ threads about unlocked phones in the last year.

New Phone Plan: 0 minutes, unlimited data

I recently downloaded Fring on my cell phone. Fring is a mobile client for Skype, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, & SIP. Think of it as Trillian or Pigdin for cell phones. Using Fring, for example, I can make Skype voice calls using the mobile data network (or a WLAN data network - my phone has an 802.11g antenna). I've tried making voice calls.. it actually works! There's a slight delay, but it wasn't more noticeable than on a computer.

This got me thinking: why have voice minutes at all? Through Skype (or some other SIP service), I could buy minutes and call any phone number. Skype charges 2.4 cents/min to call the US. Cingular's charges vary, but taking my plan, it's 11.25 cents/min ($40/450 min). This, of course, doesn't include nights & weekends, mobile-to-mobile min, etc. Including those, I would need to talk for 1666 minutes/month, to get a rate of 2.4 cents/min. This is only domestic calling. Layer on international calling and the equation looks much different.

So here's my proposal: a service plan with 0 voice minutes and unlimited data. Perhaps I could try to do this with Sonopia.

Smartphone without a data plan?

Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg posted a "factoid" today: a non-negligible percentage of a certain smartphone being sold in the US without a data plan. I don't think this is that surprising (assuming smartphone means a phone with a QWERTY keyboard). For an avid txter, a keyboard is key (pun intended). There just aren't that many phones with keyboards aimed at the texter/non-email crowd (the Sidekick series is the prime exception that comes to mind).

Here are some people that fit this description.