Current Mood: Cool

Okay so I recently opted to change my phone service after 3 years to a new carrier. First off I should probably point out that to keep on my minimilistic “college” budget (which means I work REALLY hard to keep from having ZERO bills of any sort) I use prepaid carriers only. The problem is that my other carrier (like most prepaid services) gave me very little for my dollar. I was using Verizon which was nice because of one perk, unlimited nights and unlimited calls to other verizon customers. Since that’s the big carrier here in Western NY, it meant not wasting my money as often, this was the only reason I stayed with them. Well a few months ago I was doing research into a better plan thinking there had to be something out there. I didn’t want much just my unlimited nights as always, some decent daytime minutes so I could make calls W/O the parnoia and a small amount of text messaging since so many people kept messaging me from work. Enter the king of prepaid, Virgin Mobile who had all of this and more for the top off price of $60.00 a month.

My new service now with them gives me 400 anytime minutes with unlimited nights AND weekends starting at 7PM, unlimited text messaging, IM and email and 50MB of web all for that low cost. I know people with contract phones who pay more for less. The best part is that there is NO CONTRACT! My plans are fully customizable so if one month I have to take off extra time for term papers or a nasty flu bug and I can’t afford a huge bill I turn off or downsize those services and then turn them on again the following month. And the best part is is that if I have trouble paying a bill do to incident they cover my bill for 90 days.

Now comes my rant (see title)… okay so Virgin Mobile isn’t AT&T or Verizon (it does however use Sprint towers so it gets good coverage) and the company isn’t exactly shelling out Blackberrys but the nifty text messaging designed cell phone the X-TC does a great job of handling it all. It has a slide out full QWERTY keyboard, real music ringtones, apps and a camera just to name a few features. So why do people rip on it so bad online? I have to admit I was bit concerned over switching my carrier because of those reviews. I knew I didn’t want any other phone but this one because of it’s bang for the buck so I was kind of upset in finding that after I had it running a few days with no issues that these people are still shelling out bad reviews. This includes tech mojos who think that only Blackberrys and iPhones are the only “decent” phone for human kind. Granted I’d kill for a Blackberry Storm that ran on Virgin (they have them in Canada) but for all that I get for $60.00 and no contract? I’m not going to complain! At least I’m not fighting with my carrier every month about why my bill is so high because a certain feature kicked in I didn’t want.

What I’m getting at is it’s a prepaid phone (and probably the best one out there for the cost with the features) don’t expect to get a contacted experience with it. All these reviews were about what the X-TC was lacking. People want to get it all for nothing and it doesn’t work that way. Be grateful you can get such awesome stuff for so little I know I’m not the one complaining.