With some creative eBaying and SIM card swaps, can you slash the bottom-line cost of an iPhone or other hot cellphones?
To be exact, here’s a possible way to enjoy subsidies on models your plan might not cover. See details at the Brad Ideas blog—via David Farber’s Interesting People list.
Pros and cons
So, gang, what are the pros and cons of this approach? Iffy cellphone bargains are outside my turf, and I’m not endorsing it without knowing more. Still, it is significant that Brad Templeton, who picked up the idea from another luminary, Al Chang, is the chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, not some anonymous attention-seeker.
Could the Chang idea result in genuine savings, just like the now-expired $99 price on the Sony reader or the still-available $49 credit-card offer. Let’s puzzle things out. As of now, 46 percent of TeleBloggers responding to a poll are planning to buy an iPhone, many with e-books partly in mind.
Further thoughts from Brad Templeton: “It’s hard to see anything particularly unethical here. The network gives a subsidy to the person who takes a 2-year contract (which will get them typically $1500 over those 2 years) and not to a user who takes a phone with no contractual requirements. It just changes which phone. At worst things go slightly differently than the carrier’s marketing plans expected. I’ve lamented before why the networks won’t give you a subsidy if you bring in your own phone, but they seem to be stubborn about this. The only thing I can think of is it provides kickbacks to the retailers who push both phones and plans on customers. I’m not bothered by disrupting that and I don’t think it’s that valuable anyway.”
