Sprint is running a promotion offering a $100 Reward Card from American Express when you buy any smartphone and start a new line of service. $36 activation fee is also waived. This is on top of the current discounted prices for a 2-year agreement, meaning a new iPhone 4S now costing $149 would be only $49 after the $100 gift card. (The $99 refurbished one would essentially be free.) Sprint has to sell something like $15 billion worth of iPhones in the first 4 years, so it looks like they are clearing out the iPhone 4S inventory..
Valid during 8/14-8/26, online only. Requires 2-year Agreement and new line of service. Account must be in good standing for 30 days to receive card. Card will arrive in 8 to 10 weeks. You can get one $100 gift card per line with a family plan with multiple phones and multiple lines. Android phones like Galaxy Nexus and Samsung Galaxy III are also eligible.
Keep in mind the monthly data plan costs, and don’t forget to add any employee or student discounts available with can be substantial. Compare with other good iPhone options like the Virgin Mobile iPhone $30 plan and the Straight Talk BYO iPhone $45 Unlimited plan.
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Also don’t forget that the iPhone 5 is expected to come out in a month.
I was pretty excited about the Virgin Mobile iPhone — it could save my wife and I $500 a year.
BUT:
I recently read on Hacker News that Sprint (which I currently have) has a roaming agreeement with Verizon. The two share CDMA network technologies and that makes sense. But what they went on to say is that the deal on applies to people on Sprint contract. That even though V.M. uses Sprint’s network, it doesn’t have Sprint’s VZW roaming deal. In other words, I’d worry about significantly reduced coverage.
Bottom line is that Sprint’s current bandwidth is at too high of frequency to reliably penetrate into buildings. While that should be alleviated in the coming years as new spectrum comes online for them, it wouldn’t help you now if you had a Virgin iPhone.
This all remains unsubstantiated. And I’ll look into it before totally writing-off Virgin. I also might get a cheapo $30 phone and see how my coverage is here and outside the city. But the Hacker News community is made-up of engineers mostly and is usually quite reliable.
Waiting for the iPhone 5… these are just gimmicks to try to rid the inventory of old phones.
recieve: “i before e except after c”
I bet you knew that.
@Shane –
That’s mainly correct. The prepaid phones (from all carriers as far as I know) do not come with Roaming. So they will connect ONLY with the parent network towers.
The majority of post-paid plans include nationwide roaming. So on any of the standard CDMA networks (Sprint, Verizon, US-Cellular, etc) you can roam on the other networks. I like Virgin (mainly because of the price), but we leave my wife on Sprint specifically so that we can roam while traveling in case Sprint doesn’t have a tower nearby.
Regarding the frequencies and not penetrating buildings – I don’t there is a difference between any of the standard “3G” coverages on CDMA networks. There likely are differences with the “4G” networks since they use a variety of technologies to do so, and it may be possible that 4G works better than 3g at penetrating buildings.
The main nice thing about Sprint is that they offer unlimited data and have made that their differentiating point.
I’m actually thinking that when the iPhone 5 comes out, that an “old” iPhone 4 will be really cheap and I can run it on Straight Talk for $45 on a no-contract basis. My guess is that the best thing about iPhone 5 other than it’ll be thinner/smaller is that it uses 4G data which of course costs even more on a monthly basis.
Regarding the 8/14-8/26/12 $100 Sprint and American Express promotion pictured above, we are wondering if anyone has actually received the promised $100 gift cards. We have not as of 1/2/13. Both Sprint and Amex assure us we met all the requirements and should have received them but they see no record that they were sent.