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Comment by ambiate | Hacker News Reader

My Nexus 4 paid for itself on Straight Talk within a month by selling my older phone on craigslist. One of the best decisions I have made in a long time.

My wife's Samsung phone is so incredibly foreign to the vanilla Android experience. I have had some recent issues with Google Maps draining my battery, but that was corrected by simply reverting the update. All in all, a great phone. If I destroy it, I can just get a new one for $250. Flops consisted of the wireless battery charge, frictionless glass back that slides, and (original) nubless back that left the speaker against the surface.

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> I can just get a new one for $250

Where? I was thinking the same way, not really worrying about my phone, until recently when they lowered the price and cleared out their stock.

Hopefully the 5 will be a similar price point because I don't have a backup decent phone at the moment.

Does straightalk work pretty well nationwide? How does it compare to major carriers?

it's on AT&T's network. So it should be about the same.

How can it be so much cheaper than AT&T? It seems almost too good to be true, no?

I'm paying double that for way less minutes/data!

Straight talk's data isn't really unlimited. It's throttled to EDGE after 2.5Gb. Minutes on the other hand work out well.

My att unlimited is the same for $30/mo extra

When you buy a phone with AT&T, roughly half of the monthly cost goes towards paying back the ~$200-400 loan they gave you to subsidize the phone (it works out to some absurd interest rate, roughly 15-30% depending on what assumptions you make). Of course, they charge this even if you don't get your phone subsidized through them so in that case it ends up just being really expensive.

With Straight Talk, they don't subsidize the cost of the phone, so they charge less on a monthly basis.

Where I am, its on Verizon's network.

Wow it's wired. I got an email from Verizon offering me a cheaper plan within 30 minutes of browsing the plans on straight talk? (And googling to find it)

Any chance there's some crazy cookie tracking magic there? Or just a coincidence?

If you did so using your phone, they could have used endpoint tracking, DNS tracking, or DPI to detect your pending disloyalty.

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