I've been searching for years for an inexpensive (instead of outrageous) cell phone plan that offered me some minutes to talk as well as the ability to see and reply to my emails while I was traveling or doing errands. I mention the AT&T GoPhone plans in previous blog posts, which allow me to have exactly this. With an AT&T GoPhone plan and the right phone, you can have a cell phone and check all your emails for as little as $100 per year. You can even skip a month or two as this is a prepaid plan. Phone calls are $0.10 per minute (that's 10 cents per minute, I wrote $10 per minute in the past which is wrong), and checking your emails each month will cost as little as $5 per month. I know, I've had this plan on a Blackberry that has the GMail mobile app on it for four months now, and I've gotten by with the $5 per month data plan easily.
I've had this plan for four months now, and if you talk on the phone for about 100 minutes per month and check your emails, it costs $15 per month ($10 for the voice calls and $5 for the data plan). I've now found a phone on Amazon that I can say works well.
One caveat -- if you receive or send text messages, the cost seems to be $0.20 per text message. This is outrageous. You can buy a package for $4.99 per month that gives you 200 text messages per month, or you can pay more for 1000 messages per month, or unlimited. I don't send or receive texts at all, so this is not an issue for me. I am a total email guy. Yes, I am old school.
I don't talk on my cell phone much at all. When I am at home or the office, I use a landline and Google Voice, which gives me free phone calls in the US (and maybe Canada). Google offers anyone with a Gmail account free calling also -- just go into Gmail and use the Call feature. You enter the phone number, and Google connects you through your computer just like Skype, only for free. I also use Google Voice for international calls, which are very inexpensive, on the range of two cents per minute for Australia and England.
Update: March 21, 2012: I tried an LG Thrive phone ($115 from an Amazon seller) that works with the AT&T GoPhone. This is a low-end Android phone. I was able to set it up for emails and calls in just a few minutes. Rather than the Nokia, I would recommend the LG Thrive phone. Since this was an Android phone, it came with a bunch of apps like GMail, email, and a web browser already installed. All of these work great and with a lot less work than the Nokia X-2 (which is admittedly older technology).
So -- buy an inexpensive Android phone and use the AT&T GoPhone plan!
So -- buy an inexpensive Android phone and use the AT&T GoPhone plan!
If anyone out there wants to use the Nokia X-2 phone, here's the text from my older post:
I have finally found a phone that is relatively inexpensive and will allow you to put the GMail mobile app on it. I did not want to buy another Blackberry -- Google no longer supports the GMail mobile app on the Blackberry, which means that you if you don't have it on a cell phone that allows the web, then you have to log into your web browser every time you want to check your email. The biggest feature of Blackberries, "push email", simply notifies you with a red flashing light on the Blackberry when a new email comes in. I discovered that my unlocked Blackberry with the GMail app on it (not the dedicated Blackberry email service) DID notify me this same way when I had a waiting email. Awesome! But Google went and canceled support for GMail on the Blackberry.
I wanted to find a phone for my wife that let me do the same two tasks -- voice calls and GMail. The phone had to let me install the GMail app rather than having to open a web browser. I've done a ton of searching and reading, and I finally bought a Nokia X2-01 from Amazon for $85. This is a nice phone, seems sturdy, and after much fiddling and research on the web, I got it working so I have the GMail mobile app on it.
I have found that Nokia's email app works nicely with Gmail too. It does not use push email as well as the Blackberry. If the phone is locked (not powered off), it seems that a notice of incoming emails does appear on the screen, but there is no flashing light. I have to test this further and use the phone a bit longer. But this phone has good battery life, good build quality, and once you get it set up, it seems to fit the bill. You won't get a full-fledged web browser or 3G or 4G speed. The Opera browser doesn't do much for me at all; it is very slow and limited.
Here are some important notes if you want to use this phone's email and internet browser on the AT&T network.
There are a ton of confusing and old posts that describe how to set various Nokia phones to use the AT&T GPRS network. If you follow those instructions, then you might get your Opera browser on the phone to work, but will get constant error messages when trying to get GMail and the Nokia email app to work. The error messages will include "subscribe to packet data first" and "you need a working internet connection for this application to work."
Note that the Nokia X2-01 phone runs the Series 40 or S40 operating system. There are not many tutorials out there that explain how to set up this particular phone, so you have to use instructions and adapt them to the instruction set of this phone.
This video is just great. I spent hours on the internet trying to figure out the settings so my Nokia phone could access the internet, and so I could set up Gmail on it. This video provided the answer -- most of the files on the internet do not provide the right or most current information.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyTD7GYIWZI
In
summary, you want to get to the Settings-Configuration menu on your
Nokia S40 phone. Set one access point and call it AT&T Internet
or whatever you want. Go into Bearer Setting and set Packet data
access pt. to "wap.cingular". Network type IPv4, Authentication type
Normal, and User name to "wap@cingulargprs.com". Leave password blank.
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