You may remember my infamous post I wrote back in April 2010 where I was complaining about the idiocracy behind Sprint’s customer policy where even if you bring your own device you MUST sign a 2 year commitment. Yes, even though you aren’t getting a phone at a reduced cost (because you already owned it) Sprint will still require you to be in a commitment and pay early termination fee’s should you decide to leave… I callit infamous because I had the CEO’s office calling me trying to explain the policy, but it still makes NO sense. You can find that post here (http://www.jeremy11.com/?p=1320).
Well the main rant I had was because I had bought a MyFi device so I could get my wifi iPad online anywhere without having to upgrade to the 3G model. After Sprint rejected me and I couldn’t find any prepaid solutions that would work I decided to sell the wifi ipad and buy a 3G ipad and have been loving it ever since. But that doesn’t mean I have forgotten about Sprint and their stupid policies.
So, with that being said I wanted to let you know that Virgin Mobile has just released a prepaid MyFi which is exactly what I waslooking for. The Myfi through Virgin will cost you about $150 for the device which is similar to the cost of the Sprint or Verizon model and run you anywhere from $10 for a few days of service to $60 for 5GB a month… Wait a minute, that 5GB plan is the same price as sprint and without a contract! So yes, why would you sign up with Sprint with a 2 year contract when you can get the same exact plan contract free? If you would like to learn more about Virgin Mobile’s plan here’s a link to the MyFi page on Virgin’s site. -> http://www.virginmobileusa.com/phones/mobile-broadband-2200.html
But why in my title do I say it’s a little late? Well if Virgin offered this at the time of iPad launch I would have gone this route. But they didn’t, so I had to change my plan. I now have the 3G ipad which is great. The cool thing about it, and everyone is always saying “get the wifi and use a myfi to get it online, then you can hook up 5 devices to it as well and get them all online.”
Well I recently jailbroke my iPhone 3G mainly because I wanted multi-tasking and apple left us 3G owners in the dust when they only released multi-tasking to the 3GS and 4 owners. I can say first hand after being afraid to jailbreak for the first year and a half I had the phone for fear of bricking it, I found my fears to be unfounded. The jailbreak of my 3G iphone took literally 15 minutes and all I had to do was push a button and the system did the rest. I now can multi-task and it makes the 3G phone so much better! Yes at times the phone gets REALLY slow, but generally that’s because I forget I have a lot of programs running in the background. When I remember to close a program after I’m done with it the performance doesn’t get impacted much at all.
Anyways, once I jailbroke my iPhone and saw how easy it was I pondered the idea to jailbreak my iPad. Now I won’t say I did this, it’s all “theory only” of course. But technically once the ipad is jailbroke I would be able to install the MyWi application on it (not to be confused with the hardware MyFi I mentioned earlier) and now can use the 3G ipad as a MyFi device and connect multiple device to it and share it’s 3G connection without having to pay for a MyFi service plan which costs about $60 for 5GB, reminder yes you are paying for the iPad plan and if you signed up early you have “unlimited data” but it’s only $30, half the price of a MyFi 5GB limited plan and the iPad has a much larger battery which can last many more hours then a myfi! Once again, I’m not saying I’m doing this but it is technically possible.
So if you don’t want to jailbreak this new Virgin MyFi is the way to go, I highly support companies that work to offer Good service and not lock customers into contracts with no way out other then paying expensive early termination fees.
Apple, listen…. I know you are pretty busy with the whole Magical iPad thing… I get it, I had a wifi one, it was the coolest gadget I’ve ever played with… And then I decided I wanted the 3G model so I sold my wifi one with hopes I could get my hands on a 3G one locally but to no avail. So I ordered one from your website and it’s been 7 days and finally yesterday it changed to say “Prepared for Shipment”…. I logged in and checked my order about a dozen times since yesterday waiting and hoping to see the status go to “SHIPPED” but it’s still “prepared for shipment…” Yes I realize checking my order a dozen times doesn’t make it ship faster but I’m like a kid in a candy store.
With all those “DROID DOES” commercials on TV which poke fun at how DROID is better then the iPhone (yeah right) I’m laughing at that I thought I’d poke some fun at them…
But for now my iPhone is just fine, and while the iPad has a better battery life then the iPhone, I have 2 external batteries for my phone, one case battery and one that plugs in via usb so I have all the battery I really need.
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