OUR FIRST SMARTPHONE

We’ve never been smartphone fans. When we leave our office, we leave the Internet behind. We are two of those now seldom seen people whose noses aren’t glued to a tiny screen.

But prices are getting tempting. So we decided to check out the 45-day free trial of a smartphone offered to members of AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) at ConsumerCellular/AARP. For $17 a month and the cost of a phone, the deal allows you to surf the Web, send text messages, email or just talk. A refurbished iPhone on the site costs $200, but we went for an Android phone, the Huawei 8800, for $175.

The phone is fine; it’s the plan that stinks. Joy went on the Internet to check messages for about ten minutes and the phone showed she had used half her allotted Web usage for the month. They have other plans, but the costs go up quickly. In short, beware of deals aimed at seniors. When we called to say we wanted to cancel the service, they just hung up.

So we decided to switch to T-Mobile. It offered unlimited use of the Web on a prepaid (no-contract) phone for $30 a month and 100 minutes of talk time. Or you can get unlimited use of the Web, with unlimited talk and texting, for $2 a day on the days you use it. For us, that might be only $4 a month charge. (We do our talking the old-fashioned way: face to face.)

None of those deals were immediately apparent by going to their web site: T-Mobile.com. But when Joy hovered on a page with prepaid phones, a chat window popped up and she had a text conversation with a human. (We presume they were human.) Then the deals came thick and fast – and they were good ones.

We’re looking at T-Mobile’s offer of a Samsung Galaxy for $200. Hey, even if we rarely use it, we want the best. You never know when you might need to send an emergency email or get an answer to important questions, like “How old was Cary Grant when he starred in “Charade?'”

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