Yesterday I described how I saved $50 per month on my cell phone contract.  Today, I am going to share the story about how I got there.  Let me begin by saying it was no cakewalk.

I purchased a new MyTouch 4G last Friday at a mall kiosk in Rockford, IL along with an $80 monthly contract.  The phone never worked properly.  In fact, it didn’t work at all.

I spent Saturday morning on the phone with T-Mobile trying to solve the issue, and the final conclusion was that I needed a new sim card.  Not a big deal, except that I was in unfamiliar territory in Madison, WI without access to the internet, so finding a T-Mobile store would not be easy.

The T-Mobile customer service representative directed me to a nearby Radio Shack for help.  The rep put me on hold while he called the store to verify that they would be able to help me.  I asked if the Radio Shack sim card would be free for me, and the rep said, “Yes.”

Upon arriving at the Radio Shack, I was informed that they didn’t have any sim cards and that I would have to go to a different Radio Shack across town.  So I drove 20 minutes to the Radio Shack at the West Town Mall.

The staff at this Radio Shack seemed to want nothing to do with me, but I pressed them anyway, explaining the situation and asking for the promised sim card.  They refused, saying that I could pay $25 for a new sim card.  Having just purchased a new phone, I wasn’t about to shell out another $25 for a sim card, especially when T-Mobile promised me a replacement one for free.

So, I left Radio Shack angry and disappointed. I decided to cut my losses and head home, with plans to bring the phone into my local T-Mobile store when I got home.

Saturday night I arrived home in Minneapolis and headed over to the T-Mobile store.  After spending the last 6 hours in the car, I had time to stew and was rearing for a battle.  Surprisingly, my local T-Mobile store was unbelievably helpful.

Within 5 minutes, I had a new sim card installed and was on my merry way with a working cell phone.  *and there was much rejoicing*

Buuuut I was still dissatisfied with the phone, itself.  The MyTouch 4G is an amazing phone – twice as fast as my iPhone and with 100x cooler features.  The big downside is that it sucks up battery life like there is no tomorrow.  I had to charge it twice per day.

Ultimately, I decided to return it to my local T-Mobile store, not knowing how the store would react.  Returns are always a weird thing, because stores like Wal-mart and Target accept returns with no questions asked, but other stores can be ornery about returns.  Thankfully, this T-Mobile store was a “no questions asked” type of store.

After explaining my situation, the sales guy at the T-Mobile store gave me everything I wanted – a refund for the MyTouch 4G and a month-to-month plan for $50/month.  +1 for T-Mobile customer service!  They earned my loyalty for the foreseeable future.

Radio Shack, on the other hand, committed the ultimate corporate sin of disappointing a customer and letting the customer leave unhappy when they could have easily helped said customer out.  For better or worse, I will probably never enter another Radio Shack store.  It’s not that I believe them to be all bad or anything, but why waste my time there when there are all sorts of other stores offering the same items?

That particular Radio Shack store definitely suffers from poor management, a topic which I will address in a forthcoming blog post.

My AT&T iPhone bill for the month of November, including taxes, was $97.70.  That included 450 minutes, 1500 SMS messages, and unlimited 3G internet access.  After a quick switch from AT&T to T-Mobile, my bill for December will drop to around $60…AND I will have an upgrade in service!

Below I outline how you, too, can save $50/month or more.

1. When your contract expires, do not upgrade your phone.
   I have and will continue to use an iPhone 3G that I purchased 2 years ago.
2. Move to a cheap month-to-month cell phone plan with T-Mobile or another provider that your existing phone is compatible with.
   In my case, my iPhone 3G works perfectly on T-Mobile’s network.
3. Drop unneeded services.
   I dropped text-messaging (SMS) completely and went with a 200 MB data plan with T-Mobile

That’s it!  Here is how my costs broke down on my recent upgrade:

I WAS paying $39.99/month for 450 minutes; I am now paying $39.99/month for 1000 minutes.  That’s 550 additional minutes per month, which I will use.  I was always counting my minutes and regularly exceeding the 450 minute allotment.

I WAS paying $15/month for 1,500 text messages; I am now paying $0 for zero text messages.  I was receiving around 250 text messages per month and sending 10 per month.  I will not miss text messaging.

I WAS paying $30/month for unlimited internet access; I am now paying $10/month for up to 200 MB of internet.  I was using around 400 MB/month, but I plan on making up for this by using WiFi rather than 3G access.

On top of all that, if I were to get another nice smartphone such as the MyTouch 4G or the G2, I would be paying another $250 or around $10/month for the phone, plus another $20/month that T-Mobile tacks on to contracts that include a discounted cell-phone (plus I would be locked into a 2-year contract!).  So, I am, in effect, also saving another $30/month of which I will only include $10 in my equation since it complicates the math a bit.  But know that the actual savings is around $70/month!  Wow!

When all is said and done, I am saving $45/month before taxes (or $65/month if you include the hardware discount noted above), which will easily end up rounding out to around $50/month after taxes are added in.  PLUS, I am getting more of the service that is most valuable to me – minutes!

To accomplish this, I switched from AT&T to T-Mobile.  NOTE: You will want to wait until your contract expires before doing this, or else you will be hit with a cancellation fee from your current service provider. It also required me to unlock my iPhone, which was a single click using the free Blackra1n software.

When I got to thinking about it, I realized that the main things I use my iPhone for are:

• Directions/maps
• Checking email
• Playing mp3s and podcasts
• Making phone calls

As such, I don’t require a whole lot of internet access, nor do I particularly enjoy text-messaging.  For me, this decision was a no-brainer.  I got more of what I wanted (minutes) and save $50/month!

I have used an iPhone for a couple of weeks now, using it mostly as an online social media device, and pausing sporadically to make a phone call on it. Generally speaking, it is a good device for connecting with friends on the major online social media networks. Of course there are some pitfalls, too.

The good:
Facebook
MySpace
LinkedIn
Pandora

The bad:
YouTube
Last.fm
Flickr

The ugly:
Twitter
Blogging

First, let’s talk about the Good. The free proprietary applications for Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn are all fantastic. All three provide an easy way to quickly update your status, check and send email, and connect with friends. Facebook even provides a way to chat.

Pandora’s app is simple, intuitive, and offers all the functionality of the Pandora website. One bad thing about this app is that the application closes and the music stops playing when you press the home button. I’m not sure if this is a limitation of the iPhone operating system, itself, or if this is a programming issue. But the iPod app continues playing until I manually close it or press “pause”. It would be nice for Pandora to have that functionality as well.

Now, for the Bad. The biggest disappointment, by far, is the YouTube application that comes pre-installed on the iPhone. It sucks. It is fine for playing videos, but it lacks all of the features that make YouTube a great online social media environment. You can’t view user profiles, post comments, make friends, send email, or really do anything at all, except watch videos.

Flickr does not have an official iPhone app. This is a bit of a black eye for this giant of the online social media world. True, you can still post photos to your Flickr account by taking advantage of Flickr’s “post by email” capabilities, but without the ability to comment on others’ photos and check my Flickr email, and see what my friends are saying about my newly-posted photos, what is the point?

Last.fm’s iphone app doesn’t do anything except stream music, making it a clone of Pandora’s app. Without the ability to check your neighborhood, your recommendations, etc., Last.fm is merely another online radio station.

Finally, we reach the Ugly. The iPhone app store is saturated with Twitter clients of varying abilities. I have only used two free ones – Twitfire and Twitteriffic. As I have said before, Twitfire is great if you just want to send a quick Tweet with a combination of text, location, and photo. But it does not have the capability of viewing other’s tweets. Twitteriffic provides a fantastic interface for viewing tweets en-masse and for sending tweets. Unfortunately, it does not provide a way to track specific friends in the timeline. Also, there is no way to find specific friends via a search. So, these applications are good at what they do, but have significant room for improvement.

Blogging on the iPhone is mainly limited by the keypad. The iPhone is great for short text messages and tweets, but it’s keypad makes it too cumbersome to write anything more than a sentence or two. There are probably kids who can type 60 words per minute on the iPhone, but I am not one of them. In fact, I am lucky if I get 20 words written in a minute. That said, the WordPress application is a gem! From time-to-time, I post short blogs with photos, which works exceptionally well. Also, the next iteration of the WordPress app will include a landscape (horizontal) typing feature, which might increase typing efficiency.

So, that is my experience with online social media and the iPhone so far. Please comment if you have anything to add!