Upstart “freemium” wireless carrier FreedomPop has a new device in its product lineup. Starting out late last year, FreedomPop offered up potential users a great deal on a $99 HTC Evo device. After the beta period ended, the Evo’s price went up, but for a bill-less cell phone, it was still a value at $199.99. Moving forward to today’s announcement, FreedomPop has run the Galaxy SII (WiMax edition) out for their users to enjoy. Even with it’s aging specs, the GSII is still a very solid device.
The Sprint-tastic version of the Galaxy S II shipped back in late 2011, but still has some specs that keep up with today’s lower cost Android handsets. The 1GB of RAM might struggle a bit with some of the more ‘multi-task’ oriented folks, but for the average user, 1GB is more than adequate. Also, the 16GB of internal storage is plenty to suffice, especially when you consider you can add in a 32GB MicroSD card for storing media. The device is equipped with the WiMax 4G radio as well as the EV-DO Rev. A (incase you are worried about WiMax going away soon) that operates at 3.1Mbps downlink.
The 8MP camera will capture amazing images and the 2MP front camera is perfect for selfies and video chatting. The 4.5” screen is still at the “about perfect” size range and the 800x480 resolution isn’t tops in the game any longer, but it’s far from a bad looking display. As far as I could find, the last version of Android that the GSII (Sprint) version had was 2.3.4 (Gingerbread). The Dual-core 1.2 GHz Exynos chipset inside should keep performing well for quite some time as well.
But what does this $160 investment in a dying phone get you? Well, if you are the low use cellular type that is usually just playing with Facebook and Pinterest on Wi-Fi, you can get a bill-less cell phone from here on out. That’s right, you get 200 minutes of voice, 500 texts and 500MB of data for free. If you need some additional talk time, for $10.99 you can upgrade to unlimited talk and text with 500MB of data. Then for the ones that really want to save, you can subscribe annually to the unlimited plan and get it for $6.67 per month (a one-time payment of $79.99) or even go out a full 24 months and bring that cost down to $4.58 per month (a one-time payment of $110.00 for 24 months of service). There isn’t a cheaper plan available.
Now, for those watching those penny pinching bills even more, you need to note that voicemail is an additional $2.49 a month unless you subscribe to the annual or 2 year plan. One quick way around this of course is to hook your Google Voice number to your Freedom Pop number and use this for voice mail and messaging.The 500MB of data will probably go pretty quickly for those that aren’t living by Wi-Fi, but again, for such a low cost, it’s hard to kick a deal like this to the curb.
That said, the new FreedomPop offering is very exciting to see. With ultra-low cost 2 year plans becoming more and more available, it’s only a matter of time before the big boys take notice and start dropping rates – we hope…
By The Numbers:
2 Year Cost – FreedomPop Unlimited Plan
$159.99 Device Cost + $110.00 2 year service price = $11.25 per month
2 Year Cost – Republic Wireless – $5 Wi-Fi Plan (Wi-Fi Only Service)
$279.99 Device Cost + $120.00 2 year service price = $16.67 per month
2 Year Cost – Spot Mobile Unlimited Talk & Text (Wi-Fi Only Data)
$79.99 Device Cost + $599.76 2 year service price = $28.32 per month
More details about FreedomPop can be found at www.freedompop.com.
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