TL;DR: If you have the cash to buy an unlocked iPhone 6 upfront, don’t mind running on the T-Mobile network, and mostly care about data as opposed to voice, you can save well over $500 over a period of two years compared to mainstream plans by AT&T, Verizon or even T-Mobile’s flagship plans.

NOTE: The following post is specific to the US smartphone market.

Over the last 2 years I have been on an AT&T business plan [1] which was not a bad deal by US standards:

• Upfront cost for the iPhone 5: $363.74 [2]
• Monthly cost: $74 ($69.99 plus taxes, fees and phone subsidy)
• Monthly data: 3 GB
• Contract duration: 2 years

I usually stayed under the included 3 GB, but occasionally went over and had to pay an extra $10 for an additional 1 GB. I made very limited use of voice and text.

As I wanted to get a new iPhone 6 Plus, I considered my options. With that same AT&T business plan, here is what the cost would have been for the next 2 years:

• Upfront cost for the iPhone 6 Plus 64 GB: $435.91 ($399 + tax) [2]
• Monthly cost: $74
• Monthly data: 3 GB
• Contract duration: 2 years
• Total cost of ownership: $2,211.90 ($92 / month)

The price of an unlocked iPhone 6 Plus 64 GB, bought directly from Apple, is $927.53 ($849.00 without sales tax). If we spread the total cost over 2 years, we get the following breakdown:

• Monthly device payment: $927.53 / 24 = $38.65
• Monthly service cost: $92 - $38.65 = $53.35

Looking at the monthly cost over the same period of time is useful as it allows us to do meaningful comparisons.

Now let’s look at the T-Mobile plans advertised for the iPhone 6. They give you quite a bit (unlimited talk, text and data with data throttling), but they are not cheap: they range from $50 to $80 per month, “plus taxes, fees and monthly device payment”, that is without phone subsidy. They mainly differ by the amount of 4G LTE data you get (from 1 GB to unlimited, and then “your data speed will automatically convert to up to 2G web speeds for the remainder of your billing cycle”). [3]

For my data usage I would probably need the $60 plan (which, remember, doesn’t include taxes and fees, so is probably at least $65 in practice) to have something equivalent to my AT&T plan. This is about $12 more per month ($288 more over 24 months) than my previous AT&T service.

In short, T-Mobile is not a particularly good deal if you care mostly about 4G data. [4] And, by the way, AT&T now has comparable prices as well.

But luckily there is more: T-Mobile also offers prepaid plans. And although the flagship prepaid plans that T-Mobile advertises are the same as their regular plans, you will find, hidden in plain sight, the following:

$30 per month - Unlimited web and text with 100 minutes talk

100 minutes talk | Unlimited text | First 5 GB at up to 4G speeds

Now get unlimited international texting from the U.S. to virtually anywhere included in your plan—at no extra charge.

This plan is only available for devices purchased from Wal-Mart or devices activated on T-Mobile.com

I had heard of this plan from friends who have been using it for quite a while with Android phones. T-Mobile clearly doesn’t want you to know too much about this: it is a little bit buried, and details of the plan are lacking. But it’s there! [5]

The question now is: does this work with the iPhone 6 Plus? The answer is yes, it does work! Here is what you have to do:

1. Buy your unlocked (“Contract-free for use on T-Mobile”) iPhone 6 (or 6 Plus) from Apple. [6]
2. Order the T-Mobile SIM Starter Kit with nano SIM. The kit is $10 but T-Mobile sometimes has promotions (I bought the kit for one cent).
3. Don’t activate the T-Mobile SIM which comes with your iPhone. [7]
4. Once you receive the SIM, place it in your iPhone.
5. Proceed with activation online [8] and choose the $30 plan. [9]
6. Profit!!!

So now let’s look at the total cost of ownership of this solution over two years:

• iPhone 6 Plus 64 GB, unlocked, with sales tax: $927.53
• Monthly cost of plan: $30 [10]
• Monthly data: 5 GB
• Total provider cost over 2 years: $30 × 24 = $720
• Total cost per month including the iPhone: $68.65
• Total cost of ownership: $1,647.53
• Savings over my earlier AT&T plan over 2 years: $564.38

Of course, this is still not cheap overall, but it’s a bit better, and in addition I get:

• 2 GB more 4G data per month than with the AT&T business plan
• tethering [11]
• an unlocked phone which I can use on many networks around the world
• no contract commitment whatsoever
• the ability to upgrade the phone at any time (just sell it and buy a new one!)
• the pleasure of giving money to a company a little bit less evil than AT&T and Verizon

There are drawbacks to this solution, in particular:

• It is unclear whether I could have ported my phone number and still qualify for a “new activation”. I did not try it because I use Google Voice to forward my calls anyway.
• You are on the T-Mobile network, and this means that you won’t have as much coverage as with AT&T or Verizon.
• This can be seen as a benefit or a drawback: you have to pay upfront for the phone, and T-Mobile won’t help you pay for it when you get prepaid plans.
• There are way less voice minutes (an option to call regular phones is using Skype, Google Hangouts, or other VoIP solutions).
• It is unclear whether fancy features such as Wi-Fi calling [12] or VoLTE are or will be enabled. But since these are voice features and this solution is for people who care more about data than voice, it doesn’t matter much to me.

No matter what, I will see how this fares over the next few months, and in the meanwhile I hope this post will be useful to others!

Disclaimer: This has been working for friends with Android phones and appears to be working for me so far with the iPhone 6 Plus, but I cannot be held responsible if you go this route and have issues of any kind.

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For another article comparing plans by major providers, see iPhone 6 Plans Compared: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Keep in mind that this looks at and iPhone 6, not 6 Plus (so about $100 of difference) and only 2 GB / month plans.

Daniel Miessler asked himself which iPhone 6 to get and I did the same. Here are my thoughts.

First, whether considering the 6 or 6 Plus, there is definitely a decrease in pocketability. But I see the move to larger screens as necessary [1] as we use the devices we call phones more and more as computers-which-you-carry-in-your-pocket. [2]

After Apple’s keynote, I hesitated a little bit between the iPhone 6 and the 6 Plus. Initially I was pretty sure that I wanted the larger size. Then I printed the templates and realized that the Plus was larger than I had expected. I started having doubts about whether I would like the larger device, in particular:

• Will it fit in a pocket relatively comfortably, or will it be a constant annoyance? [3]
• Will I be able to use it with a single hand at least part of the time? [4]

In the end I decided to get the 6 Plus and to consider it an experiment: a device so different from the ones I have had so far (iPhone 3G, [5] iPhone 4, iPhone 5) might change my habits in some interesting ways.

I am also experimenting in another way: I have had AT&T contracts since the iPhone 3G in 2008. This time around I ordered an unlocked iPhone 6 Plus for use on the T-Mobile network. [6] I like the idea of having an unlocked device, as well as having more options for plans. I will probably try to get one of the T-Mobile prepaid plans (which they don’t advertise much). [7]

Here are the features specific to the 6 Plus I am looking forward to:

• Improved camera with optical stabilization. I have kids and I consider the camera which I carry with me at all times important. [8]

• Bigger screen. Many activities should be more comfortable with a larger screen. Will I use my phone for reading more? Will I still be interested in getting the next Kindle?

• Improved battery life. Depending on which feature you are looking at, the battery life is supposed to be better across the board. For example, Wi-Fi browsing is 10 % longer and standby 60 % longer.

I am also looking forward to the following features shared by the 6 and 6 Plus:

• Improved speed. The CPU improvement announced is “only” 25% over the iPhone 5S, but the 5S was about twice faster than the 5, so that will be a nice improvement.

• The new hardware design. I like the rounded body, which looks more like the original iPhone and should make the device pleasant to hold. The iPhone 3G, while plasticky, was also great to hold due to the curve of its back, and from this perspective the iPhone 4 to iPhone 5S design was a step back.

• Apple Pay. I don’t need to pay in stores all day long, and this won’t revolutionize payments, [9] but I am intrigued by this combination of Touch ID and NFC. Will it work as reliably and fast? Will it work in stores I am likely to visit? The US is finally implementing “Chip and PIN” cards to help prevent fraud. This means that it might become a little slower to pay with cards than it has been so far, as you will have to enter your PIN. [10] Could Apple Pay be slightly more interesting due to this move?

I am looking forward to retire my beat up iPhone 5!

This weekend I reorganized my iPhone home screen like this:

I tried not to fill the entire screen, keeping one full row empty and one spot in the bottom row, to encourage me to go the extra mile when removing the non-essential apps, and to give new apps a chance to make it to the home screen. The organization is not perfect, but here we go:

• Bottom row (“most important apps”):
  • OmniFocus: I use it extensively on the desktop, and the iOS version synchronizes with it (in the background with iOS 7!). On the iPhone I use it to enter new inbox items on the go and to deal with a few contexts (standup meeting at work, errands, and contexts for a few people I often interact with).
  • Mailbox: my email client of choice. I use it to do a first pass on my email, including archiving unimportant items.
  • Chrome: my web browser of choice.
• First row (“voice and chat”):
  • Google Voice: I moved my number to Google Voice a while back. The app is not great and there is no native integration with iOS’s dialer (Apple doesn’t support it), but for better or for worse that’s what I use now. This covers old-school calls and SMS.
  • Messages: iMessage (SMS is via Google Voice).
  • Skype: chat and the occasional call.
  • Photos: not “voice and chat”, I know, but this had to go somewhere.
• Second row (“social and reading”):
  • Tweetbot: my Twitter client of choice.
  • Facebook: yes I use it.
  • Instapaper: favorite reader.
  • Kindle: to remind me that I need to read books.
• Third row (“audio”):
  • Maps: I know, it has nothing to do with audio (unless you count directions). This is the Apple Maps app, which works well in my location. I occasionally use Google Maps too.
  • Music: provides access to my music collection via iTunes Match.
  • Instacast: my podcast client of choice.
  • Podcasts: the Apple Podcasts app. Contains a few podcasts which I haven’t yet consolidated with Instacast.
• Fourth row (“health”):
  • Food: the Evernote Food app, to remind me to eat well and collect data about it.
  • Up: to remind me to exercise and sleep well.
  • Automatic: to remind me to drive economically and safely.

I use the camera often but didn’t put the Camera app on the home screen as it is so easily accessible from the lock screen.

Finally, I chose a simple built-in wallpaper. My lock screen has a picture of my family.

Mike Arrington has just posted his 2009 list of products he can't live without. After my own 2008 list, here is my update for 2009 as I think it's fun to observe how our computing environment evolves from year to year. First, the new entries:

• OmniFocus is the best to-do list application I know of. I use the desktop application daily to handle work and personal tasks. It is worth the whole of its $80. As a pure desktop application without an online counterpart it is a step back, but the benefit is flexibility and speed, both crucial to GTD.
  
• Twitter, which I couldn't figure out at all a year ago, has seen 1,778 personal updates so far, and we use it at Orbeon too. I use Twitterrific on iPhone and twhirl on the Mac, but I am not married to either of these clients. Beware: Twitter most likely will kill your personal blog (as if it needed that!).
  
• iPhone 3G: I simply can't imagine switching to anything else before a long time. I use pretty much the whole of it: phone, SMS, web, email, iPod, maps, camera, Yelp, music apps, book readers, dictionaries, you name it. Its biggest flaws are the inability to run more than one application concurrently (e.g. for music apps) and the lack of background notifications (e.g. Twitter and IM clients). I don't care how Apple does it, but these have to be addressed.
  
• Safari has become my second browser of choice after Firefox. WebKit is great (with some quirks), Safari itself not so much. To be really usable, a browser needs: 1) something like the Firefox "awsome bar", 2) an ad blocker and 3) proper tab save/restore. Safari does have some add-ons partly addressing these shortcomings, but Firefox remains the king in this area. So I use Safari for certain specific sites or applications only.
  
• Google Sites handles the new Orbeon Forms wiki. Sites can do better, and it is frustrating that it is incompatible in subtle ways with Google Docs, but it is a start.
  

The strong values:

• Firefox version 3 for Mac is a winner. It is hard to imagine we had to deal with the quirky version 2 for so long.
• GMail: I still use it mostly through OS X's Mail app through IMAP, but I had to disable the "All mail" folder to make it usable. The big change is that I use it through the iPhone mail application as well. I often process (archive) my incoming email on the go, but rarely write more than one-liners on the phone.
• Delicious: I am now at about 4100 entries (was 1900 entries a year ago). Version 2.0, delivered in July, is a success. I add entries mostly through the Firefox extension.
• Skype: VoiP, chat, video, SkypeOut, SkypeIn and soon, I hope, usable screen sharing.
• Google Calendar and Google Maps remain essential.
  
• Google Docs is strong and getting stronger. The new offline support is excellent.
  
• SlimTimer: it is still impossible to live without it at work, although report performance is an issue and development seems to have stalled.
  
• iTunes is frustrating in many ways but unavoidable if you have an iPhone. The new grid view for albums in version 8 is good, and it is still probably the best podcast client around.
  
• iTunes Store: yesterday's announcement of 100% DRM-free music was long due and I may buy again music through iTunes (other than by accident). Movie rentals rock, but the movie selection is appalling.
• Amazon mp3 Store remains appealing because of price, selection, the ubiquitous mp3 format, and the web-based interface.
  
• Picasa is my favorite photo application. I had been using it recently through CrossOver, but I now use the new native version. I wonder if iPhoto 2009 will displace Picasa for me this year? In particular, the flickr integration is very promising, and Google has less incentive than Apple to promote flickr support.
  
• Flickr is still my photo site of choice, but improvements have been slow to come this year.
• Google Reader holds about 270 feeds as of now (was 200 a year ago). The recently introduced new look is refreshing. I find myself using it less heavily as lots of news come from Twitter.

The disappointments:

• Basecamp: we still use it at Orbeon to communicate with our customers. I no longer use it as a personal to-do list as it sucks at that. Basecamp is reliable and cheap, but there are issues with messages, to-do lists, time management, and the writeboards that really don't leave me very satisfied with it at the moment. 37signals is good at rhetoric, but less so at regularly updating their applications (at least Basecamp, which is rumored to represent 60% of 37signals's about $8m revenue for 2009).
• OmniFocus for iPhone is in some ways a better GTD tool than the desktop version. For example it has a built-in notion of next action, and its relative simplicity is attractive. But stability and performance make it about unusable. It often takes 30 seconds or more to start, and much more after a synchronization. I am not the only one with this problem. A GTD app must be snappy and reliable, so this is a big letdown.
  
• Jott: I haven't used it as much as I thought, especially since the iPhone app is unable to send notification emails even with the paying plans. If they fix that I will pay $3/month without even thinking.
• Adobe Acrobat Connect seemed like the best affordable screen sharing application out there, but it can cause browser crashes and handling of screen dimensions is frustrating (try sharing when using a 30" monitor!). Unfortunately, WebEx remains the most stable and powerful solution out there, but it is outrageously priced.
  
• Google Chrome could replace Safari as my second browser of choice if there was a Mac version. I suppose it is coming soon. Or is it, given that it took Google years to release Picasa for Mac?
• Blogger hasn't seen a single visible improvement since last year. Frankly, it is not a very good blogging service anymore.
  
• Feedburner is not that useful anymore given the general decrease in personal and work blogging activity.
  
• YouTube has not really moved beyond its lowest common denominator position. I watch videos mostly through iTunes podcasts, iTunes video rentals, or other sources.
  

Social networks:

• I have been going to the Facebook site more (but not really "using it" more) because many less geeky friends use it. I mostly go to the site when I get an email notification. My guess is that photo sharing and tagging will be the first feature of Facebook I might actually appreciate this year.
  
• I have about 200 connections on LinkedIn (from about 150 a year ago). I still haven't found any actual use for it.
• Dopplr: I entered a few more trips there but it hasn't been really useful so far.

Like last year, I fail to find most social networks either really useful or exciting, Twitter remaining the notable exception.

See you next year!

Like many, I took the plunge on Friday and bought an iPhone 3G (pictures and videos of the saga here). It was clearly not the most reasonable thing to do to stand in line for hours to get an expensive device associated with an expensive 2-year contract with AT&T (which is not a particularly loved company). But hey, all that was known in advance.

What in the end amazed me was the quality of the shopping experience at the Palo Alto Apple store. I am not talking about the 6 hours spent standing in line: this was partly due to the activation process, already expected to be extremely slow, and which took a turn for the worse due to Apple and AT&T servers being down. But even that was kind of expected and part of the game.

The first thing was the quality and professionalism of the Apple store staff:

• On that busy day, the two Apple stores I called actually had somebody available to pick up the phone and kindly answer my questions about stock and expected wait time.
• Employees regularly walked up and down the line, offering water and answering questions.
• At the end of the line, every buyer was greeted and personally managed. The usual wireless device used at Apple stores allowed for just picking a convenient spot in the store to talk and handle the registration process.
• The (tired) employees remained amicable and helpful without being obsequious, providing regular updates, although obviously they couldn't do much about the failing servers.
• When the possibility arose that the iPhones could not be activated before the following day and that instead we would get a voucher for the following morning, the store manager individually talked to all the customers affected and shook hands with them.

In short everything was designed to make you, the customer, feel treated as well as possible given the circumstances.

The second amazing thing is the aura that was put around the iPhone:

• The iPhone was fetched and brought back to you as if it was a unique jewel, in a nice "iPhone 3G" bag containing the quite beautiful iPhone 3G box.
• You were given the opportunity to open the sealed box yourself before proceeding to activation (see the instructions for the retail employees as reported by MacRumors).
• Finally, after all was said and done, the bag was handed back to you like a trophy (and it actually was one in a way given the effort it took to get it).

I know, after all, it's really just a phone ("This phone is that important to you?", said a woman passing by the line, "(Sigh) Different generation..."). But with this masterful mise en scène, you really felt that you went through all this for a good reason. Whoever devised this whole process is a marketing genius.