The Speculist

In a way, this post is a sequel to my recent "Closing the Digital Divide" post... Think of this series as Better Living Through Cheap Electronics.

I'm rough on cell phones. Any cell phone I carry will be folded, spindled and mutilated before being dropped from a height onto concrete (2005's phone), or fumbled into a swimming pool (1999's phone), or put through the washing machine (this year's mishap).

So when I discovered my very clean but very dead cell this week in the wash, I figured I had three options:

1. Shell out a couple of hundred bucks for a new phone at my Cingular dealer;

2. Get the same phone either free or cheap from the same dealer by signing an extended service agreement; or

3. Buy a Cingular-compatible phone cheaply on eBay and drop in the SIM card from the dead phone.

Confident that I will kill whatever phone I choose within a year, option 1 seems foolish. And I don't like option 2 because I don't want to get locked in forever with one carrier. If I had signed a new service agreement every time I destroyed a phone my commitment to Cingular would now stretch out a decade. What if Verizon offers a better deal next month? Man, this bird gonna fly!

Since I hadn't lost the washed phone I knew I could just transfer the SIM chip into another Cingular-compatible phone. So I was just about to purchase one off eBay - and wait the week or so for it to be shipped to me - when I learned about option 4:

4. Buy a $20 GoPhone.

Yeah, that's right. One of those pay-as-you-go phones that you'd buy for Ralphie:

The helpful clerk at Wal-Mart explained that you don't have to pay-as-you-go if you don't want to (paying as you go costs much more per minute than being on a standard plan). There's a pay-as-you-go SIM included in the GoPhone package. Ignore that and drop your regular Cingular SIM into the Cingular GoPhone and you'll be up and running immediately with your old number on your regular service plan. Your phone book list should make the trip too.

$20 later I'm talking again. And this isn't some ugly clunker of a phone either:

The GoPhone wouldn't be sufficient for everyone. There's no camera, fancy games, or Internet surfing. It's a voice phone that can also send and receive text messages. That's about it.

But I carry a PDA for those other functions. For me, this is perfect. This is the disposable phone I've been waiting for. I could destroy a half-dozen of these $20 models in '07 and be money ahead.