Freedompop phone

[blars]

My phone from Freedompop just arrived, a used Kyocera hydro icon.  I paid $50 and it included a car charger, now it is $40 without the car charger.  They also have another phone model available for $40.

The Good: Free calls, texts, and 500mb data for life on Sprints 4gLTE, 3g, or using wifi.   200 minutes/month is way more than I use.  It's a standard CDMA/4gLTE anderoid phone, so it may be able to reflashed to verizon or used as a trade-in.

The Bad: When you get the phone, you are subscribed to their premium plan.  You need to change plans within a month from when it is shipped to avoid recurring charges.  Data overages are not cheap.  Some users have complained about tabs missing from the back panel, so the phone may not be waterproof as advertised.  The car charger is a cheap 3rd party one.  The life is the life of the phone, freedompop's agreement with sprint (sprint dropped millinicom with little warning), or freedompop, whichever is shorter.  Teathering and data rollover are part of the premium plan.  When I first turned on the phone, it downloaded updates eating over 100MB of my data allowance.

The Ugly: Calls are VOIP (voice over IP) so you need a fast 3g or 4g signal to use it.  Drop outs may still occur.  Sprints coverage is not great, but is available some places T-Mobile is not.

It's easer to find the offers by going to http://slickdeals.net and searching for freedompop.

You get a little more free data by adding "freinds", I'm [email protected] .  Let me know your email if you sign up.

Sprint is dropping their Wimax network as of November 6, so freedompop's "free internet" devices will no longer work.  (They offered me one for $5.)

 

[offroad]

Your data is 500mb per month? And you need to use VOIP with that data to make phone calls? Does that equate to 200 minutes?

 

[blars]

I'm hoping the phone calls do not count against the data usage, but am not sure. This is a smart phone used for web browsing, etc.

 

[offroad]

Right. Think you could be correct. But would hate to find out that VOIP eats both your data and your voice minutes.

 

[blars]

The phone I got has now dropped to $35. Setting it to no charge was easy, just click ok to disabling all the charged-for settings. Voice calls do not count to the data limit. The VOIP is half-duplex (one way at a time) with irritating delays, so will not work with some automatic menu systems that time out before you respond due to the delay. But it's free calling and limited data.