One of the biggest complaints in the cell phone industry is that if a customer chooses to buy a phone for full retail or brings their own device to a carrier, they don't get any sort of discount on their monthly bill. Last year, T-Mobile changed that with their Even More Plus plans, giving customers a $10 to $20 off their bill every month if they opted to pay the full price for a phone. It appears that Even More Plus may not have been terribly popular (or perhaps it was too popular), because T-Mobile seems to quietly be killing off Even More Plus, erasing just about every mention of the plans from its site. Interested customers can still talk to a rep directly and sign up for an Even More Plus plan that way, although you'd better do it quick because a customer service representative has admitted that T-Mo is "making some changes" and "sneaking away" the plans.
This news is definitely disappointing, especially if you're an avid phone switcher and prefer to pay full retailer or bring in your own hardware. When T-Mobile introduced the Even More Plus plans, many of us hoped that they would catch on and that the other carriers would follow suit, but it doesn't look like that'll be happening any time soon. I would love to see all of the national carriers give a discount for buying full retail handsets; it certainly would make swallowing the near-$600 (sometimes higher) price tags much easier to swallow. So, are any of you on an Even More Plus plan? Are you sad to see the plans go?
UPDATE: Good news, contract-free friends! It looks like T-Mobile isn't axing its Even More Plus plans completely, it's just making them a bit more difficult to sign up for. Browsing the T-Mobile site, you'll see the image below telling users that they can go to a T-Mobile store "for no annual contract rate plans, and more." Why T-Mo decided to make Even More Plus so difficult to get is unclear right now, but at least those of us that are contract-averse and keep on rockin' without fear of having to sign away two years of our cellular lives.
Via Engadget (1), (2) (Image via Gadget Review)
