When I was younger, I wasn’t a big fan of two-year contracts. It wasn’t so much that I needed to switch carriers a lot, and so being locked down to one for such a long time was worrisome or anything like that. I’ve only switched carriers twice, in total, so that was certainly not it.
But, what it most certainly was, was the idea that I had to use one phone for two years. Back then, when two-year contracts were still in full swing, I wanted a new phone all the time. And I switched a lot. I did it so often that when I met up with a friend, even if we had seen one another just a few days before, they’d generally ask me, “Which phone do you have now?”
There wasn’t any settling back then. If I liked something long enough to have it for any real length of time, that meant I really, really liked the phone.
Three phones fell into that category in any real capacity. The Hero from HTC that ran Android. Palm’s webOS-powered Pre Plus. And HTC’s HD7 with Windows Phone 7. That last phone wasn’t spectacular, and doesn’t compare to the other two at all, mind you, but I was enamored with Windows Phone 7.
There have been iPhones. There have been more Android phones than I can shake a stick at. Every iteration of webOS-based devices (that Pixi was pretty great, though). I went through them as quickly as I could, loving as many as I could, and really trying to find the good in all of them.
That original HTC Hero was the first unlocked phone I ever bought, and even had shipped over from the United Kingdom. That really started it. It was so easy to get a phone that just worked, thanks to GSM carriers. (It’s so great that this is less of an issue these days.)
But recently, I haven’t even considered picking up an unlocked phone. That has more to do with the fact that I don’t switch phones all that often anymore, but also because contracts have gone out the window.
HTC is making me consider it all over again, thanks to the HTC 10. The fact the phone isn’t launching for one particular carrier in the United States is only compounding the desire, too. I may actually go back to the old ways to give HTC’s latest flagship, which looks really great, a chance.
How about you? Do you (still) buy unlocked phones, or have you stuck with what your carrier offers?
