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Virgin Mobile Becomes World's First iPhone-Exclusive Carrier, Offers Year of Service For $1 (betanews.com)
BrianFagioli quotes a report via BetaNews: Goodness gracious, Virgin Mobile USA has made quite the bold moves today. The cellular service provider has become the world's first iPhone-exclusive carrier. In other words, it will no longer offer Android at all. Crazy, right? This is through a partnership with Apple, and Virgin will offer many versions of the device, including iPhone 6, 6S, 7, and SE. The craziness doesn't stop there, however, as there is even something much more exciting -- Virgin Mobile USA is offering unlimited talk, text and data for a dollar. No, that is not a typo -- a single buck will get you unlimited everything for up to a year! This is through a new scheme called "Inner Circle."
Double Plus Good.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
But if you read TFA it says (my emphasis)
"Buy an iPhone and get six months of unlimited talk, text and data on Virgin Mobile's nationwide network for only $1 when you join the 'Inner Circle.' Additionally, customers who sign up by Monday, July 31 will receive a promotional offer of 12 months of service for just $1," says Virgin Mobile USA.
Unless iPhones are being given away then it's a bit more than $1. Also as per TFA .. it's Sprint's network for better or worse. Plus after the promo it's $50/month.
Soooooo .. basically it's another click bait article.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Virgin Mobile in the UK spent a good while trying to persuade me not to get an iPhone a few years back, because they didn't carry it or support it. I was interested in their four service bundle (internet, TV, home phone, mobile) at the time as well.
Still irritating to me that so few carriers in the UK fully support the iPhone - am specifically thinking Visual Voicemail here, and also native wifi calling as opposed to "here - download our horrible underdeveloped and intrusive app instead!". It was the O2 god-awful app (TuGo?) that finally pushed me off that network after having been on since the launch of the iPhone 3GS.
Slashdot Becomes World's First iPhone-Exclusive News Site, Offers Year of Shilling (For Free).
Anybody seen Samuel L. Jackson around lately?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Lighten up Francis, it's a joke.
I was on Virgin Mobile for years as they were one of the first inexpensive pre-paid carriers. Over time they kind of boiled-frogged me to higher and higher (ie more expensive) tiers.
Just switched to usmobile and am now paying 12$ month for similar service.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Obviously you are not familiar with CDMA phones.
love is just extroverted narcissism
This is the greatest scam ever! They sell you a year of service and an iPhone for one price, then the service doesn't work so they refund your $1 and you can not even take the iPhone elsewhere.
I used to be a VM customer. Shudder.
This is what the selfie camera on your iPhone is for.
You're surrounded by those here on Slashdot as it is.....
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Who knows, their service might be as good as Virgin Galactic's.
. . . and I won't go back.
Superior service and lower cost are why I went with Ting. Leaving VM was a big hassle, too, as they didn't appear to have their people (few of whom were anywhere near my time zone) trained properly.
Still with Ting, who doesn't care which device I use.
I have an Android Galaxy J3 on Virgin Mobile. My monthly charge recently was reduced to $35 for unlimited voice and about 4G of data. It's a reasonable plan that I hope to continue.
If Virgin is going to stop supporting my hardware, I hope that they will unlock it so I can use it on another carrier.
The cellular service provider has become the world's first iPhone-exclusive carrier. In other words, it will no longer offer Android at all.
And guess who I won't be signing up with, at all.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Last time I checked, big telecom companies aren't allowed to lose money on their services. That's anti-competitive, and it's illegal, around here anyway.
First a rant. If only we could vote this trashastroturf off the front by page of slashdot . You have to join the $50/mo circle plan. The linked article is just some click site.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Charles Bronson runs a tight ship at Virgin. The $1 is quite an eyeopener.
Commit a crime in his neighborhood, and you will find out how the 'castle doctrine' works.
Anyone know when they will cancel the current android service ?
Yet another stunningly useless Article
And /without/ needing to join a $50/mo plan, or finance an iPhone. You can bring your own cheap Moto G Play or similar. You only pay a few bucks in taxes/fees some of which get credited back if you do auto-pay. The main catch is you have to be a current customer of another postpaid carrier, bring a Sprint compatible phone, and port in your number. I guess the goal here is to steal customers from the competition. In my area Sprint coverage is as good or better than Verizon or AT&T so I've ported two phones over already and am considering doing two more (but it would mean I need to first re-activate them on a competitors network before I can port them to Sprint, which is a pain and causes another credit pull). Some people claim to have had luck porting pre-paid lines, but the rep flat out told me no, so YMMV. For reference sprint.com/1yearfree if you missed it.
Does Nathan Fillion show up and slap you around?
#DeleteChrome
..with a very limited circle.
and you'll buy the phone for 123423 bucks or some shit like that.
and being american, the data is sure as fuck not going to be unlimited - plus are they just fucking going to ban androids? I guess it would work if they were only allowing phones sold by them. you wouldn't get away with one dollar though. more like paying 40 bucks for the phone per month and 1 for service..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
A carrier should not tie to a phone brand. Being a carrier is to provide a service and as long as the device is conforming to the standards it should not be a problem.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Charles Bronson is alive and well, and serving a life term in prison. You're thinking of Chuck Norris, for whom it's easy enough to charge $1 for phonecalls, he just picks up and shouts into a random inanimate object, and everyone who he decides needs to hear him gets the message.
You understand that the carrier provides service to a SIM, right? iPhone, Android, Toaster, etc it doesn't matter.
No they don't. Some American networks do not use SIM cards. Look up CDMA.
A carrier does not provide handsets, nor does it have any job regulating what handsets attach to the network, besides specifying having passed certain radio and radio protocol certification lab testing.
Yes they do. There's a reason that there's two models of Galaxy S7 for the world (single SIM and dual SIM), and yet 7 models specifically for the USA (SM-G930V,
SM-G930A, SM-G930AZ, SM-G930P, SM-G930T, SM-G930R4, SM-G930U), and only one of these models has a SIM card. Take a guess which one. To prizes for guessing V stands for Verizon, A for AT&T, T for T-mobile etc.
Even if a cell phone company is selling you a phone, you should never buy it.
Why not? You just finished telling us how portable they all are and how easily we can just throw in a SIM whenever we want.
So how long is it going to be before people figure out how to get the 'sim' out, load it into a cheap Android phone and then sell it to a Chinese guy who sells the iPhone on at triple profit?
A blog I run for the wealth
Founded in 2001 as a joint venture between Virgin Group and Sprint Corporation, Virgin Mobile USA commenced operations in June 2002 as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), providing services via the Sprint 1900 MHz CDMA network. In 2008, Virgin Mobile USA acquired post-paid services provider Helio, Inc. In 2009, Sprint Nextel bought out joint venture partner Virgin Group, becoming the sole owner of Virgin Mobile USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Mobile_USA
You AC's always are good at reaffirming your good decision making skills!
love is just extroverted narcissism
Selling Android phones keeps mobile sellers fluid in the months before the new iPhone comes out.
They're going to have a rubber banding sales pattern after this.
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Most modern CDMA phones *do* use SIMs because they use LTE. I believe the SIMs are just as swappable as normal GSM ones.
However, SIMs can be locked to phones and phones can be locked to SIMs. The most restrictive arrangement I've seen was on my old GSM Tracfone. Put its SIM in another phone and it comes up as corrupted or unrecognized. Put another SIM in the Tracfone and it rejects it without a way to enter an unlock code. The reason for this is that some of Tracfone's minute accounting seemed to be done on the phone itself, so they required special firmware on the phone. (Since then they have started allowing non-customized devices on their network and offering BYOD SIM kits, so they've obviously reworked whatever was requiring heavily customized firmware.)
I have no idea if Virgin is doing anything restrictive like this to keep other phones off their network. My point is merely that it's possible to lock things down this much in a SIM based system.