Service plans

T-Mobile USA is taking on its wireless competitors with its new "unlimited" everything cell phone plan for only $79.99 a month, proving that it's still looking to compete as regulators consider AT&T's bid to buy it.

Today the company launched the new plan that includes unlimited talk, texting, and data up to 2GB a month. While talk and texting appear to be unlimited, the fine print for T-Mobile's deal reveals that the data service is not actually unlimited. Consumers are allowed to use up to 2GB of data per month. After that, … Read more

Boost Mobile introduced a couple of international services yesterday that will please those who need to make calls to Mexico, Canada, and a few other nearby countries.

The first is a $5 International Connect plan that will let Boost customers make unlimited calls to landlines in more than 150 cities in Mexico, unlimited calls to Canada, and unlimited international texts from the U.S., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. IDEN customers get some extras, too, like unlimited walkie-talkie capabilities from the U.S., Canada, and Baja California to Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Chile.

If you pay … Read more

Sprint will discontinue its Common Cents prepaid plan, CNET learned today, and will instead transition existing customers into the PayLo plan run by Virgin Mobile, a different Sprint prepaid brand.

Sprint and Wal-Mart launched Common Cents as an in-store brand last May to compete against retail handsets like TracFone's StraightTalk brand, but the program wasn't rolled out nationally. Existing Common Cents customers will join Virgin Mobile this May, cutting off the plan's lifespan at one year.

"Current Common Cents customers need not … Read more

Sprint plans to temporarily replace mail-in rebates with instant savings, Sprint spokeswoman Caroline Semerdjian told CNET this evening. The promotion will begin March 27 and continue "for an unspecified time," Semerdjian said.

If the AT&T and T-Mobile merger goes through, Sprint will be pushed into third place, and will probably need to come up with money-saving solutions like these to stay competitive. It'll be interesting to see if these instant rebates are only a temporary solution or a permanent one.

ORLANDO, Fla.--Sprint and Google on Monday announced a partnership that turns your Sprint number into a Google Voice number and gives you access to visual voicemail and call forwarding to multiple devices. Yet it wasn't until yesterday that the two stood together here to discuss the merits of the deal for both sides.

We heard from Vincent Paquet, Google's product manager for Google Voice, but it was Sprint's Kevin McGinnis, Vice President of Product, who made the biggest case for the team-up. "This is an extremely important event for Sprint," he said at … Read more

Little by little, Google Voice has encroached on U.S. mobile operators' turf, most recently offering to port a subscriber's carrier-assigned cell phone number for use with Google Voice's service. But now for one carrier, potential friction has given way to partnership.

Sprint and Google announced today deep integration with Google Voice that lets subscribers use their Sprint phone number as a Google Voice number to access the service's features. These include transcribed visual voice mail (manage voice messages as you would your e-mail), call forwarding (calls ring through on your cell phone, home phone, office phone, … Read more

You can listen to Google Voice messages from your smartphone, can dial out using your Google number on an Android phone, and can finally port your own cell phone number to Google Voice. But if you're not quite ready to cut the cord with your carrier, you don't have to.

Google Voice has a vast number of benefits, from managing voice mail in an inbox to placing free texts. However, there still are some flaws--barely legible voice transcription and mobile app SMS delays to name two (I know, I know, not everyone experiences the same issues)--and the … Read more

In addition to accessing faster network speeds, T-Mobile's Samsung Galaxy S 4G will also get another kind of access.

Phone owners who purchase movies and TV episodes through Samsung's Media Hub will now be able to lump those fees in with their monthly phone bills. 

Carrier billing is a convenience that ties phone-related expenditures to a service plan rather than to a separate credit card bill. As with renting movies from a cable TV provider in the home, costs can add up. Regardless, carrier billing is a provision many users have been wanting to gather more steam.… Read more

GreatCall, the maker of the Jitterbug phone for seniors, introduced a new personal security service for its customers last week at CES 2011. Called 5Star, the service is designed to address security and health concerns that don't necessarily merit calling 911. For example, if you're walking alone in a park at night, you might feel unsafe, but there's no immediate need to call the police. If you have the 5Star service on your Jitterbug phone, you can call them to at least have someone there on the line. And if something does happen, 5Star will be able … Read more