I’ve been carrying a cheap little Huawei Ascend Y on Straight Talk Wireless for a couple of weeks now. The short story is, I’ve gone back to my Droid 3.
STW is OK as far as service goes. Fine, in fact. I do get an occasional text message from them trying to upsell, which is a little annoying, but not overly so. Aside from that, it’s regular Verizon coverage, which is to say excellent. So… no complaints there.
The Huawei phone… well… what a POS, for one thing. As an Android phone, it’s as close to the bottom of the barrel as you can get. The web browser is next to useless — it frequently seems to just lose its mind, followed by a crash. The phone has VERY little internal memory, and a lot of the apps can’t be moved to the SD card. Some pretty basic features, like a flash for the camera, are missing, and some firmware features are inexplicably missing. Like… no quick way to silence the ringer. The phone cost me less than $18, I think, and it’s about worth what it cost and no more. So… POS, but not a ripoff. Want it? I don’t need it.
So, will I drop Verizon for Straight Talk? Not immediately. With discounts, my phone costs us $43 and change per month. Our overall bill is ridiculously high, but dropping my phone for STW would actually cost us a little more. I’ll continue to look for a less expensive way to keep them on Verizon, but I’m not anticipating that will work. We may just drop Verizon, pay the early termination fee, and move – or maybe we can find two separate plans under VW that will eb cheaper. Time will tell.