Sledgstone

ATT leases the phone? Wow screw that. Wireless charging seems like a waste of time and energy to me. I don't see how the transfer of energy could be efficient at all and I bet it takes longer to charge to. The charger that came with this phone took my battery from 17% to 100% in about 2.5 hours. And most of that time I was actively using the phone. Not bad. I remember back in the day my old Motorola photon would take almost 5 hours to charge while off.

Yeah ATT doesnt do the 2 year plan for a subsidized phone anymore from what people have told me. They're pushing their "NEXT" program where you dont pay for the phone upfront, you just pay it over 2 years added to your contract. I don't want to pay $20-$30 more a month for 2 years. You have the option to keep your phone after that, knowing that you problably wont because the battery will be all worn out by that time. I have a suspicion that the non-removable battery trend was by design.  You can still replace the battery, but unless you're willing to do it yourself, you're going to pay a good $150 to have it done... at least thats how it is around here since there aren't many shops that do it. After 2 years there is a significant drop in battery performance.... battery tech has reached its ceiling, and with each new phone and its new bells and whistles were stuck accepting worse and worse battery life each generation. Its baffling to me how no one has integrated solar panels  on to phones since they love to make the back out of glass so much these days. Solar panels probably couldn't keep the phone functional, but it could extend the battery life.

It's not just battery life that kills old phones, my galaxy s4 got the end of life treatment with software. Samsung stopped supporting it as of 2 android versions ago. It was still running Android 4.0 and unless I rooted the phone to install a custom android build it would never get an update again. I had apps disappearing left and right on my phone until I turned off auto updates. The apps were no longer compatible with my version of Android and disabled themselves. I dealt with the same issue with my old photon phone to.

That payment plan ATT has sounds just like the payment plan Verizon has to as an option. I thought those plans were rip offs because we'd end up paying $600 a phone instead of the $49 with contact. The salesman told me those payment plans end up being the cheaper plan if you use alot of data because even tho we'd pay $20 something per phone per month the actual phone plan is cheaper because it's the same cheaper plan ppl would pay for if they bought an unlocked phone off ebay and got service from Verizon. He told me the $49 2 year contract was the cheaper option for me.

Theres probably better links out there but I found this one with a better explanation. 

http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/10/technology/new-verizon-plans/

I forgot to ask the guy to confirm but I'm pretty sure I could swap to the paid off phone plan at the end of my 2 year contract to save money each month until I upgrade my phone but with how these phones are designed to be obsolete after 2 years it's kind of pointless. I also have been looking at slickdeals.net for phones prior to yesterday. Occasionally I'll see an unlocked phone deal but not all unlocked phones work on every network. It all seems a bit rigged to me. I couldn't imagine buying a laptop that would only work with certain networks like comcast or time Warner.