iCaved iBought the iPhone

So here's the full story. I had been meaning to make a trip to the AT&T store to combine my wife's cell phone plan with mine... in the hopes of saving money. I still have an old "Blue" AT&T account, my wife is an "Orange" Cingular customer. We currently appreciate our corporate discount. My plan is more expensive, because I have the unlimited data plan to accompany my Audiovox SMT5600 (a 3 year old Windows Smartphone). It's a great phone. I couldn't imagine using anything else. I rarely use the web/data features, but love the Outlook integration! This is the must have for me. Not that I'm a super busy guy, just busy enough that having a single device that can converge the PDA features with a cell phone is a big win. It's the first smartphone that is phone 1st, PDA 2nd, and I was quite happy with it.

So back to the point of my story. The unlimited data plan currently costs me $20/month on top of my 400+ min plan. Works out to $60/month before our corporate discount, which nets $52.34/month. Not too bad. Today's AT&T now calls the smartphone dataplan a PDA-data-plan and charges (can you guess?) $40/month! This is outrageous, and nearly criminal (in my opinion of course). So to have a current 450minute plan ($40/month) and a data plan ($40/month) for say a Samsung Blackjack (a 3G smartphone)... this will net your credit card a deduction of $80/month. Crazy... however, if you plunk down $500 for a 4GB iPhone you can pay $60/month ($40 talk + $20data for a 450min plan). The iPhone will save you money on the monthly bill... but will cost you more on the hardware upfront.

Factor in the cost of the Samsung Blackjack at $50 and the iPhone saves you a net $30 after 2 years.

Ahh yes, there's a catch for us corporate discount people. No discounts apply on the sought after iPhone (which by the way wasn't so hard to purchase when I just waltzed into the AT&T store at 7:30PM, not even planning on buying one). I'm told, no discounts apply to the monthly plan either. As part of the 2 to 5-year Apple Exclusivity deal with AT&T(depending on who you talk to), they get a residual off the customers plans too. So what started out as appearing to be a very good deal (amoratized over 2 years), is no longer so sweet.

Now I'm debating whether to keep it. The user interface really is fluid like in the commercials. I love the idea of being able to share photos and video clips of my daughter with people on it's handsome display. I like the idea of having a decent mp3 player integrated into the phone (vs. my Windows Smartphone). I like the idea of having Wi-Fi capability integrated into the phone... but is it worth $500?

PS: I can't crack the plastic, 'cause there's a 10% restocking fee. On top of that, there is a 14-day return policy instead of the usual 30-days from AT&T.