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I asked a customer service rep and they can upgrade my year old 3G for $18 because i pay more than $99 monthly for it, and i still pay only $199 for the 3G S

macguru wrote:

... i can upgrade any of my lines (contract or not) to the 3G S for $18 plus the cost of the iphone.  This is awesome!!...

Sorry...why is this awesome? The $18 is just the standard new phone activation fee.

They'll typically give you $150 off any phone if you sign a brand new 2 year contract or renew your 2 year contract halfway through. The $200 iPhone subsidy is a bit better than average, but that's not at all surprising. They're making millions getting people hooked on iPhones.

Well, you'll love it. So far I thought it was lame that you can't record video while talking on the phone, but the battery life is better and feels a bit more responsive than the old 3G phone.

knobtwirler wrote:

That's true, once you breach a year, you get the $199 deal.

This is not true for all people. The date at which you are eligible for the upgrade at $199 is dependent on time and the amount you pay per month for your service.

For example, I have two phones and pay well over $100 for the service for both and I was eligible for the upgrade for both of my iPhone 3G's that I bought on release day last year on the release day of the 3GS this year.

I decided to upgrade my iPhone 3G to a 32GB 3GS and when it came in and she was upgrading it she noted that they waived my $18 fee as well.

I have another friend that bought his when they came out last year but he isn't eligible for an upgrade at the $199/299 cost until December or something like that.

knobtwirler wrote:

is it even possible to pay under $100 for the service?

Thanks for the clarifications guys. I didn't think anybody actually had a 450 minute plan, but I suppose some do. I thought I needed a high minute plan, but as it turns out, over the last six months or so, most of my talk has been ATT mobile to mobile, registering a paltry 100 minutes or so per month on my 1350 plan. On T-Mobile just before, I had a 700 minute plan that was getting banged out quick. $69.99 with the data rate plan is a pretty sweet deal.

mrreet2001 wrote:

the 450 is overkill for me ... Most of my communication is via SMS, aim, twitter or email. However I have a 2 phone family plan so the lowest I can go is 700 min.

I (as in my phone not the plan) *typically* don't use more than 60 minutes a month excluding mobile to mobile and N&W

Yeah, I have the 1400 minutes family plan and don't come anywhere near using it. After one year of use I have almost 13,000 rollover minutes. I was actually going to lower it to the lowest possible family plan but I found out that AT&T changed their policy since the last time I was with them and if you lower your plan you lose all of your rollover minutes except for a number equal to your new monthly minutes. So if I were to switch to the 700 minute  plan my rollover minutes would go from 13,000 to 700. I guess they realized that this is what people were doing, building up rollover minutes and then switching to a lower plan. The problem is that I was on the lower plan but in my first month I almost went over and had to switch to the next higher plan with just a few days left because we were moving at the time and therefore we were on the road a bunch and using a lot of minutes. If I had been using my regular usage of minutes in the first few months I would have built up a buffer and been just fine.

But then the higher plan probably contributed to me being able to upgrade to the 3GS early. Oh well.