Pros and Cons of SmartPhones

Pros and Cons of SmartPhones

There are many pros of owning a smartphone but there are also some cons with smart phones as well.

Pros:

A smartphone provides a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) with a mobile phone; it’s like having a computer in the palm of your hand. They can play Videos and music files with Windows Media Player Mobile (or iTunes if you have an iPhone), making it a portable multimedia-device.  You can download many games for smartphones making them a portable gaming device as well.  Smartphones come with a wide variety of accessories such as cases, Bluetooth devices & GPS applications that can navigate you to wherever you would like to go.  They also come with a higher mega pixel camera with them, generally around 5.0 mega pixels. 

All of these options sound great, but they come with a cost too.

Cons:

            While a smartphone provides all different kinds of options to help you with your office needs or just personal enjoyment, they have some cons.  The average cost of a smart phone is in the hundreds of dollars, just not practical for some people.  For example, the iPhone 4 with a 2 year contract with AT&T is $199 for the 16GB and $299 for a 32GB (black or white in color). Now, if you don’t want the 2 year contract the price jumps even higher, for the 16GB its $599 and for the 32GB its $699. Some would say it’s worth it for not having a contract, others would concur.  What some people don’t know, when you upgrade to a smartphone there is an additional fee you must pay monthly for the data you are using for the internet and text messaging.  With AT&T for the DataPlus package you pay $15 a month for 200MB of data, if you want the DataPro package you pay $25 a month for 2GB of data. Again, others would say they don’t need 2GB of data, others would say they absolutely need the 2GB of data; it all depends on your daily use of the phone.  After you find a data plan that fits your needs you must choose a voice calling plan just like any other mobile phone. AT&T offers an unlimited calling plan for $69.99 per month but if you are like me I rarely call people nowadays so AT&T offers two other calling plans which are 900 voice minutes for $59.99 or 450 voice minutes for $39.99 a month.  If you’re like me, you text a lot, for that you’ll need a text messaging plan.  AT&T offers an unlimited text plan for $20 a month, but if you don’t need the unlimited text, they also offer 1500 messages for $15 a month (5 cents for additional messages after you go over the 1500) and 200 messages for $5 a month (10 cents for going over the 200 messages) 

 Now that you have the facts about plans, the phone itself has some cons.  Smartphones’ batteries do not last generally for more than a day; it all depends on how much you actually use the phone for the day. Another con to smartphones is the small screens for web browsing or reading.  Some phones you can magnify the screen for better visibility. 

In conclusion, the smartphone is a very nice asset to have if you are in the business world or just using it for personal enjoyment. I think that the pros definitely outweigh the cons in the long run.