Don’t buy another phone ever again. That's a weird thing for us to say, right? We're WIRED! But by the end of last year, it was fancy-ice clear that the distinction between phones and the other little touchscreen computers with over-the-air Internet connections had become blatantly artificial. The only reason we still have electronics with that Bell-ian name is so carriers can sell us a plan.
Think about what a phone is. It's a device that lets people talk to each other remotely by converting sound waves into transmissible signals. For more than 100 years, phones changed very little. As cell phones took off, our conversations broke free of fixed positions, but we were still using gadgets made to move voices, not files. Then touchscreen smartphones changed everything. According to US government data, 16 percent of American homes didn't have a landline in 2006. That was just before the iPhone came out. Today it's more than 40 percent. More and more, when we talk, it's on our smartphones.
Yet what we really use these devices for, according to network operations powerhouse Ericsson, is to move data—increasingly over the 4G wireless tech called LTE. You might think LTE just means a faster Instagram feed. It does. But LTE is also the main reason our smartphones are getting so large. Power-hungry LTE devices want bigger batteries. Bigger batteries mean bigger phones. It's no coincidence that Apple, Samsung, LG, and Google have all rolled out 6-inch phonelike flagships since the end of 2013.
I say phonelike because, come on, these are tablets. They barely fit into a front pocket. They won't fit into a back pocket—or at least not most back pockets. The average Levi's have a back-stash that's just 5.25 inches deep.
So is that a tablet in your pocket? Yes. LTE didn't just change our phones into things that look like tablets; it also changed them into things that act like tablets. Older cell networks, even 3G, used dedicated connections to move your voice, just like a landline. But LTE turns your voice into data packets like the rest of Internet traffic. Until last year, carriers were mostly using older networks and technologies to carry voice calls, but now everything's moving to voice over LTE, or VoLTE. It's basically VoIP—like Skype.
So why do we still need voice plans? Dunno. You can get LTE on any decent tablet. And with LTE, you can send and receive calls with Skype and its ilk even, say, on the bus. You can send text messages with services like WhatsApp. You can port your existing mobile number over to Google Voice and continue calling and texting, from the exact number you have right now, on your iPad.
Here's the icky part: A 3-GB data plan from T-Mobile for your iPad mini is $30 per month. Yet if instead of an iPad mini it's an iPhone 6 Plus, which requires a voice plan too, your phone bill is $60 per month. That $60 would buy you a 9-GB plan on an iPad. I know what you're thinking: maybe VoIP and VoLTE use lots of data. Nuh-uh. An average one-minute data-based call is about 3 MB. Those extra 6 gigs amount to almost 2,000 minutes of talk time. (Call your mom.)
Which means if you live in an area with LTE coverage, it might make economic sense to buy a phone that has only a data plan—no voice. Oh, sorry, you can't. The major carriers won't sell you one. Why? Well, as an AT&T rep put it to me, “Tablets and cell phones are different.” Except not really.
Yes, phones have additional antennas for things like 3G, but if you're using only voice over IP, you don't need them. Tablets and phones have essentially converged in form and function. If you are willing to put up with some inconveniences, a small LTE-enabled tablet can make a great telephony device. In fact, considering the money you can save, it may just be the best phone you've ever owned.
