The iPhone / Android cost difference is getting large

I'm not saying there's no cost difference or that it's not getting larger, but the post doesn't compare like with like. How would that Android phone compare to an iphone 3GS on payg? That's a more interesting question.

Although I agree that the price difference is staggering, the important metric to measure these phones by is depreciation. If the iPhone user can sell that iPhone for a few hundred dollars at the end of those two years (I certainly have), then the cost of using the phone isn't that high. On the Android side I'm pretty sure depreciation is quite fast.

Additionally, the figures pointed out in this article are totals of the Voice&Data plans tied to the iPhones by AT&T. These are costs of a minimum iPhone service as deemed by AT&T, and not a cost of the iPhone itself.

The gap for more "advanced" plans is even more egregious; Wal-Mart+T-Mobile US is providing a pay-as-you-go plan for $30/mo with unlimited (5GB throttled) HSPA+ data+SMS and 100 minutes of voice. Over two years, the plan itself (assuming no overages) works out to about $720. Ignoring the cost of the phone, Verizon's most comparable plan (400 minutes voice, 5GB data, unlimited text) is $140/mo, or $3360 over two years.

Why not simply compare the price of an unlocked iPhone to an unlocked Android? iPhone 4S costs $649-849, simple.

I've had some success with putting an AT&T GoPhone SIM directly into an iPhone 4 with no jailbreak/unlock.

Couple that with Google Voice (and the Talkatone app), and you can barely use cell minutes.