Gadgetory

AT&T has a new upgrade plan that you might want to avoid I'm Bridget Carey and this is your CNET update ATT is giving customers the option to ditch their two-year contract and pay about $30 more every month for the opportunity to upgrade to a new phone once a year this option is called next but it makes no financial sense your monthly service plan has not changed at all so let's say you currently pay about $100 a month for service instead of just paying $200 up front for that shiny new iPhone and being done with it you now are paying double that almost $400 over the course of a year for that same iPhone and that's just so you can trade it in for a new model in 12 months and that phone better be in good condition because if it's cracked you got to pay more to trade it in the only person this benefits is someone who pays a large termination fee to break their contract every year just to get a new phone if you do the math the difference between paying a termination fee for your contract and the next plan is about 55 dollars if you don't get a new phone every year with next you're losing money the next plan basically takes the full price of the phone and splits it up over 20 months so if you keep your phone for the whole 20 months you just shelled out the full six hundred and fifty dollars for a new phone when you could have gotten for $200 just with sticking with a contract so why is 18 t even offering this well I guess they thought they needed to do something to compete with t-mobile which has a better version of this concept a t-mobile they don't have contracts you just put a down payment on a phone like about $100 and you pay a monthly fee to pay off the rest of the phone over time but your monthly service charges are lowered to balance it out that's what 18 T is missing and t-mobile just launched the jump plan so for over $10 a month you could upgrade a phone twice a year if you want something new or if the phone is damaged so it's like an insurance plan we expect Verizon to also jump in and offer some option for people to upgrade early but we'll have to wait and see if Verizon can make it worthwhile it's time to claim a new Yahoo user name Yahoo has been doing some cleaning and deactivated old abandoned IDs that have not been used in over a year now yahoo is opening up those names to other people on a first-come first-served basis just go to wish list dot yahoo.com to request your username and Foursquare is beginning to roll out advertisements that show up after you check into a place so for example when mom checks into the neighborhood park or pool she might see a Toys R Us ad to encourage her to pick up some frisbees and pool noodles that's your tech news update you can find more details at cnet.com slash from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey