Gadgetory

welcome to the 359 where we talk about the top tech news of the day and all the other crap we want to throw in I'm Joni salzman and with me is Sam roads hello and in a first for the 359 we have a special guest dialing in to discuss our top news for today t mobile tmobile is getting rid of data plans the carrier said today that it will offer just one unlimited data plan instead of the different data levels for different prices joining us to explain more is Maggie Reardon one of cnet's most senior reporters who has been covering mobile news for years hi Maggie hi thanks for having me great to have you so tell me Maggie what does this change mean for t-mobile customers well now it means that everybody there's going to be only one plans that they offer postpaid customers and it'll be unlimited and to get in is just you know one person it'll be seventy dollars a month which you know it's pretty good for unlimited you know currently they charge 95 dollars a month for their unlimited plan but it also means that like the cheaper plan you know the two big plan is going away that one was I think fifty dollars a month so you're going to have to pay twenty dollars more even if you don't use that much data if you want to be on t-mobile's postpaid plan now what they say is if you're a light data user you can go to a prepaid plan and get into that at you know about thirty dollars a month but still I mean you know they say they're making things less complicated but yeah I'm not sure how really uncomplicated things are you still have to look sit down with your calculator and figure out which plan is going to be best for you right it sounds like some people are going to be saving so many people that were already heavy users people that already had the unlimited plan but people that were trying to save money with a lower plan might end up paying more is that right yeah and you know all of this is being enabled because of what t-mobile says was their success with their binge on program which was basically you could get free you could watch some videos because they were basically compressing all the video so now what they're going to do is they're going to do that sort of across the board and every video that you want to watch is going to be free will anything you want to access I mean so they say it's not really free because you're so paying 70 bucks a month but there's no limit essentially so you know it's interesting I do think this is sort of a new day for wireless because what we're seeing here is the carriers are trying to make their network more efficient so that they can give more more data away I guess so people don't have to worry about like am I going to go over my data cap and usually video has been a big suck for that so now you know so we'll see if others are able to follow already Sprint is saying that they're going to do the same thing and they're also going to be compressing data so i don't know maybe we'll see Verizon and t-mobile eventually bring unlimited back yeah so it sounds like how does this compare to what Verizon and AT&T are doing those are the two big dogs the t-mobile is going up against yeah well currently you can't get an unlimited plan if you're a new custard customer to AT&T and Verizon they got rid of those plans years ago there are a few stragglers who have kept on to their their grandfathered plans but not many of those folks still remain so you know so right now the two big dogs still have these plans now they've come out with different pricing they're they're giving customers more data but it's also costing you more you know they've pumped up the pricing on their plans and they've also done something very t-mobile like as well where if you go over your plan you now don't necessarily get hit with a big c or you know a penalty you you can just keep keep using your data but your service is slowed a little bit now for that privilege horizon is charging you five dollars a month to do it and as John ledger the t-mobile CEO called it he he basically said it was like a mafia shakedown okay uh yeah yes but you know he's a pretty colorful guy as a color food user yeah he's a lot of colorful language like that yeah you Maggie thank you very much yeah speaking of yikes McDonald's had a fitness tracker for children and it failed miserably yeah them skin irritation and now no one wants them yeah McDonald's was trying to its latest attempt to get kids moving after they binge on fries and burgers they offer the began offering a step at activity band it's basically a fitness tracker for kids but they had to within days remove the toy from happy meals because of reports of skin irritation now receiving limited reports but still I mean nobody wants skin irritation when they're trying to have their burgers and fries yeah and you don't want to mess around with anything that is causing kids harm yeah especially if the point is to get them to not be fat yeah that's the point for all of our coverage check us out on cnet big thanks to our guests Maggie Reardon I'm Joanie salzman I'm Samantha road thanks for