We thought we’d pull ourselves away from grilling burgers and enjoying the warm weather where we are to cover some news - our way, of course.

Recently, Verizon Wireless finally announced their new data family share plans (if you want to see the official stuff, Verizon was good enough to launch a page which details the new price plans).  And by “new,” we definitely mean new.

The best way to summarize the new plans is with this: minute and texting plans are basically a thing of the past, and data plans are the way of the future.  In fact, this is the very thing that some of the Phonecan moderators have been telling people to expect for many, many years.  We can’t count the number of times we’ve mentioned to someone that one day a cell company was going to scrap everything, hand you a plan with unlimited voice and text, and ask you to buy a bucket of data.  We should have counted, cause now it’s here.

There’s a long list of details, and for whatever reason, much larger and more visited sites around the web haven’t covered it yet.  So here it is…

True, but customers also prefer choice.

And we don’t appear to be the only ones. Which should be enough for most people to ask why. Why are so many companies accepting this purchase, even though they likely compete with Google and/or Motorola?

What are the real reasons behind the acquisition? What do Google and Motorola Mobility gain?

And what will the company be called (since Motorola Solutions is a separate company)? Googorola?

One of the most interesting editorial pieces we’ve ever written was our article, Hunting Down A Unicorn: The VPhone.  For us, we spent considerable time last year working to get current information about the device, only to find none.  In response to our article, certain representatives of Saygus, the company behind VPhone, started inundating us with emails and comments making various claims about our article.

Because it’s now been more than seven months since our article posted, we thought we’d do a little recap on the VPhone.

We explore the data plan as it is today, look at what’s changed in the last couple years, and where the future may or may not end up.

We get a lot of searches and questions from people trying to understand Verizon Wireless’ upgrade policies and discounts.  Our Upgrade Policy article accounts for a lot of our traffic, but upon further review, we felt it might be prudent to follow up with an article explaining why discounting has changed over the years, and what it looks like today.

If you haven’t read the original upgrade article, please read it first.

And now… the fascinating world of Verizon Wireless subsidy.

Read on for an insider’s perspective on escalating and what it does (or doesn’t) accomplish.

The truth of the matter is, one year contracts likely comprise of less than 1% of overall contracts.  We have no real data on this, but a long observation of the business tells us that the numbers are minimal.

The problem, though, is choice.