Cricket offers prepaid iPhone 4, 4S for $55 a month starting June 22

Cricket Wireless (subsidiary of Leap Wireless) has announced the upcoming availability of the US' first prepaid iPhone. The offer will open on Friday, June 22 and gets you Apple's handset contract free for $55 a month.

Naturally, that also means the devices aren't steeply discounted. You'll have to cough up $400 for an iPhone 4 8GB or $500 for an iPhone 4S 16GB -- far more than signing a two-year contract via major providers, but still a tad cheaper than the full retail price offered by AT&T, Verizon and Sprint (currently $550 and $650).

Cricket's prepaid service offers unlimited voice and text, while data is technically unlimited, but speeds are throttled to 56-100Kb/s if you exceed 2.3GB a month. Based on habits claimed by AT&T and others, only a small percentage of smartphone owners approach such levels, so it shouldn't be a concern for most users.

For the typical user, Cricket's service seems like a great value compared to conventional packages which hit $70 to $80 a month -- especially over the long haul. Cricket says subscribers on major carriers can expect to pay $2,775 over the course of two years, whereas its own customers will pay $1,719 during the same period.

There is at least one tradeoff in the way of coverage as Cricket's network is largely limited to major markets. It covers about 90 million Americans with only 60 million in areas supported by the iPhone (you can view a full list of the launch cities here). That could be a problem if you travel a lot or if you're in the sticks like me.

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Cricket offers prepaid iPhone 4, 4S for $55 a month starting June 22

Cricket Wireless (subsidiary of Leap Wireless) has announced the upcoming availability of the US' first prepaid iPhone. The offer will open on Friday, June 22 and gets you Apple's handset contract free for $55 a month.

Naturally, that also means the devices aren't steeply discounted. You'll have to cough up $400 for an iPhone 4 8GB or $500 for an iPhone 4S 16GB -- far more than signing a two-year contract via major providers, but still a tad cheaper than the full retail price offered by AT&T, Verizon and Sprint (currently $550 and $650).

Cricket's prepaid service offers unlimited voice and text, while data is technically unlimited, but speeds are throttled to 56-100Kb/s if you exceed 2.3GB a month. Based on habits claimed by AT&T and others, only a small percentage of smartphone owners approach such levels, so it shouldn't be a concern for most users.

For the typical user, Cricket's service seems like a great value compared to conventional packages which hit $70 to $80 a month -- especially over the long haul. Cricket says subscribers on major carriers can expect to pay $2,775 over the course of two years, whereas its own customers will pay $1,719 during the same period.

There is at least one tradeoff in the way of coverage as Cricket's network is largely limited to major markets. It covers about 90 million Americans with only 60 million in areas supported by the iPhone (you can view a full list of the launch cities here). That could be a problem if you travel a lot or if you're in the sticks like me.

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Posted in: Cricket,iPhone,month,offers,prepaid,starting

Google Docs gains 450 new fonts, reviews April as a big month

Google's cloud-based office suite, Google Docs, has gained a whopping 450 choices to its once scarce selection of font types. The new fonts include Ubuntu, Android's Ice Cream Sandwich "Droid" font and a wide variety of others ranging from monospaced to cursive. The addition of 450 fonts is certainly a welcome extension of Docs, although Google may have performed a great public disservice by keeping Comic Sans on the list of available type faces -- just saying.

Although changes to Docs have been mostly gradual and incremental, Google has continued to improve the Google Docs experience over the years. Some recent examples of those improvements include Google Drive integration, pagination, cloud printing and support for additional file formats. 

Google also takes some time to look back at April, outlining a number of improvements that were made in just the past month. Amongst some of the April changes was improved screenreader compatibility, a default page size setting and improved scripting support. Additionally, Docs allows documents up to 50MB (as opposed to 2MB prior to this change), more image insertion features and a total of 60 templates for users to choose from. Google has even added OCR (optical character recognition) for many types of documents, including PDFs and images. Sorry, no handwriting recognition -- yet.

For users who haven't visted  Google Docs in awhile, the service took on a new layout courtesy of Google Drive. Gone is the "home page" which provided an uncategorized list of recently modified documents. Rather, Docs now displays your files in a hierarchical fashion relative to a root "folder" when you first load it up, much like you might expect your files to appear on your own computer.

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Posted in: April,fonts,gains,Google,month,reviews