Ting is a regional carrier that works on the Sprint network and is one of the only carriers that essentially allow its customers to customize a smartphone plan that fits their needs. With Ting, you can choose how many minutes you want, even zero if you never plan on talking, how many texts you want to send and the amount of data you plan to consume up to 3GB. Each step of the plan is more added to your bill and overage fees are never charged, but a customer is bumped up to the next tier for the remaining portion of the month.
Earlier this year, in April, Ting announced they would be offered 4G LTE devices once Sprint gets their network up and running and today, the list of devices has been updated. Ting made a blog post saying they would be offering LG Viper 4G LTE, HTC EVO 4G LTE and the 3G LG Optimus Elite. Release dates and other information like price have not been mentioned, but Ting did say “sooner than later”. Ting also made mention of offering the Samsung Galaxy S III by the fall of this year and that was their “best guess”.
All of the phones they offer are powered by Android, so what about non-Android phones? The company mentioned they had no plans to offer any Blackberry device and even though they are “open” to Windows Phone devices, they have not mentioned anything officially at this point. Since customers are seeing the iPhone pop up on other regional carriers, they wanted to know if Ting was going to offer it. A customer service rep replying to the question on the support forum saying they would like to offer the iPhone, but right now there are no plans to do so. Ting did hint at the end of their blog post that they are working on some “exciting things” that could “bear fruit” when all is said and done. Wonder what that means?
Ting has been working on the Sprint network since day one so it really is not any surprise that we see the same handsets appear on Ting that have already come across the Sprint web site. It is good to see higher end smartphones being offered by the “little guy”, which gives more people access to great 4G LTE devices without the long contracts.
