There's no easy way to add a smartphone to our current plan ..
Just buy a smartphone and transfer the SIM card to it?
Or if not GSM, then call the operator and have them activate it in place of her leased phone? They shouldn't mind, so long as you continue with the contract to end of term.
We're on Verizon, so there's nothing so simple as transferring a SIM card. Although, intriguingly, my Galaxy Nexus runs on Verizon's LTE network, and it *does* have a SIM card. I have no idea if I could just move this to a new phone and expect it to magically work like things do in the GSM universe. If/when Google releases the "X phone", with its vaguely-hinted at excellent battery life, and if it's sold at roughly the same prices as the Nexus 4, *and* if it runs properly on Verizon's LTE network, *then* it would be a fantastic upgrade for me and I'd jump on it.
My wife currently has an LG "Accolade" running Verizon's "standard" feature phone firmware. It's as awful as you might possibly imagine, but standby battery life is over a week. Given her "drop in the purse and forget about it" usage model, this turns out be an essential feature. I read up on the battery life for the Kin, and the reviews seem mixed. A
CNet review claims
The downside is that between turning on auto-sync on and watching a little video, by 8:05 I got a message that my battery was critically low. For the record, that's 12 hours after I unplugged the Kin with a full charge--nowhere near the weekend of battery life that Microsoft said a typical user can expect.
On the flip side,
Anandtech claims,
Battery life on the KIN was a shocker. It was superb.
Both of the KIN not only delivered above average call times of around 6 hours, but also 3G web browsing times of around 7. But the real shocker was WiFi web browsing battery life, which came in at around 13.5 hours. I ran this test twice on both phones because I was confused. It really lasts that long.
I imagine it might also be frustrating to have a phone that was engineered with all sorts of social networking features that are now completely and utterly unsupported. I do get your point that it's a fine way to have a "better featurephone" if that's really the only goal. Hmm. I'll discuss this with her and see what she thinks.
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