My tip of the day: How to sign up for a plan without a 24 month contract with AT&T Wireless in the US.

How? Easy. Buy your own Nokia Nseries phone and let the Sales Human at the AT&T store that you just want to get a sim chip and plan for it with no contract.

Ok, maybe not so easy. The sales human may try to sell you an AT&T branded phone from the store on top of your desired call & data plan. Resist. Bless AT&T, but at current time they are not carrying any Nokia Nseries phones due to the fact that Nokia will not back down on disabling the GPS & Mapping features (go Nokia!). AT&T would like to sell their own navigation/mapping solution for an extra $30 a month.

As an aside, let's do the math here (as of Aug. 2008):

Cheapest Apple iPhone is $199 with the mandatory 24 month AT&T contract (in the US). But you also have to pay AT&T $30 extra dollars per month for their GPS/Maps feature beyond one's phone & data plan, which is an additional $720 over the course of the 24 months.
$199 + $720 = $919 (real price of iPhone with GPS)

Cheapest Nokia N82 purchased on Amazon.com at the beginnging of August during a sale is/was $379*. A Nokia purchased outside of AT&T does not have disabled features, thus the GPS and mapping is free.
Thus the real price over the course of the device's lifetime is $379.

In my world as a photographer a Nokia with a 5 megapixel camera for $379 is a much better deal than a 2 megapixel iPhone for $919.

Now to get back to my point, if you show up at the AT&T store (or T-Mobile) with your own unlocked device, then you don't need to be in a contract. Multiple month contracts are a way for the carrier/operator to make their money back from subsidizing the cost of the mobile device. Last week, when my Mom and I went into the local AT&T store to purchase a sim chip and get a plan for her new Nokia N82 the sales support representative was very helpful and pointed out to us that he was taking off the 24 month contract requirement before I had to mention it.

If the AT&T sales human that you are purchasing a plan from does not rightly see the above logic, then find the manager to eliminate any contract requirement for a person with their own phone. The sales human will still get their commission regardless if you are in a contract or not, appeal to their finer nature.

*If you gasped at the cheap price for the Nokia N82, start watching Amazon's prices on Friday through Saturdays, that is when they seem to drop significantly. If I wanted to switch my Mom over from an evil little flip phone on Verizon, I had to find a similar price to what Verizon charged her two years ago. Now she is free.