Verizon's new prepaid cellphone plans let you buy rollover data

If you don't like commitment, a prepaid phone plan can be appealing -- but not if you have to predict your data needs well in advance. Verizon may offer a lot more flexibility with its new Allset plans, though. While there's only one base $45 per month plan for smartphones with unlimited calling, unlimited messages and 500MB of data, customers can tack on "bridge data" that rolls any unused megabytes over to the next month. If you pay $10 for 1GB of data or $20 for 3GB, you can hold on to any leftover capacity for up to 90 days -- a big help if you know you'll need some headroom during that summer vacation. There's a $5 pack if you only need 500MB of data for 30 days, and basic feature phone users can buy the same bridge packs. Basic feature phone owners can also use Allset, although their $35 base rate caps them at 500 minutes of voice. These aren't the cheapest prepaid plans we've seen in the US (see Virgin Mobile for a good example), but they may make sense if your internet usage varies wildly from month to month.

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Via: GigaOM

Source: Verizon (1), (2)

Tags: allset, carrier, mobilepostcross, plans, prepaid, smartphone, verizon, wireless Next: UK patients' data uploaded to Google servers, serious privacy concerns ensue (update) .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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California Court Rules In Favor Of Using Cellphone Maps While Driving

Good news, Californians. You can now, once again, use Google Maps on your phone while driving. That is, legally. Until this court ruling, map use was in a shady legal gray area.

This comes two years after a Fresno, Calif., man was ticketed for looking at a map on his iPhone while stuck in construction. He was looking for an alternative route. As you do. The cop issued the $165 ticket under a law that prohibits listening and talking on cellphones while driving.

The man thankfully challenged the law and won.

The 5th District Court of Appeal reversed the ticket on the ground that the law specifically limits the use of “listening and talking” without the use of a hands-free device, but does not apply to other uses of the phone.

Next up, Californian man challenges traffic ticket issued for playing Threes while driving.

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The best cellphone deals of the week: 12.29.13

BYBilly Steele18 hours ago 0

With Engadget's new tools, you can track price drops on thousands of devices every day, and once a week we feature some of the best deals right here. But act fast! Many of these are limited-time offers, and won't last long.

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NSA can decode many GSM cellphone calls

The NSA may say that its phone surveillance efforts focus on metadata rather than the associated calls, but we now know that the agency can listen to many of those conversations whenever it wants. Documents leaked to the Washington Post by Edward Snowden confirm that the NSA can decode GSM-based cellphone calls without obtaining the encryption keys. The ability isn't surprising when GSM has known weaknesses, but the document suggests that the NSA (and potentially other US agencies) can easily process cellphone calls worldwide. Not surprisingly, the intelligence branch argues that such cracking is necessary -- folks on both sides of the law use encryption to hide information, after all. The NSA may not have such an easy time in the future, however. AT&T, T-Mobile Germany and other carriers worldwide are moving to tougher encryption methods for their GSM service, and 3G calls are typically more secure as a matter of course. These measures don't prevent eavesdropping, but they do complicate any attempts to snoop on cellular chats.

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Source: Washington Post

Tags: att, cellphone, eavesdropping, EdwardSnowden, encryption, gsm, mobilepostcross, nsa, privacy, security, surveillance, t-mobile Next: As Google slowly preps the Chromecast ecosystem, waves of new apps are on the way .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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