What we missed: AT&T prepaid, Zact MVNO, Consumer Cellular

Sprint MVNO Zact brings custom usage. Do you use all the voice minute in your plan? All of your texts? Do you max out your data usage? Chances are you don’t. Zact, a new MVNO, aims to change that. They feature a sliding scale of plans that fit anyone’s patterns. When you go to their plans page you can pick a custom level of talk, text, and data. It sounds like a great concept. Even better: you can change your plan on the fly, even mid-month. Think you’re going over on your data? Just bump up your plan and pay the difference. Even better than that: if you don’t hit your data level, you get reverted to the plan that you fit and get a credit for the next month. So if you pay for 2GB of data but use only 1.4GB, you get credited the difference between the 2GB plan you paid for and the 1.5GB plan you needed. There are some limitations. For instance, you have to pay a monthly maintenance fee of $4.99. THey also have only two phones at the moment, though Zact representatives claim they will have “iconic devices” in the future. Make sure to read the entire CNET article to get an idea of what Zact does, and why they don’t want to be called an MVNO (even though they are). AT&T launches Aio Wireless prepaid brand. The big thing, it seems, is for big carriers to launch off-brand prepaid services. Sprint has done this for years. T-Mobile got into it with GoSmart Mobile earlier this year. They have a number of plans for both smartphones and feature phones. The smartphone plans include $55 for 2GB of data and $70 for a whopping 7GB of data. Even after customers hit their limits, their speeds are throttled instead of discontinued. The launch is limited to three markets — Houston, Orlando, and Tampa — but they say they’ll roll out to more cities in the coming weeks. It also appears that there are differences between offerings in each city. You can check out this FierceWireless article for more. Consumer Cellular lands two new smartphones. Finally, Consumer Cellular announced two new smartphnones, the LG 930 and the Samsung Exhilarate. Both are actually pretty good devices. The 930 features a dual-core 1.5GHz processor and a 4.5-inch screen, while the Exhilarate has a 4-inch display with a 1.2GHz processor. The former is $300 while the latter is half that at $150. (Via Phone Scoop.)]]>