Virgin Mobile\Tracfone Updates

First off, the quick Tracfone blip: the Motorola w370 is now available, spec-wise, on PhoneScoop. Which suggests that its introduction into Trac's lineup isn't far off. May, maybe? Here's the link (and the full features):

http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=1162

No Bluetooth but it's interesting to see that the site lists the phone as tri-band (internetional coverage?!? probably not but one can only hope) and capable of mass-storage mode via USB. As in you may be able to easily load ringers onto your phone with a simple USB cable. Now if you could figure out how to use GPRS tethering on the phone...:)

For Virgin Mobile, thhere are two things in the skunkworks, or so it seems: a Slice successor and a family plan.

The Slice II (who knws what it may be called...Virgin Mobile is holding a survey to figure that out...Slash anyone?) has a camera, Bluetooth and a heckuva lot of memory (64MB so I've heard), above the normal Slice. And you can probably do stuff like mobile email and IM on it, which isn't possible on the original Slice. One can only hope it'll come out near the price point of the old Slice ($50)...that would rock...

And yes, this was the UTStarCom CDM1450 I mentioned earlier. Here's another picture:

http://i14.tinypic.com/45519ux.jpg

Lastly, Virgin mobile is considering having a family plan, for $80 a month. It's like smashing two $35 300-minute 1000-night-and-weekend plans together (yeah, it's $5 more per line than normal...wierd). To make up for this nice revenue increase, calls to the other person on the "family plan" are free. So if you call one other Virgin Mobile user 50+ daytime minutes a month and use the 300\1000 plan already, this is actually something to look at. I just hope the price will come down ($70 a month maybe?), though I'm not really interested.

Oh and by the way, enter in the marbl giveaway if you haven't already! There are still a few days to enter and you're likely to win!