Prepaid with a postpaid feel: Motorola Triumph for Virgin Mobile USA

How much do you pay per month for your Android? My bill is at around $90 including taxes, and I even have the bare minimum voice plan. That seems to be pretty standard for a voice/text/data plan in today’s market, and yet it still seems rather expensive. I remember the days of paying about a third of that with my crappy flip phone. We all long for the days where our cell phones cost less in the same way we yearn for the days when gas was a buck a gallon. Yet, somehow, Virgin Mobile has a deal that’s just about as cheap as my old flip phone, and it’s good enough to power an Android device. Combined with the Android pictured above, the Motorola Triumph, it’s probably the best value on the market. The plan is where you really save. While Virgin recently upped the price for its Beyond Talk base plan, it’s still cheaper than any other talk/text/data plan you’ll find on the market. It costs just $35 per month, and it comes with 300 anytime minutes plus unlimited messaging and data. The only catch is that after you consume 2.5GB of data, your speeds get throttled to 256Kbps. Still, with enough ingenuity — and we’ll be helping out along those lines — you can keep your data usage low and make sure you get full 3G speeds when you need them. If you need more minutes you can get 1,200 for $10 more, or you can get unlimited minutes for $55 per month. It’s hard to find anything better going right now. The Triumph might look pedestrian for an Android handset, but that’s precisely the point. It’s not a low-end handset you typically see on prepaid carriers. Instead, it’s a mid-level device that packs plenty of punch. The 1GHz processor means you won’t be lagging, as you would with the 600-800MHz processors on many prepaid Androids. The screen is a nice, robust 4.1 inches at 480×800 pixels. In fact, in terms of processor, screen, and memory — expandable up to 32GB — you can think of this as a slightly larger Nexus One. As with most smartphones on prepaid carriers, the price is quite a deal more than you’d pay on postpaid. Of course, you also aren’t signing a two-year contract, so there’s a give-and-take here. At $299.99 it’s more expensive than anything in Sprint’s Android inventory, but only $100 more than its latest Android handset, the EVO 3D. Think about it this way, too. Even if you’re paying $100 for the device, Sprint’s service still costs $69.99 per month, or twice what Virgin’s costs. In six months’ time you’ll have saved that $200 on your cell phone bill. Prepaid isn’t for everyone, but if you don’t need your Android for business purposes there’s a good chance it could work for you. Virgin has put together some excellent plans to help feed the data-hungry smartphone users out there, and they have a great handset to go along with it.