Dante D’Orazio of The Verge compares the Jump, Next, and Edge plans across the United States’ three biggest carriers. The costs of these plans are broken down into tidy charts that explain what’s happening when you opt into these plans.

T-Mobile’s made a lot of news lately thanks to their outspoken CEO and marketing campaigns around becoming the “un-carrier.” T-Mobile’s greatest strength is that they have the most transparent plans in the industry and flexible options for those who bring their own phones to the carrier. Last week T-Mobile announced Jump, a plan that’s supposed to help people upgrade to a new phone earlier. AT&T and Verizon followed with Next and Edge, but their plans aren’t really that good of a deal. Dante has a couple breakdowns for those who want to upgrade every year and every six months. T-Mobile has the most affordable plans, but in the end none of them are that great.

Ultimately, most everyone is better served by sticking with their traditional cell phone plan and buying a phone at full cost when you can’t take that old smartphone any longer. It’s best, then, to think of these “upgrade plans” as extended payment plans that take advantage of customers who want the newest phones and want to pay little up-front by charging them massive fees as the months roll by. No deal.

I don’t think these plans are necessarily geniune attempts to help customers who want to upgrade early, but they do at least ease the pain of upgrading. Maybe people might find it easier to break up the cost of their next phone into chunks rather than paying for an expensive phone outright. Personally I’d rather just budget and buy the phone if I really wanted to do this, selling the old one afterwards, even though it’d be a bit of a hassle.

And these plans definitely make more sense for those who want the latest Android phones, since iPhones are (so far) on an iterative update cycle with major updates occurring every two years. For the iPhone it’s not the next phone that’s substantially better than the one you have now, it’s the one after that. If you have the iPhone 5 you’ll want next year’s. If you have the 4S you’ll want this year’s. Etc. etc. Things could change, but I think in the United States, the two year contract cycle is the way to go for most people. Today’s phones are powerful enough that the latest can stay relevant for a long time. You couldn’t say that in 2010, but you can say that now if you’re buying a flagship phone.

Nick Bilton of the New York Times writes:

Today’s consumers don’t want options. They are impatient. They want to tear their new shiny gadget from the box and immediately start using it. They don’t have time to think about SD cards or USB drives or pens or flip stands.

The surface RT didn’t allow that. Customers had to think about it.

The Surface RT had a lot of things that didn’t bode well for it. For one the name. The other was Windows RT, which I think is an even better example of what Nick Bilton is describing as far as options go.

I don’t think the Surface’s hardware ever really got in the way. An SD card slot or an available USB port don’t really interfere with what someone will do with a tablet. The kickstand and keyboard accessories are sort of the Surface’s cherry on top. The things that the Surface has on the hardware side are incentives. But I think Windows RT itself wasn’t what customers were looking for in a tablet.

On top of good hardware is an operating system that’s buggy and clumsy, getting in the way of the things people want to do. Windows RT is this cut down version of Windows that doesn’t let you install traditional desktop applications and wasn’t completely optimized for your fingers, and I think customers got fed up with this idea relatively quickly. I get what Microsoft is aiming for, the idea that you can have a tablet for both work and play that gives you a lot of choice in how you use it, but that point didn’t come across in their marketing and Microsoft’s implementation of it (like switching to the Desktop through a tile) ended up confusing people.

Microsoft said, “You can have the best of both worlds!” The result is a product that sends mixed messages about what it wants to do and what it’s really capable of. Surface RT feels like a product that had to hit some arbitrary deadline, was then rushed onto store shelves, and it shows.

The Surface RT doesn’t solve any pain points, which is the kicker. Things like the iPad take away a lot of the stuff that people don’t like about computers. People use their iPads because it instantly turns on, has great battery life, and doesn’t behave like a traditional computer. People generally don’t have to worry about maintaining their iPads. You don’t have to restart it to install updates every week, download the latest virus definitions, or run a cleaner to magically improve the computer’s performance. It’s a worry free device. The Surface RT was supposed to be Microsoft’s answer to these things — a product that sheds all of the legacy components Windows held onto for so long that would make the computer safer and easier to use — but ultimately Microsoft decided people wanted their desktops on their tablets so they could use Office, forgetting that that’s the thing people wanted to get away from. The irony is that the tablet that was supposed to offer more choice than the iPad ended being the compromised experience. That’s why it failed.