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Hi Swordmaker, I have appreciated your knowledge of Apple products in previous discussions. We are retired and unsure that we could justify the expense of even a used iPhone at this time. But we are very curious. 18 Billion dollars in profit indicates that Apple must be doing something right. We would appreciate your insight. Here is our current situation:

My wife and I have two Samsung S3 phones on Ting. We paid about $100 a piece for them on eBay... both of them look like new. Ting charges $6 a month for every handset on your account... then they charge you for your usage of minutes, texts and data. There is no contract and when we signed up... no activation fees... I am not sure if that is still the case. Our Ting account averages about $30 a month for both phones.

We also have a Samsung S3 on Freedompop which costs $20 a month for unlimited everything. We use it for listening to Pandora in the car and as a wireless hotspot for our tablets and laptops when we are traveling. Freedompop uses VOIP for voice calls so the call quality is unpredictable. This is why we usually use Ting for voice calls unless we are in town. Freedompop works fine for texting.

Both Freedompop and Ting currently support up to the iPhone 5 cell phones that have been previously activated on the Sprint Network. A decent looking and working used Sprint iPhone 5 is currently around $200 or more on eBay. We have rooted all of our Samsung S3 Phones and all of them can be used as wireless hotspots for no extra charges and without violating TOS agreements. Can you do that with your iPhone?

The S3 phones have decent cameras, but I am a bit of a photography enthusiast so I almost always use my much more capable DSLR and Fuji 3D camera.

We have a lot of apps that we have purchased or gotten for free over the years from the Play store and the Amazon App Store that we are very familiar with. For Christmas I received a used Samsung “smart watch” which interfaces with the S3. I didn’t want to hurt my wife’s feelings, but I thought it was stupid to begin with, but the thing is incredible and I wear it literally 24 hours a day, because it even keeps track of how long I sleep, along with so many other features that I don’t even want to waste everyone’s time trying to list them all.

I really would like to know from you or any of the other iPhone aficionados what your phones do that makes them so much valuable than our little Samsung S3 phones? This is a sincere request. I hope that it is not too far outside the parameters of the original discussion. It might help a lot of us who are not Apple users understand why it is that Apple is doing so well.