Straight Talk has only two "smartphones" and they are failed Nokia phones... the ones that have Nokia's President announcing last week that their company is standing on a burning platform, the Symbian platform. Nokia has just announced they are abandoning it and partnering with Microsoft.
Any browsing you can do is crippled and limited to mostly mobile websites. They do not offer any Android phones at this time. According to the critiques of their service I read, even their service is limited and browsing and email has to be done through Straight Talk servers, apps for their Nokia "smartphones" cannot even be purchased from the Nokia Ovi app store, but rather through the much more limited Straight Phone app store. These are serious limitations on their smartphones.
I looked at the phones. They offer 26 phones (at least in my area in California). YMMV. The FREE phones are reconditioned older (four year out of date) model flip phones, which is all well and good... for what they offer, they will do the job. And the other phones Straight Talk sells are at least two year old surplus or remainder models from other manufacturers.
For example, Straight Talks NEW top of the line smartphones, both announced mid December 2010 to replace their older "smartphones" that had numerous complaints lodged against them, are the Nokia E71 and the Nokia 6790... but the E71 was released March 17, 2009 and the Nokia 6790 was originally released as a captive phone, the Surge, on AT&T in July 2009.
Straight Talk Phones are not, and probably never will be, cutting edge. They keep their prices down by selling older technology. So what? They are what they are. They offer value for value at a cut rate. They do not and will not appeal to people looking for cutting edge phones.
They have to be sub-contracting with some other carrier for their signals. Who? They don't say. But it has to be AT&T, since their phones are GSM phones and they have to be using the AT&T frequencies since from the phones I saw, the ones I recognized I had seen all of them with AT&T logos at one time or another.
By-the-way, a "semi" smart phone, what your wife has, is what is known as a "feature" phone.
Most people really don’t need “bleeding edge” technology or even leading edge. Heck, there are even companies with cell phones that merely call other people and do nothing else. My wife just gave me her old phone (a Samsung R451C) when she bought the feature phone. I use it to call people. PERIOD. Even though it’s capable of more.
When I spilled tea on my iPhone 3G, I swapped my SIM card into my brother’s old Razr for a couple of days. I was impressed with how well it does what it does. I was even able to use iSync to load my contacts and calendars onto it. Excellent build quality and sound, a crisp and responsive interface, all in a nice little package.
There is certainly a place and a market for “feature” phones. I don’t think there’s much of a market for featureless phones any more; it’s easy enough to ignore the features you don’t need, and you can’t get much cheaper than free. There is a niche market for just-a-phones like the Jitterbug, but
Me, I’m hooked on smartphones, after 2.5 years with an iPhone and three years with a Treo before that. There are fewer and fewer tasks that tie me to my desk.