Device update: The calm before the storm

Andrew Moore-Crispin • March 6, 2013

There’s a lot happening on the device front here at Ting… but much of it is on the horizon and so there’s not a lot we can say at present. Not because we play our cards close to our chest but rather because we’d hate to make an announcement and then have to reneg.

Suffice it to say that the stuff you’ve been asking for most is precisely the stuff we’ve been working on… and there’s some exciting news coming very soon.

We’re still in the relative calm of the post-holiday season. The first quarter of the year is generally pretty sparse for device news. In Q2, things really start to happen… and we’re looking forward to offering more and more exciting device news just as soon as the opportunity arises.

Recent additions

We recently added the LG Optimus S up as a refurbished device. More, we put it on sale; it can be had for under $55 while supplies last.

We were also (finally!) able to fill the hotspot gap in our lineup with the addition of the Sierra Overdrive Pro 3G and 4G WiMAX hotspot. This hotspot sets itself apart with its LCD screen that offers much more detailed status updates than the blinking LEDs that we’re used to in mobile hotspots. It’s available now as a refurbished device and at a sub-$30 price that can only fairly be called compelling.

Coming soon

The Samsung Galaxy SII is coming back to the Ting lineup as a refurbished device. Demand for this smartphone has been consistent as a used device via our partnership with Glyde so we expect good things for it as a refurb too.

We expect to be able to offer the SII refurbs up for pre-order at a sub-$200 price as early as next week, shipping in one to two weeks.

Offering a device up for pre-order helps us to get a sense for how strong the demand for said device is. Using pre-order data, we can bump our order quantities up or down to ensure we don’t end up with a glut of stock and that we can meet the latent demand.

It’s hardly earth shattering (in fact, it’s pretty much Inventory Management 101) but if I hadn’t just written that, this would have been the shortest device update post of all time.

Consider that I get paid by the word a set and agreed upon amount per written word (even words that are written as a parenthetical aside) regardless of whether they confuse the point and, in a similar vein, regardless of how pointless and overrun the sentences that contain those words might end up and of whether the overall confusion of the sentence can be correlated and / or attributed, either tangentially or directly, to this excess verbiage.

Seriously though…

We’ll have some exciting news soon. We’re verily bursting over here.