More than $1260 a year—that's the average cost of a high-end smartphone in the U.S., once you factor in the cost of the voice, data, and text services. Yes, for about $105 a month, you earn the privilege of Instagramming your Sunday brunch and having nearly 24/7 Web access at your fingertips.
The hefty cost of smartphone ownership has to make you wonder what people around the world are paying for the same devices and services that we have here. Given our massive rate of data consumption and the big charges that show up in our monthly bills, we must be paying more than everyone else in the world, right? Right?
"Absolutely not," said Daniel Hays, principal and U.S. wireless services advisory leader at Pricewaterhouse Coopers, "We do not pay more here in the U.S. than others in major markets do."
When you add everything up, the total cost of owning a smartphone in the United States is about the same as the cost of owning one in Japan or Germany. Ultimately, our phone costs fall somewhere in the middle: We don't have the cheapest phones and plans in the world, but we don't have the most expensive, either.
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