Pre-Paid

Wireless carrier Cricket has announced it will be offering two iPhone models pre-paid with no contract starting on June 22. The iPhone 4 or the iPhone 4S will be available subsidized for $400 and $500 respectively. This pricing is $150 cheaper than buying a no-commitment iPhone 4S from Apple.

Besides no contract, Cricket offers the advantage of an unlimited talk, text and data plan for only $55 per month. This undercuts all of the major carriers, although Cricket will throttle data speeds when customers exceed 2.3 GB during the billing period.

If you're looking to save money with your GSM iPhone, Straight Talk provides a pre-paid option without unlocking or jailbreaking. Straight Talk offers iPhone owners an unlimited data, voice and text plan for just $45 per month. This is less than half the price of standard plans from AT&T.

Straight Talk is a MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator), which means the carrier operates using other networks including AT&T and T-Mobile. Once you get a micro-SIM card from Straight Talk for your AT&T iPhone, the device won't know the difference.

Another day, another iPhone rumor... BGR is sticking to their earlier report that a new iPhone will be released this August, but this time their unnamed source also revealed that Apple plans to offer a cheaper prepaid iPhone and their next generation device by the end of this summer.

According to Boy Genius Report, Apple will begin selling the iPhone 3GS for around $350 with no contract. Their "incredibly solid source" could not confirm the iPhone 5 with teardrop design that they announced back in June, but they did confirm that the next generation iPhone will be announced by "late August-ish."

Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore thinks Apple should and will embrace the mid-range/pre-paid mobile phone market in 2011. Two-thirds of the 1.5 billion mobile customers worldwide are pre-paid users, and Whitmore believes Apple will try to reach these customers by releasing an unlocked iPhone priced between $300 and $500. Perhaps the iPhone 4S?

“With Nokia and RIMM struggling,” Whitmore said, “the time is right for Apple to aggressively penetrate the mid range smart-phone market to dramatically expand its market share.”

Whitmore predicts that an affordable iPhone priced around $349 will not negatively impact profitability, and will help give Apple a bigger share of the $70 billion worldwide market.