Yeah, it's really expensive. It'll be around $600 bucks, unless you sign a contract. No one wants to pay you for nothing, unfortunately. They want a promise of future revenue.

A promise of revenue comes the same way for any
OTHER BUSINESS!!!!! It's called a satisfying customer experience.
Gosh!!!! Business goes 2-ways, if smart phones weren't so outrageousesly priced I'm sure a lot more people would pay retail.

Contracts are not normal business.
Receiving continued business from a
customer is based off of customer satisfaction
not a contract.

That's how ANY business in this world works,
except wireless in the U.S. customers return based if a satisfying experience, not a contract.

That's like asking ExxonMobile to pay taxes. The carriers are making more from data revenues than the so-called Full Retail Price of these handsets. Why SHOULD they give that up? Would you if you were in their place?

That would be nice but unfortunately we have a lot of people scamming the system but opening an account and never paying the bill and Verizon eats the cost of the phone. Verizon doesnt set the retail cost of the phones.

How many lines do you have on your account? It's $300 per line. Another thing you can do is find someone who is willing to screw up their credit to purchase the phone at contract price, then perform an ESN/MEID change to an old phone and then you have your number swapped to the recently purchased phone. Your idiot friend then refuses to pay their bill. Verizon will hotline the CPE handset NOT your fancy, spiffy new phone and your friend then has messed up credit after Verizon sends them to collections or whatever. If your friend is dumb enough to do this you can probably get them to do it for minimal cash. Say $50? Worth a try...

Okay. Maybe you don't have any friends that stupid. (Nothing to be ashamed of). I was just thinking of another possibility. Let's say you have a relative who is on Verizon who is extremely happy with their phone. Maybe a grandparent or parent. They may be eligible to upgrade but have no intention of doing so... Well, put on the charm young one. Ask them if perhaps YOU can have that upgrade. So...assuming you succeed in sucker---I mean convincing your relative into doing this... The next step is to process an upgrade on their line of service. I recommend doing so via My Verizon although Telesales would work as well. Personally, I detest actually speaking to Verizon reps unless I am just calling to waste time intentionally. Anyway...
(continues)

If I knew where to find a hot phone which was not on Stolen/Deny list...I would buy them all up and place them on Ebay.

Why buy it off contract?

U can go through craigslist or ebay it will be a bit cheaper.

You dont have to worry about a clean esn with lte phones

best phone in verizons line up. Also, 4.0 is pretty killer.

I'm just really not a huge fan of MotoBlur in any form.

I got a Xoom, that thing is pretty cool.

Blur is ish, thats what roms are for. Spec wise, rezound is better and HTC lets you unlock the bootloader. Im just scared to make the jump i guess. But regardless, its going to be a while before I get anything new because no upgrade = no cool phone for mikey.

I might look at the CPO option.

Yes xoom is cool. check out rouge/kangs stingray build. I posted my quadrant score result on FB. Also ICS.

i'm having problems getting it activated currently. No 4G for me.

Not like im in a 4g area anyway...

But you got the 4g model though, right?

Im not in a 4g area either, but evidently you need to have the 4g hardware for the rom to work.

Plus overclock to 1.7 GHz. Beast.

How much did you pay, if you dont mind me asking?

didn't pay anything. Perk of the job

Hard work pays off, eh?

Promotion gift or requirement? Guess you cant root it if its company owned.

lol, instead of a Mifi they got me a tablet with the hotspot feature activated.

guess they got a good deal on xooms.

Most likely considering they are EOL

yup. Whatever, thing came with the media dock. I've got a Netflix viewing device on my bedside table now. Ballin.

That was one of the first things I bought. Well the HD Speaker dock to be specific. Is a beast. There is a tablet equalizer that you can download, too. helps if you have the dock.

And the free otter box promotion the company is doing? Guess which free otter box I said I wanted. I didn't see any limitations on what kind of otterbox. Super ballin.

Get me a new phone, perky.

You seem to be a big Motor fan, huh?
My first Android smartphone was the
original Motorola Droid, had problems
with the keyboard, charging port, and
touchscreen, no more Moto for me!!!
I'm done with Motorola like a bad girlfriend!!!

Current smartphone, Droid Charge, Go Launcher EX, dreaming of owning a Galaxy S3 at some point, but I refuse to pay $300+!!!

Ah well...just checked it is back to $199.99 online.