Slog tipper Kevin says, "I'd love to hear Paul's take on [Republic Wireless's] cell phone plan:"

As GigaOm reported last week, it will cost only $19 a month for unlimited text, data, and voice. It can offer these low rates because its phones use a special ‘Hybrid Calling’ system that relies on Wifi whenever possible, falling back to cellular connections when Wifi isn’t available. The initial cellular partner is Sprint, but Republic is working to use other carriers as fallback options as well.

Well, Kevin, I think it's a great idea. I think cell phone companies are making a lot of money off people right now because people have been trained to think of calling as a separate service from data. Once the average phone user starts realizing that voice is just another data service, they'll expect to pay less. I probably spend 80% of my life around wifi, at home and at work, and I'd be happy to rely on those networks. (Although in my experience, wifi does consume batteries a lot faster than 3G or 4G, and so that might be a problem for the phones.) I'd like to see more handsets, obviously—right now, it's a single, allegedly fairly decent, Android phone—and there's a scary clause in which they can kick you off their service if you use too much 3G, but it's a start. This is a much-needed change in the way cell phone business is done.

But to hell with what I think! What do you think?