Offer to Test Drive an iPhone for a Week from T-Mobile

Not one to mince words, T-Mobile CEO John Legere is once again taking pot shots at the other three major U.S. carriers. On Wednesday, T-Mobile hosted its Uncarrier 5.0 event in Seattle, Wash. And not one to miss out on an opportunity, Legere moved this venue from its original L.A. site to Seattle to take advantage of the fact that thanks to an earlier announcement from Amazon, there were a lot of press people available to him.

During his opening statement, Legere said that he promised himself that he wouldn’t get angry by talking about the other carriers and what they are not offering, so instead, it made him very happy to talk about why no one else is offering unlimited data plans. Now, you may have heard that Sprint is looking to close on a deal to acquire T-Mobile, buy that did not stop Legere from also putting down Sprint—just not quite as vehemently as AT&T and Verizon.

You may think that he was taking a page out of a car dealership when the T-Mobile CEO announced, “You can have a seven-night stand. You cheat on your carrier and it’s free.” In a deal made with Apple, T-Mobile will offer you a seven day test drive of a brand new iPhone 5S. If you are old enough or can remember 30 years ago (that would be 1984), Apple offered this same type of proposal to try and get people to test drive a Mac instead of a PC.

Being the optimist that he is, Legere is expecting to see somewhere in the neighborhood of over a million people taking up the test drive offer. According to executives at T-Mobile, Apple itself will be providing tens of thousands of iPhone devices just for this promotion. Moving forward, when Apple releases the next iPhone, T-Mobile will upgrade the offer to whatever the latest models handset is available.

Since the acquisition of MetroPCS last year, T-Mobile has been working hard to upgrade its network. While it hasn’t reached deployment in all the regions that AT&T and Verizon has, it is said that T-Mobile’s high-speed LTE is faster in certain areas. Taking a page of turning lemons into lemonade, T-Mobile has the opportunity to state that it has the most LTE capacity per customer, due to the fact that it has fewer customers. You just have to love marketing!

When talking about AT&T and Verizon, Legere was quite straightforward with accusing them of being greedy for not offering unlimited data plans. Possibly because of the looming acquisition, he just complained about Sprint’s Framily plan in passing and said about its Spark service, “Sooner or later the Sprint guys will figure it out. The execution track record is pretty poor.”

However, as for Verizon, he said “The Verizon guys are catching up with their AWS spectrum. They took their eye off the ball and it hurt them…In a lot of markets we are beating Verizon because of their incompetence.”

So how exactly would this “test drive” option work? Well, according to the company’s CMO, Mike Sievert, T-Mobile will take your credit card information, however, this is supposed to be for the purpose of checking your mailing address. This is what will be used to ship your new iPhone 5S. Once the seven day test drive is over, you can bring the device to any store. You do have to keep in mind that since they have your credit card info, if you do not return the device you will be charged for it, Sievert is quoted as saying, “It should be fun.”