The incessant buzz around smartphones masks the fact that a significant portion of subscribers still use feature phones – about half, according to the most recent numbers from Nielsen. 

Virgin Mobile USA is targeting these customers with a new monthly prepaid $40 plan that provides all-you-can-eat voice, text, e-mail and instant messaging, plus 50 MB of Internet access.  

“Even with the huge increase in data usage, there are still millions of people who mainly talk and text ... and they deserve reliable service and phones," payLo Director Mark Lederman said in a statement. "Half of our current payLo customers are primarily talking and texting, and now we’re providing to them unlimited value that suits their needs.” 

The new payLo plan is only available with four feature phones – the Samsung M575, the Kyocera S2300, the Kyocera S2100 and the LG 101 – and there are extra fees for picture messaging and data exceeding the plan limit. Each picture message costs 25 cents and Virgin Mobile is charging customers $1.50 per megabyte for data past the plan's 50 MB cap.  

But the data limits could be hard to reach on feature phones, which are less bandwidth intensive than smartphones. If customers do reach the cap before the end of the monthly plan, they can re-up the service before the end of the billing cycle instead of paying data overage fees.

Virgin Mobile also offers two other payLo plans. The $30 monthly rate comes with 1,500 voice minutes, 1,500 messages and 30 MB of data. The $20 plan comes with 400 voice minutes and charges an extra 15 cents per text message, with $1.50 for each megabyte of data.  

Virgin Mobile is one of Sprint's prepaid brands. Sprint bought the company in 2009.