Boost Mobile, the Irvine mobile phone company that popularized pre-paid plans for teens, is dropping the youth angle and opting for something more universal: Value.

“Boost is refocusing our strategic direction to offer value and simplicity in products and services geared to that segment of population that is motivated by cost,” Andy Colley, Boost’s director of corporate communications, told me this morning in a phone interview.  ”We have no interest in competing with the iPhone.”

Specific details will be announced after in the first quarter of 2009, he said. The company already offers a variety of “value” plans, including an unlimited text-messaging plan that averages $1/day. The highest-priced unlimited talk and text plan is $70/month.

I’ve always considered Boost Mobile to be the scrappy outsider in the mobile phone industry. The company, which uses major investor Nextel’s wireless network, always seems to be having fun.

From its “Where you at?” TV commercials featuring Blink 182′s Travis Barker to extreme sports events and rock concerts for young volunteers, Boost’s existence has always been tied to youth culture. On one Register visit to its office,  the company turned its street into a totally killer motorcycle ramp (see video on right) — one of the most extremely un-Irvine sightings I’ve ever seen. Read the rest of this entry »