My advice -- Look at what you need the phone for. It sounds to me like you don't really need a
reliable, mobile phone that can be
used a lot, since you said:
I pretty much only use my personal phone for photos because I have a work phone with a data plan.
Personally I don't think its worth it to tie yourself to republic wireless. I wanted a Republic Wireless style solution, but wanted the freedom to keep my
old phone and change carriers at will.
So I decided to get a google voice account and use it with google hangouts on my phone. It's my favorite setup that I've ever had -- since I work on a computer most of the day when I'm at work, I can get all my SMS in google Hangouts. If someone leaves me a voicemail, it
Transcribes what they said and sends it to my email. I love it. And the best part is, its free!!! And even if I change my phone or carrier, I get to keep the same number. Just for clarification I am talking about real SMS and phone calls on the PSTN, not a walled garden like WhatsApp or Facebook Chat.
Initially I thought, hmm, maybe I can get a tablet plan with data-only and just use Google Voice for phone calls over the data connection. Not a good idea. Google voice works well when the Wifi is good and strong and the ISP connection has a low ping (latency). At the request of my housemates, we upgraded from our cheap netgear Wifi router to an
enterprise-grade wireless access point. The difference was staggering. It vastly reduced packet loss and improved call quality.
But even on an ideal wifi connection, VOIP is not as stable and reliable as good old voice over GSM or similar.
So my strategy is this -- for all mission critical communication, plus data (and google hangouts sms) on the go, I purchased an H2O Wireless pay as you go plan. They are an ATT MVNO. It costs 5 cents a minute, 5 cents a text, and 10 cents a megabyte I think. This plan has a different number than my Google Voice number -- I didn't link the two. I love this because i can give my h2o number to business contacts for critical phone calls that I need to receive. But when I am just keeping in touch with friends via SMS, I use google voice. Even if im not in wifi its pretty dang reliable, and the data usage is minimal. I barely ever need to use the pay as you go plan, but whenever i need it, its there and its reliable.
So really its like having two phones, one that is free, and works pretty well in wifi, but only sends texts, slowly loads web pages, and does GPS when you are outdoors, plus another phone thats 5 cents a minute and works flawlessly anywhere. I love the flexibility, and it was way easier to set up than I thought it would be. It's been a month since I got the h2o plan, and I've only used about $4 out of my $10. I'm pretty happy with $4 as a monthly phone bill :D
My only gripe is that the google hangouts app doesn't work perfectly offline -- sometimes it will wait to connect before showing your text history. But that has never been a big problem for me.