As Android Police's resident phone insurance guru, I'm here to talk to you briefly about AT&T's new multi-device insurance plan that it's offering postpaid subscribers starting today. The premise is simple: pay more money, be able to insure more things. They're calling it the Multi-Device Protection Pack, abbreviated MDPP, which is about as catchy as MERS.

Anyway, the plan works like this - you need at least one connected postpaid AT&T device (phone or tablet) as the "anchor" device on the plan. Once you've got that, you can add two additional "non-anchor" devices, which can either be more AT&T-connected smartphones (non-AT&T smartphones are not allowed), tablets, or laptops. The tablets or laptops don't have to be in any way connected to AT&T, you just need that first "anchor" device on the plan to get them on there.

The new plan is through Asurion and costs $29.99 a month, but there are catches. You're allowed up to 6 claims in a one-year period, and the individual value of a claim can't exceed $1500. For those with pricey laptops (eg, the target audience of laptop insurance), this is a very significant and slightly fine-print kind of catch. Given that an optioned-up MacBook can easily exceed $2000, you're not exactly completely covered.

AT&T is also promising "disappearing" deductibles, except that they don't actually go away, they just get lower. Go 6 months without a claim, and your smartphone deductible drops to $150 from $200, and at 12 months down to $100. The same deductible structure applies to laptops and tablets. Repair deductibles for laptops and tablets (AT&T will try to fix those, because they're expensive) start at $89, then go down to $66 and $44 after 6 and 12 months, respectively.

Is this plan worth picking up? Asurion has a good reputation for quick claim turnaround and customer service, though $30 a month is steep. I personally can't recommend any phone insurance - after researching it into the ground, the conclusion I arrived at was that it was definitively not worth it for someone in my situation. But, there are folks out there who could potentially use something like this, and if they're on AT&T, now they can.

AT&T