Busy
I’m replacing my cellphone and wasting a lot of time evaluating alternatives. I started the search seriously after the end of le Tour, and eliminated a lot of the possibles by the lack of information on products. If they really had something worth buying they would make information available.
It is a bit sad that John McCain made one the last acts of his public career to return to Washington over the advice of his doctors to cast the deciding vote to push forward a bill to throw millions of people off their health insurance. Of course, like his father, John hasn’t spent a second of his life, from his birth in a military hospital, without taxpayer funded health coverage.
13 comments
About the phone thing: I too spent a lot of time thinking about it a. I suddenly flashed on my pager. (yes I’m old, gosh darn it!) and how I hated the fact that it had such a “leashing” effect on me. And that was my answer, a small phone without the doodads that make it a leash. I bought the cheapest Samsung at the time and went for straight talk. Still have it, wore out one battery though. My wife recently went for a high end almost a tablet phone and she’s totally enslaved by the device.
I currently have a Samsung ‘slider’ [separate keyboard] which has served me well for years using TracFone, but I would like to be able to use some of the map, weather, camera features of my iPad when I’m wandering around. The Samsung is getting loose and some keys are starting to fail, so I need to replace it.
I spent years with a radio and/or pager with me 24/7, so I know what you mean about ‘leashing’.
Bryan – So I gather you’re looking for a phone that you can tether an iPad to?
I’m shopping around myself – tentatively thinking about pairing an unlocked Blu smartphone with a Ting account. I also want a 10-inch tablet though, so I wonder if I’m better off keeping my old dumbphone and adding a tablet with SIM ports. Or a wi-fi tablet plus a pocket hotspot, but I’m trying to limit the number of rechargeables and accounts I have to pay for and fiddle with.
Buying from China seems to be the only way to get a reasonably priced and unlocked cellular tablet, but I’ve found it difficult to get reliable specs, and the churn of new models makes it a moving target.
I don’t need to tether to the iPad, it’s just that apps like Storm, Google maps are handy, and lugging around my Nikon isn’t very convenient. I decided on an iPhone SE which is an iPhone 6S equivalent with a small [4-inch] screen, for $170 tax included with 32GB. It uses the newest version of IOS and has a 12 Mp camera. I bought it from Consumer Cellular and am starting with 250 minutes of talk for $15/month and 2000 texts & 200 MB of data for $5/month. I may have to go to the next level on data [500mb], but it’s simple to change. [Note: most of the heavy data stuff I can do on WiFi]
I looked at a lot of different Androids, but those in the $200 range tended to have older version of the OS [4s & 5s] while the current version is 7.0.
You’ll become annoyed by that small screen soon enough, or at least I did, but maybe my eyesight is worse than yours. I got the iPhone with the biggest screen.
Why iPhone rather than Android? Because I keep wanting to like Android, all my millennial nerd friends are deep into Android, but frankly it’s a mess that annoys me too much. I have a couple of Android tablets and an old Android phone for testing our software, but thus far when I need an actual tablet in the field I end up taking my trusty old iPad.
I also really wanted to like an An Android phone, but OS updates seem to be an issue. The screen is actually larger than my current Samsung slider, so it won’t be an issue for what I want to do with it. The weather app and the map are my real needs. If the keyboard on my Samsung wasn’t starting to get flaky, I wouldn’t even have looked.
I got the cheapest I could w/ the features I wanted. Large screen, decent RAM, USB, uSD, latest (@ the time) Android. The big names weren’t any better. All have irreplaceable batteries. So when they die, new phone or a service center to get a replacement for almost the cost of a new phone. *shrug* Also, most don’t upgrade the major version of the OS.
They are now a short-term commodity (3 years or so maybe, depending how heavy the use).
You have better options on Android than we have in the US. I’m not going to be using it for much as a smartphone, some nav stuff, wx, locating stuff in big box stores. I have modest needs and limited my budget accordingly. The price of the SE dropped $49 from the beginning of my search to the end. I needed 5.0 or better for the apps I wanted to use.
My Android friends mostly go for the Google Nexus phones, which Google updates with the latest Android for, uhm, three years. After which it becomes a brick.
Google, as you might recall, is the company that refuses to hire phone support people because they’d have to hire 20,000 call center employees to handle the load. And despite the fact that they have half a trillion dollars in the bank, they simply refuse to do that. Now you know why I don’t buy from Google if I have any choice…
Yeah. I’m not a big fan of Google. Never have been. Though, I do have Gmail accounts, by necessity. Other than that, i don’t even use Google Search. I use DuchDuckGo. I use Chromium based browsers, but not Chrome. Way too nosy! I use Torch (because it has a suite of useful integrated downloaders for Torrent & Vids etc.) I also use SRWare Iron. Google are trying to out M$ M$! *shrug*
Adobe, M$, Oracle, Google, et al. act like they’re doing you a favor by ‘allowing’ you to buy their products. Google wants too much information to make me comfortable with them, or with Facebook.
Yep! Gmail keeps asking for my mobile number, for backup you know… Not a GOPers chance in hell! I signed up for an anonymous Russian eMail acc’t, then used that for my GMail acct’s. All are still active, & anonymous. I actually have a very small footprint on the ‘net & plan to keep it that way! I keep my K42 (& another pseudo nic I use) & my real persona completely separate. Much safer that way. After years in the Intel game, trust NOBODY is my #1 motto!
I’m not quite as careful as you, but I don’t give up personal data easily. Your data has value when sorted and classified for marketing, I know because I had two large clients who purchased and used data in support of ad campaigns. Amazon has the ultimate in marketing data, but Google isn’t far behind. If I don’t get a cut, I’m not interested in being annoyed.