New cell phone dilemma.

[Bestwifeever]

I just switched from a HTC 3g phone using Virgin Mobile's $35/mo everything plan. The 3G was incredibly slow and I suspect dropped to 2G during peak periods. I doubt it was bigger than 8 gigs and that was plenty with the mini sim for photos. I kept it on wifi enabled and even though data was on, the phone never switched to data if our wifi was available.

 

[aja8888]

I installed Data On-off. One installs and then makes it active.

Yes, that's the one I use also and it is very good, and it's free.

 

[JustMeUC]

I had a Nexus 4 which I DEARLY LOVED... but it only had 8GB and was not expandable. It was not even close to being enough. I use my phone as my MP3 player and I have over 8GB of songs I would like to put on it, it was passed on and now I have the Nexus 5 with 32GB and am MUCH happier!

When I am in the USA I use Straight Talk which gives you 3GB of data in their unlimited plan. I can't imagine using that much unless you want to stream a lot of something.

 

[ERD50]

This article has what looks like a good description of the problem.

KitKat and SD cards — what's fixed, what's broken and what's misunderstood | Android Central

Basically, sdcards are formatted in FAT format, for compatibility. But FAT does not support permissions/ownership, so any app could do anything it wanted with any data on the sdcard, whether that app was supposed to have access or not. A security nightmare.

The file system internal to an Android phone is ext3 (or maybe ext4?), which is a widely used Linux format that supports permissions/ownership. So, in the name of security, some changes were needed. From the little bit of further reading I've done, it sounds like the restrictions will be manageable for most people, and the sdcard will still be useful.

I'm very interested in that new Moto G with sdcard. DD and DW have the Samsung T679 Galaxy Exhibit II 4g, DW is using the 'Gold Plan' pre-pay/pay-as-you-go plan, DD is on that $30/month pre-pay 100 minute talk, unlimited text, 5GB hispeed, unlimited lower speed data (that's a mouthful!).

That T679 seemed to be the best low-cost Android back a few years ago, and it's pretty good. DD thinks it is slow, and I imagine this Moto G is a big step forward. I'll be watching the reviews.

-ERD50

 

[calmloki]

It is with deep regret that I must announce the passing of my Nokia 6230b. The faithful warhorse took massive abuse since 2/2004 and kept on working. Recently though the buildup of pocket lint and impacts resulted in loss of response in the upper corner buttons and, fatally, the #3.

Amazon is sending out a new Nokia 520, plus a case and a dash mount for navigation, for the grand sum of $69.45. If all works as planned I may add a 64Gb Sandisk micro SD card to store maps for offline use.

Went round and round over specs and dithered about before realizing this was a huge upgrade over what I've used the last ten years and pulled the trigger on this adequate model.

The Nokia is dead. Long live the Nokia!

 

[photoguy]

So my question is this. How restrictive do you think that 8 Gib internal drive is going to be. Your really only left with 5.2 after operating system and their applications. So any applications and data you want to download and use is going to have to go on that 5 gig remaining internal drive and not the SD card. I don't care about having music on it, but it would be nice to have a few audio books on it, and they take up some room and I don't think I will be able to put those on SD either.

The stuff that usually takes up a lot of memory are games (some but not all) and videos. If you don't have either, I think you should be good. Another application that might take up a lot of space are GPS apps if you download the entire map (e.g., say North America) at once.

Regarding audio files, if you actually have the files you can look to see how large they are (depends on the compression). But when I look at my files, an hour long podcast is only about 25MB.

That said, I would probably just go for a 16GB version if the cost difference is minimal.

 

[NoiseBoy]

I am paying $59 a month for 1GB of data and unlimited talk/text with T-Mobile. Data coverage is poor, much worse than when I had Sprint/Virgin. No data on major interstates! Text/talk coverage is good, so T-Mobile must rent that from AT&T. I recently came back from a trip to London and my phone did work as advertised; free text and data. In fact, data coverage (3G) in London was excellent.

I have a Moto X (love it) and using it without any issues in London was a plus. But, I'm not happy paying $59 a month and getting really crappy coverage. I'll have to check into this deal at Walmart. How can they sell more service for $30 than T-Mobile is selling for $59? Am I just a sucker?

FYI - 1GB of data is plenty for me. Never gone of 500Mb in fact.

 

[RE2Boys]

My son just left T-Mobile due to poor data coverage, not only in our home town but even worse when traveling between cities. After unlocking phone, switched to Consumer Cellular, a reseller of AT&T service but with a more flexible pricing plan.
www.consumercellular.com

 

[Lsbcal]

What part of the US had poor T-Mobile coverage?

 

[RE2Boys]

What part of the US had poor T-Mobile coverage?

Live in NW PA, travel to Cleveland area and to western Iowa frequently. It's spotty within Erie, PA, along I90 and data coverage between any major cities is largely useless.

 

[modhatter]

I am paying $59 a month for 1GB of data and unlimited talk/text with T-Mobile. Data coverage is poor, much worse than when I had Sprint/Virgin. No data on major interstates! Text/talk coverage is good, so T-Mobile must rent that from AT&T. I recently came back from a trip to London and my phone did work as advertised; free text and data. In fact, data coverage (3G) in London was excellent.

I have a Moto X (love it) and using it without any issues in London was a plus. But, I'm not happy paying $59 a month and getting really crappy coverage. I'll have to check into this deal at Walmart. How can they sell more service for $30 than T-Mobile is selling for $59? Am I just a sucker?

FYI - 1GB of data is plenty for me. Never gone of 500Mb in fact.

I don't have enough experience with data usage yet. I only have experience with talk time, and as I know I don't use talk time very much, I am ok with the 100 minutes. (I have an Ooma phone for home phone use) But most people wouldn't be. After I have time to experience data use out on the road, I could better say that the 5 gig is an overkill. But if you want any kind of data combined with talk and messages, it is hard to find anything less than $30 a month. Previously I got by with an old fashioned flip phone with 1000 minutes for the year from T-Mobile, and it only cost me $100 for the year. But unless I go on the Sprint network, $30 a month is the cheapest I can find that allows 4G, with generous data.

I always have the option of changing plans if say I find that I don't need as much data, but could use more minutes. Then I could go to Straight Talk for the $45 a month plan.

 

[modhatter]

This article has what looks like a good description of the problem.

KitKat and SD cards — what's fixed, what's broken and what's misunderstood | Android Central

Basically, sdcards are formatted in FAT format, for compatibility. But FAT does not support permissions/ownership, so any app could do anything it wanted with any data on the sdcard, whether that app was supposed to have access or not. A security nightmare.

The file system internal to an Android phone is ext3 (or maybe ext4?), which is a widely used Linux format that supports permissions/ownership. So, in the name of security, some changes were needed. From the little bit of further reading I've done, it sounds like the restrictions will be manageable for most people, and the sdcard will still be useful.

I'm very interested in that new Moto G with sdcard. DD and DW have the Samsung T679 Galaxy Exhibit II 4g, DW is using the 'Gold Plan' pre-pay/pay-as-you-go plan, DD is on that $30/month pre-pay 100 minute talk, unlimited text, 5GB hispeed, unlimited lower speed data (that's a mouthful!).

That T679 seemed to be the best low-cost Android back a few years ago, and it's pretty good. DD thinks it is slow, and I imagine this Moto G is a big step forward. I'll be watching the reviews.

-ERD50

I had read that post before, but it still leaves me confused as to what and how the SD card will be able to be used. It does say in the write up, that data on your SD card would be wiped out with any future KitKat updates. That doesn't sound good. Does it mean that nothing is going to be put on the SD card unless you transfer it over from your computer? Does it mean, when you take pictures that there going to go on the internal drive and not the SD card.

If so, can they be transferred over to the SD card later? I am totally confused by this.

 

[NoiseBoy]

My experience is largely for Illinois and like RE2Boys, I've found that data coverage on interstates between cities is non-existent. Big change from having Sprint/Virgin 3G coverage on these same roads. Why is that a big deal you may ask? Well, it means that you can't use a T-Mobile phone to navigate with, so that's kind of a drag. Keep your Garmin handy!

Even within cities of over 100k where I live and work, coverage is not nearly as good as it was on Sprint/Virgin. If you're wondering why I switched, it was b/c Sprint did not offer 4G coverage in my home area when it was time for a new phone and I didn't want to buy another 3G device. They offer it now, of course. I could put up with the poor coverage better, if the deal was better. But after paying full price for my phone (it is unlocked), and with a $59/month plan to get the "free" world coverage, I'm less than $10 a month under the price of an AT&T plan, which has much better coverage.

I will look into the Walmart and consumercellular options.

 

[ERD50]

I don't have enough experience with data usage yet. I only have experience with talk time, and as I know I don't use talk time very much, I am ok with the 100 minutes. (I have an Ooma phone for home phone use) But most people wouldn't be. After I have time to experience data use out on the road, I could better say that the 5 gig is an overkill. But if you want any kind of data combined with talk and messages, it is hard to find anything less than $30 a month. ...

One option, that I bring up from time to time because I learned about it here, is the T-Mobile 'Gold Plan'. It clearly won't work for everyone, but if you are a low talk-time user, it can be as low as $0.83 per month, after the first year of putting $100 on it - and those minutes roll over.

Now, there is no data at all under that plan, BUT, if you only use data for about < 10 days/month, you can switch to a $2-$3 per day plan with unlimited talk/text/data ($3). And switch back after a day or two, or a week, or whatever, and you never lose your minutes from your regular $10/year plan ( ~ 100 minutes). Remember, you can use wi-fi where available.

I had read that post before, but it still leaves me confused as to what and how the SD card will be able to be used. ...

I'm somewhat confused as well. I understand the security issue with FAT format not supporting ownership/permissions, but I have not read up enough to fully understand all the implications.

But I gather it is a bigger problem if you are trying to upgrade an existing phone from an older OS version to KitKat (which only somewhat technically inclined people would probably be doing anyhow). In that case, you would have a bunch of existing apps that don't 'know' about the new restrictions, and that could 'break' those old apps.

But if you buy a new phone with KitKat, those apps should be able to play withing the new restrictions, I would think. So nothing should 'break', but maybe less can get stored to the external SD? This is just a semi-educated guess on my part, but I would think that the Google authentication program could verify that apps could read/write to the SD-card only through a specific API (application interface) in the KitKat OS, so the OS would provide the security, and only allow writing to the folder that was created by that app. But that is just a guess.

My experience is largely for Illinois and like RE2Boys, I've found that data coverage on interstates between cities is non-existent. ...

DD lived in a small town in central IL for a year, and had to switch from T-Mobile to Verizon for voice coverage, they were the only game in that area. We've never had problems on the interstates though, but there were stretches we were limited to the slower speed network. I only know that as other DD was driving, and I was messing with her phone the whole way, downloading apps and such.

-ERD50

 

[gauss]

For data, I signed up with Ting and bought one of their refurbished Android smartphones for $80 unlocked. I spend about $10/month with Ting if I use data only (up to 100MB) and $13/month if I also use it as a phone (up to 100 minutes). I primarily "write" to the SD card by taking photographs with the phone. When the card fills up I copy the photos over to the computer.

I usually use a flip phone for voice however.

-gauss

 

[aja8888]

My experience is largely for Illinois and like RE2Boys, I've found that data coverage on interstates between cities is non-existent. .

That's interesting as it may be an Illinois issue. I travel all over the U.S. (and Canada) on oil & gas projects (for 25 years now) and find that along the interstates is where I get the best coverage. I usually see cell towers along the freeways, too.

Since having cell phone starting in 1988, I have used AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, the clones (PagePlus, Straight Talk, etc), and some provider names you would not recognize and never had a connection problem along a highway. I have problems in remote areas of North Dakota west of Minot, but that is to be expected.

My current provider is Page Plus (Verizon towers) and I have issues in southeastern Oklahoma as for some strange reason, they don't have service there. That area is populated too.

 

[kramer]

I just wanted to add a quick note here. I use an Android (KitKat) application called Pocket Casts to manage my podcasts (both audio and video) on my Samsung Tablet.

This application does not have the option to install it on the microSD card. But it stores everything you download on the microSD card automatically. So right now, it is using about about 20 Megabytes in application space and cache in the main memory. But it using 1 Gigabyte on my SD card -- these are all the podcasts and videocasts that I have downloaded and archived on my device.

So this application is accommodating a microSD card perfectly for me.

 

[Lsbcal]

Any recommended podcasts?

 

[zinger1457]

With my previous cellphone, which was really lacking in internal memory, I used an android app (app2sd) which manages the movement of apps to the SD card. When installed it will scan all your apps and tell you which ones can be moved to the SD card or if you install a new app it will automatically (if supported) pop up and ask you if you want the app installed on the SD card. Seemed to work good for me.

 

[ivinsfan]

Does anyone have any experience with Republic Wireless, I want smart phone ability and free national calling only when we are away from home. We have a grandfathered dumb 4
phone plan that we use for our business. RW seems as though it might give me what I need at a good price, if it works as advertised. I noticed it was endorsed by Mr MM.

 

[Sirka]

Republic

Does anyone have any experience with Republic Wireless,

We use Republic; started with the DEFY XT, but upgraded to Moto X as soon as it came out. It is a real smart phone and the screen is big enough for my big fingers. We use $10 plan except when we travel and need the Internet. It is easy to switch right from the phone.
Often I log on to wifi when at Kaiser and other places - as a guest. It is same as using a wifi on our laptop.
They did over the air update last month (no problem), so we now have Kit cat OS. DW loves the phone, she checks Facebook, email, inventory and shopping list while in the store. It's great! One phone is enough for now, but I might get another when they cut the price. They have specials now & then. It works for us (unlimited everything), but it is not for everyone.

 

[bld999]

I bought a republic moto-x in January, and so far it's been fine. I also use the $10 plan, which gives you handoff between wifi and Sprint cellular. That plan gives you copious data via wifi and phone only while on sprint. So far it operates fine and saves me about 30 bucks per month compared to my previous verizon contract with old dumb phone.

I think if I was still running a business, I would get something using verizon's network, simply because it has better coverage and seemed more reliable. Retired, I can work with the holes in the network and have become pretty good at finding wifi to allow data when away from home while maintaining the 10/ mo. plan.

Republic's phones will not work on any service besides theirs, one caveat you need to get comfortable with, and I am sure it is frequently a deal killer.