IOT Is email data?

[Mark Lloyd]

Yes, you get to talk to a real person who speaks English.

On Ting, MMS (picture messaging) is data, and costs a lot less than SMS which is not considered data.

[micky]

Ting does look good and Replublic sounds good and Zact is probably good,

But would I have to change phone numbers?

And I think my phone is still locked to ATT.

I'd have to unlock it somehow or get a different phone, right?

I don't like this phone and wouldn't mind getting a different phone.

If I find my flipphone, are they also locked to one carrier or another?

[Tony Hwang]

Is any CDMA phones still in use down there? All GSM phones up here now. It is a matter of swapping out SIM card in your phone if it is GSM type. SIM card costs like 10 bucks. Unlocking is not that hard.

[CRNG]

On Sun, 10 May 2015 07:47:57 -0400, Ed Pawlowski wrote in

Thanks for the correction. I don't own a cell phone and I didn't know that.

[Tekkie®]

trader_4 posted for all of us...

Get a free Obamaphone and it will solve your problem.

[Tekkie®]

micky posted for all of us...

No, it is called portability by the FCC.

[trader_4]

Zact is kaput. They got bought out last year by Virgin Mobile. Virgin put the Zact phones with the adjust your plan on the fly concept into Walmart, branded as VM Custom, for about 6 months, then discontinued it. I still have the plan and phone with Virgin now, hopefully it will remain the same for some time to come, but it's no longer available for new customers.

In almost all cases, you can port your number. Some carriers might charge to do the port.

You have to see which phones the specific carrier of interest supports. They have lists.

They might be.

That plan sounds good if you rarely have to pay the extra $20 to get data access. If you pay the extra most months, then it's the same as the major carriers, ie ~$35. That's why I liked. You can adjust the plan in smaller increments, any time, from the phone, on the fly. With Zact which became Virgin, I can get ~250V, 250T, 250MB data for ~$20. With no data it's just $12.

[trader_4]

Sounds like you did.

Why do you hate the smartphone? I loved mine from the minute I got it. I use it to access email, the web, it gives me constantly updated news headlines, weather for the next 5 days on the homescreen, gasguru gives me the lowest gas prices in the area. With dropbox, if I take a pic, it's automatically sent to dropbox on my PC. I'd never go back to a regular cell phone.

[Ed Pawlowski]

All that and more. Track flights while waiting to head to the airport, weather any place in the world, especially if you travel, weather alerts, banking, deposit checks, (yes, deposit checks from the phone, not the bank). Find restaurants, shop, the list just never ends.

Never thought I'd be texting either, but I send a few every day.

[Ralph Mowery]

It is not an extra $ 20, but it just goes up by $ 10 for a total of $ 20, not $ 30. The data is free for the wifi with that deal and only costs if going through a cell tower. I am not really that much into the data away from home and have only used the wifi away from home. Sems like where I go most places have wifi. I have only had the phone for about a year and a half. One drawback on that phone is that it has special software and you can not put a miniSD card in it. The camera says 5 meg, but I don't think it takes as good of pix as a 4 meg digital camera I have. Almost never use that function. Best thing I have found for me is the calander program to keep up with things I forget about.

[micky]

When it's time to swipe the thing from the left to the right, to wake it up, when first turning it on and other times, it can take me several tries. Once it took over 8 tries.

Some other "buttons" don't work on the first try either. A gifl friend tells me** I'm capacitively endowed, and that might be good but not when using a cell phone.

When I get a call while driving, which has only been twice so far, once just as I was getting on a narrow, curved expressway ramp, I can't swipe that thing and drive at the same time. I'll pull over to talk, but it will go to voice mail before I can pull over if I don't answer. right away

When the screen goes dark, it takes 3 steps to wake it up again.

More stuff like that.

It was just so easy to use the "bar" phone and later the flip phone.

**Just kidding. But maybe there's some reason capacitvie buttons work better for other people.

I will never do any of those things. I'm home a lot, but I'm out a lot too, and only once have I wanted to read my email while out. (If a particular email had come, I might have been able to do a second errand in the same place on one trip. But when I got home, the email hadn't come anyhow. (I think it never did,))

(But, if I ever had to, that's why I will keep the smart phone and a car charger in the trunk.)

I do like the camera, though I've only used it a couple times, but I don't need to send photos to the PC.

The previous phone, the flipphone, was a Samsung, which provided software (Samsung PC Studio 3) to read and update the phone storage, like the address book, as if it were a USB drive. Not as convenient as Blue Tooth, but I only took a second to plug in the cable.

Android otoh keeps trying to get me to tie my phone to my gmail address, and store all my contacts on their server. I don't want to do that. It's bad enough people I know are storing my name and number on their server.

[micky]

I wanted to do that once, but don't have a data plan and couldn't find wifi without leaving my car. I figured he'd show up eventually, or call, and he did.

I agree. It's a technical marvel.

I don't plan to ever text, except.... it seems if one is contracting with someone, it's good to get it in texts and save it. They use this stuff all the time on TV court shows, and the litigants have agreed to or admitted to everything much of the time,. IIRC regarding Deflategate, there are text messages talking about how low the air pressure was. Hard to believe people would write that down.

[trader_4]

Depending on the phone, you should be able to choose from different screen lock options. I use the pattern draw and you can change it to whatever pattern you want. There is an option for a number code too. You've probably looked at the options in your system security menu, but if you haven't there may be something you like better.

Maybe you just have a bad phone. Mine is a ZTE Awe, nothing fancy, but the screen works perfectly.

I rarely use it when driving, but I don't think it's much harder to answer than my old non-smart phone. It comes up with a blinking icon in the center, with a red dismiss one to the left, a green answer one to the right. You just have to swipe from center to left or right. The old phone, as I recall, you had to press a button. I guess that might be a little easier. On some, I think you can change how many rings before it goes to voicemail.

Speaking of voicemail, one great thing on smartphones is you can put a visual voicemail app on many of them. Instead of having to go through 6 unknown msgs one at a time to figure out who they are, etc, you can see the six listed on the app, who they are and pick any of them to listen to in any order.

The ones I've seen, eg iPhone or a couple of Androids, all you have to do is the unlock process. Either enter a code, draw the pattern, etc. You can disable the lock, but then if you lose the phone, anyone has access.

If I'm expecting an email or have reason to check, I use mine at home, even when watching TV, instead of going to the computer.

The problem is you still have to do it. Then manually transfer the pics. And hence, unless it's something I really need at the moment, then it rarely gets done. I like knowing that when I take a pic, it's going to automatically get stored to the PC and optionally online at dropbox too. That way it's not only done, accessible, but it can't get lost and if I need space on the phone, I can just delete pics.

I have mine set to back up all the critical data from the phone automatically. That way if the phone is lost, screwed up, etc I have it.

[rbowman]

Verizon and Sprint use CDMA, AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM. Where I am, Verizon is about the only real game in town. I've never had a problem when traveling through the area west of the Rockies. At one time GSM was more of a west coast thing but I believe it's spread out.

It doesn't do voice at all but my Verizon MiFi is LTE.

[Tony Hwang]

Hurry catching up. Things getting more hectic by the day.

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

Here, the only carriers that provide a usable signal are CDMA (Sprint (which Ting uses) and Verion.

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

[snip]

Virgin uses the Sprint network (like Ting). However, I had some really bad experiences with customer service. It's hard to get to talk to a person and they ignored 90% or so of what I said (possibly because of not speaking English well).