Advice on Phones

[Malcolm Race]

I currently have a simple phone on EE (Samsung folding)

There are times when I would like to be able to text easily (currently choose one letter from 3) and look on internet

I have talked to EE and suggestions are Huawei P8lite

LGK8

Samsung J8 (2018)

I am currently using PAYG and intend to continue- the handset will be a birthday present so contract is a no-brainer as I only top up by less than £50 yearly

Does anyone have any experiance of these 3 handsets (I am aware that the earlier versions of the Smsung are short of memory

VMT

Malcolm

[stuart noble]

Consider MotoG4. £100 brand new. Very pleased

[Bill]

In message , Malcolm Race writes

I changed from a folding phone some time ago, my wife still uses one.

Mine is an Aldi Medion remainder bin (under ?50) one. It has been back to Lenovo, (who make it) 3 times, so I also have a very cheap Chinese spare. The Medion is 4g, the cheap one 3g, but I don't notice many differences.

I carry the phone in my pocket and keep finding that it has gone off into the woods running some stupid program that I didn't know was there. I need to find some sort of non-intrusive case. A previous phone with an attached leather fold over case was useless as it pressed on the side buttons when I was active.

I don't want to wander round like a zombie holding my phone at all times.

In many ways I miss the folding phone, but I regularly have to use my phone to show my wife the latest pics the family have sent.

[JoeJoe]

If you are simply after a phone that will take/make calls, send/receive SMS, and has a "keyboard", then just buy the cheapest smartphone that you can find. They will all do what you are after (and a lot more), for a fraction of the prices that you were quoted by EE.

I would personally go for one of the earlier Moto G's - plenty of refurbished ones on eBay.

[Chris Green]

As 'smartphones' go the Moto G is pretty good, the Moto E isn't that bad either.

However (like the OP) I wish I could buy a phone which was good at making phone calls, sending/receiving SMS and not much else but there's no such thing now.

[Max Demian]

What quoted prices?

There's the Alcatel U5 3G for around £70 which works OK with some limitations (camera no autofocus; limited built-in memory).

[Terry Casey]

My phone is a Moto G3 which cost me about £80, new,a year ago.

It wasn't locked (from new) and I use it on 3.

I doubt I top up much more that £10 a year - I don't make many calls and usually only use data when I'm connectec to a free WiFi service.

[Adrian Brentnall]

Interested to see this discussion - I'm looking to upgrade from a Huawei Y330 - which seems to have a fairly unresponsive/inaccurate touch-screen, and is refusing to allow me to download apps - even though it's got a large, empty sd-card plugged in...

I don;t use the mobile that often, but it'd be handy to be able to take half-decent photos (the Huawei complains that it's got no room to store them), and I'd like to be able to run some apps like VNC Terminal, to monitor the Raspberry Pi that looks after my glass kiln.

Prices on smartphones seem to vary widely - up to what I'd call 'silly money'. Somebody on a web-based forum recommended the Archos range - which includes a number of phones sub-100-euro - some of which seem to have quite decent specs.

Any other suggestions gratefully received. I don't need a 'selfie' camera (shudder!), or any other bells & whistles - just something that has a decent touch-screen, one reasonable camera, and more than the 4gig of internal memory that the Huawei has - or the willingness to actually use the 32gb SD-card!

Thanks Adrian

[Marland]

Have you considered something from the Doro range? They are designed for older people who just want a simple phone with reasonable sized buttons they don?t have to struggle to read, and clamshell so buttons don?t get pressed inadvertently but it isn?t compulsory to be old to buy one. Bought my Mother one the other day, she had one of the earlier versions for years but left it unused for so long that that it got disconnected and with the change from Orange to EE it was a step too far in recovering it . About 3 weeks Lidl had the Doro 2404 infor £24.99 so I grabbed one, the bumph with it steered you to Vodafone but it turned out to be a dual sim phone and unlocked.

GH

[RJH]

I bought a Xiaomi Redmi 4x for about £90, imported from China. About the same spec, and a fair bit snappier, than my 'main' iPhone 6. Toy camera and labyrinthine interface compared to the iPhone, but double the battery life, a bigger bright screen and waterproof. For the price, no complaints.

I use a SIM that comes as part of a Talktalk internet bundle.

[tabbypurr]

any old smart phone can do that no problem. I've seen ok smartphones in sho ps for £15 up. Better to pick a good old one than a new junker at that price.

NT

[alan_m]

On some (all?) phones the apps download to internal memory and then you have to manually tell the phone to move app in turn to the memory card. Some of the apps (perhaps the manufactured installed apps) may be locked to the phone's internal memory.

Again, the destination for phone's photos has to be configured for sd card. The phone will default to saving them on the internal memory.

[alan_m]

My mother has an older Sony Andriod phone that has a user configured simple or expert interface where the former has the basic functionality of phone, text, camera and a a few apps by default.

My mother gets on well with it although when something goes wrong the sometimes quirky Sony way of doing things can be a PITA. (It may be that coming from Andriod interfaces from other manufacturers trying to find a setting that must be there is just frustrating on the Sony)

[Adrian Brentnall]

Thanks. That seems to be the problem with this particular phone (based on my experience and some Googling). Many apps have a button for 'move to sd-card', but it's greyed out.

Aha! - rummaging around in the 'storage' section discovered a bunch of enormous log-files - which (after checking online) I deleted. There's now a lot more memory available..... ..and I've been able to download a couple of VNC Viewer programs - which is a start.

Can't get them to talk to the RPi yet ("Server did not offer supported security type")- but that'll be a setting somewhere - so a small step forwards!

I'll have to look into that... at least there's now some 'elbow-room' on this phone. The touch-keyboard is still dreadful though - makes life interesting if you're trying to enter passwords and you may or may not be selecting the adjacent key - even using one of those 'rubbery-pointer' things..

Think I still need a better phone!

Thanks Adrian

[Dave Plowman (News)]

That was the problem I had. Wanting a half decent camera - since that gets probably more use than the phone functions. But the best cameras rather obviously come in the most expensive phones. I bought a Galaxy 5 some years ago for PAYG, and am still pleased with the camera for the sort of use I give it.

So might be worth looking for a good used phone with a decent camera, since you're not going to need all the bells and whistles of the latest model?

[Bill]

In message , Adrian Brentnall writes

The first fault on my Medion/Lenovo phone was that it suddenly started doing that. There is usually a feature in the depths of Settings->Developer options called something like pointer overlay that shows a crosshatch on the screen. Unfortunately, it wasn't there on the slightly dumbed down Medion.

I have nothing but praise for the Medion warranty, though. All repairs were done foc, and it looked as though the carriage back and forth to Lenovo (in Austria, I think) cost them more than the original cost of the phone.

[Max Demian]

Settings->Storage->Default write disk: Set to the SD card.

I have Android 7.0 on my Alcatel.

Some applications have an individual write destination (on their Settings menus) of you don't want everything to go on the SD card.

[Adrian Brentnall]

Yes - that's a thought.... The camera on the Huawei seems to be 3.15Megapixels... the Archos core

50 I was looking at has two cameras - but the front one is 13mp (!)

Prompted by comments on this newsgroup, I had a bit of a furtle in the Huawei, and found a heap of logfiles that were occupying _lots_ of space. Sent them to the great bit-bucket in the sky, and the phone condescended to allow me to download a VNC viewer - and, after a tweak to the VNC server on the RPi, managed to access the RPi 'kiln temperature' screen on the phone - which is a step forwards...

Touch-screen on the Huawei still leaves a lot to be desired - so I'll keep looking for an upgrade. I guess 'most people' change/upgrade their phones quite frequently, so there may be lightly-used, second-user phones out there at reasonable prices - never really thought about it.. I suppose it's one of those things that either 'works' or 'doesn't'... and if the seller (thinking trader rather than private individual) is willing to offer some kind of warranty, then how bad could it be?

Thanks Adrian

[Adrian Brentnall]

Thanks - I found a little (large!) pile of old log files and nuked them. This freed up an amount of space, and I was able to download & install the VNC Viewer - which was happy enough to install the the SD-card.

Things like 'Google' don't want to have anything to do with the SD card... but at least I've got the VNC bit working. Still on the lookout for a better phone, though! Thanks Adrian

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Don't forget the quality of the actual lens. Might be an extremely expensive part of the phone, since the physics of this hasn't much changed over the years, unlike chips.

I had a picture of a car taken on my Samsung used in a club calender. Ignoring any artistic merit ;-), it looked as good in terms of definition and colour etc as any of the others, some of which I know to have been taken on very expensive cameras.