forgotten_aria | Entries tagged with cell phone

I switched away from my legacy t-mobile plan recently to mint mobile, so I've been a customer for less than a month. They send email out that says that they're replacing their pay-as-you-go international roaming with a $10/day or $40/week roaming plan and being arrogant enough to claim this is "A new and improved International Roaming service is taking off soon. International Roaming credit is gliding off into the horizon and being replaced with a new Minternational Pass program that gives you waaay more flexibility when traveling abroad."

This is NOT more flexible. I just want to be able to use my phone in Canada, but I don't actually ever do use it. Their old plan was you give them a little bit of money and they'd charge you for what you use. I sent them feedback about this, but I doubt it will do anything. This has all the markings of a decision that has nothing to do with what the customers want.

So now I think I have to look for a new cell service before my 3-months is up with mint. The thing I'm afraid of is that they haven't actually posted this change to their website. They still advertise the old system. In fact, it's hard just to get any news on this at all. Including there are some people on reddit who claim customer service knows nothing about the time line for when this change will go into effect. So how am I going to know if any other service is also planning to do this? So I can't do much research now and will have to do it closer to when my service is set to expire. I started to do a little poking and it's not easy to figure out what deals are temporary and how roaming works or doesn't. I'm betting I'm going to be switching cell phone carriers a lot in the next year.

I'm hoping the change won't happen soon so that my Christmas trip I can still have roaming at the old rate.

I'm just as mad that they are touting it as an improvement when it's only an improvement for them.

I wouldn't mind a new cell phone. The only problem is I like small cell phones. The one I'm currently using is 4.91in x 2.41in. I also don't like apple and google screwed me over on the both nexuses, so I don't want to deal with the pixel either. I use t-mobile, so I'd need an unlock phone, most likely. This doesn't leave me with a lot of options that I've found. I'd like Android 5.0 or better, I think. I'd like a better antenna too, but it's hard to search for that.

Does anyone have a newer small phone they love that is android but not google?

I just switched to my first non-physical keyboard phone since 2000.

( The boring story of me and physical keyboard cell phones )

I bought an unlocked phone from ebay. It arrived unlocked. I upgraded it to 4.4 (kitkat), it relocked. I can't seem to revert the phone to anything earlier than 4.4. So now I have a sprint locked phone that I have to sell.

I've looked on line and even with a new code, there doesn't seem to be away to unlock the phone or revert the OS without rooting it.

Know anyone on Sprint looking to buy a Samsung s4 mini?

I'm posting this mostly in hopes that if someone else has this problem, they'll find this post. I got a jabra journey, a car handsfree device that is supposed to get the contact from the phone via PBAP and then say the name of the caller. This wasn't working correctly and I checked the Internet and found lots of advice about how samsung hadn't implemented PBAP correctly, I tried some of the fixes but nothing seemed to work. Then I found a page that said:

"Make sure there is a phone icon next to the contact."

So I made a new contact with a phone icon and suddenly it worked! Then I needed a way to get them all to have phone icons and another person suggested exporting all contacts to the SD card and importing them back to the phone, which also seems to have worked. If I press "merge with google" all the phone icons go away.

Now to play more with internetless voice dailing and try to get that working too.

My new smart phone was getting horrible battery life (about 2 days of idle). I shut off data (since I don't have a data plan) and the graph is already looking so much better. I guess it was crying out for data and the network was giving it the cold shoulder, but it wouldn't give up!

I'm cheap and I'm picky. These two things usually lead to me fighting with the things I buy (the latter usually causing more problems.) So when I decided my early Christmas present to myself was going to be a smart phone but that I wanted to retain my existing pay-as-you-go-no-way-does-it-have-data plan, I thought I would have a battle. The idea being I would use it over wifi at the dojo to be able to read mail or access resources.

My research also lead me to one of the newer, more expensive phones. (wanting a physical keyboard limited my search greatly. Also finding out that modern smartphones don't always STAY unlocked, meant I had to stay with t-mobile phones.) This made the ebay game hard, but I got a nice deal on a used one, so being cheap was satisfied. It makes my hands smell like month old cigarette smoke, but I expect that to go away soon.

I got a Samsung Galaxy Relay.

As I said, I was just expecting a lot of work and a bit of aggravation. The phone I've been using for a while now doesn't always deal with my lack of data that gracefully. But here's the great thing. It did exactly what I could hope for. Other than the fact it wants a new sim to enable WIFI calling and a little aggravation with moving my contacts it seems to be completely happy to use wifi or not. Completely happy to send MMSes to email addresses with no complaints. It's been a long time since I've been this happy with a product.

And the contact list thing is a little weird, but would have worked fine if I had just known the trick, so I'll explain. I couldn't import my t-mobile saved contacts with wifi on because t-mobile wants to do it over it's own network. Since I have no data, I assumed I would just have to work around that, so I spend a while getting the contacts from my old phone into a format that I could upload meaningfully to google (since it was having no problem updating contacts from google.) I succeeded, was done fiddling for the evening, turned wifi off and then noticed that now it was more than happy to download my t-mobile contacts. Since it expects contacts from multiple sources it dealt cleanly, but it's interesting that even thought I don't have data on my plan, there are a few services t-mobile will still let my phone use.

I can't believe how well it all worked. Yay!

I got some SMS spam (and later MMS spam) phoned t-mobile and asked them to help me stop it, since it costs me everytime I receive one. they offered to change my phone number, I explained, this was untargeted spam, that wouldn't help anything and would be a horrible pain for me. They offered to shut off my SMS service... um... no. eventually she gave me a number to report the spam with, but no credit, no indication that they or I could do anything. Really, I don't blame t-mobile that much. I'm with them because they're cheap and SMS isn't designed for spam. Really, you should pay when you send, not when you receive. It's horribly overpriced too, because it's grandfathered and hopefully, someday, I can go pay as you go email and stop using it.

I'm kind of behind the times when it comes to cell phones. I'm hoping to get a nice shiny new one in the near future, but the features I want seem to greatly limit my choices. I know that andriod is getting a lot of nice apps, but the service I use has no data. Do all andriod apps require data? or are there some cool tools that work off line? IE, is someone who has no data plan just not care about the andriod OS?

I got to use someone's incredible (I think) last night and while I was amused at using the vibrate function to give physical feed back that you had touched a key, I couldn't get the hang of typing 'e's in stead of 'r's. I think I HAVE to have a physical keyboard on any phone I own. I just hope the market still has a nice supply of them by the time I need a new one.

woo, the t-mobile prepaid works the way I hoped. So I paid ~$90 last year, for the whole year of service, and I'm giving them $25 this year for the whole year of service. Woot!

I was going to pay only $10, but then I noticed the cents/minute was super low, so I thought I should get closer to the amount I used for the year, with out going over.

So, knock on wood, my ell phone problems seem to be all fixed and I'm completely happy with pay as you go now. Espeically since I switched in april. I used to be paying about ~$24 a month. So I would have paid $96 by now and I've only paid $80 and I still have more than a $100 balance in my account so I've already broken even with my switch.

I phoned t-mobile to try to fix the "your number is not in service" problem. The good tech person (after a really horrible costumoer service person) thinks she knows what was wrong and clicked a box. Since it's intermittent, it's impossible to test for certain, so please please please tell me if you get "that number is not in service" when phoning my cell.

I had some people try to call me and they got "this number is out of service" they called me 30 minutes later and it worked. I realize almost no one has a reason to call me, but if you've tried in the recent past and failed, please let me know. I'm hoping it's t-mobile just being spacy, not a problem the the pay as you go.

I finally went to add the $100 to my account (I'd been resisting both to make sure there wasn't problems with the service and so my year started as late as possible in case I misunderstood exactly how things worked.) T-mobile wanted to charge me $105 for my $100 refill. Well I'm really weird, and despite the fact that tax is a perfectly reasonable thing to charge, I felt kind of ripped off. So I bumped around and found a place that was selling $100 refills for $93 plus and extra 3% off. At first I was nervous there was a scam but I poked around and didn't find any pages saying "Don't use that site" and gave it a try. Everything seems happy. So I got my year of 1000 minutes for $90.12!

In talked with someone about t-mobile's pay as you go plan, I discovered you can use their t-zones for free. I spent the past few hours fighting with my phone about it, however, because it turns out that the defaul symbian web browser can't deal with wap and that there is a magical hidden wap browser that you can only get if you know to hold down 0 for about 3 seconds. I couldn't find it in any menu. Way to go!

And then I found out t-zones is severly crippled and broken. But hey, it's free and it allows me to refill my account from my phone (I think) which is good, since *233 wasn't working for me. I'm going to poke around a bit more and see if I can't figure out why the yahoo search doesn't seem to work, if nothing else.

two of the buttons on my cell phone stopped working. Now I can't lock the keypad.

EDIT: I don't suppose anyone has an e70 lying aroudn that they would want to sell me cheap. The broken buttons also means I can't enter in any new contact information.

EDIT: it's working again. who knows for how long.

Current Mood: grumpy

I've decided that, because of telemarketers and spammers on my cell that I'm not going to answer if I don't know your number on my cell. So please, let me know what you number is so I can enter you in, unless you already know I've got your number.