New Phone (Almost)

[billroper]

I've been paying a stupid amount of money to Sprint for cellphone service for me and daisy_knotwise over the years. This is for POTS, no text, no data, and 500 minutes that we never use up.

What I've wanted to have is a smartphone with an extremely limited or no data plan, because usually I can leach off Wi-Fi somewhere. This was not an option with Sprint. And Gretchen really didn't want a smartphone, but with Sprint, we'd have both ended up paying for data access from everything that I could figure out on the website.

And then the GT list got into a discussion of phone suppliers and Ting came up again.

Well, look at that. I can port Gretchen's old Sprint phone over there.

And I can buy an unlocked Nexus 5 from Google and use it there. And should I find myself in England again at some point, I should be able to pick up a local SIMM card and plug it in on a pay-as-you-go basis.

As nearly as I can tell, unless I go nuts with data (which I will work to avoid), I should pay off the cost of the Nexus 5 phone within a year from the savings from changing plans.

The phone has arrived and is configured. The SIMM is on its way from Ting.

We'll see how this goes. The most entertaining part is likely to be getting off of Sprint...

Comments

[traveller42.livejournal.com]

Margaret and I have been very happy with Ting. Only having to pay $6 for each device is great. At least you will not see a change in coverage.

I'll be interested in what you think of the Nexus 5.

[billroper]

I can't tell you much about it as a phone yet (for obvious reasons), but as a five inch Android tablet, it's nice. Zippy fast and highly compatible with apps, which is more than I can say for my poor old Toshiba Thrive.

[whl.livejournal.com]

In some cases, compatibility and lack of zip is people coding to newer specs; I had to sell my iPad 1 to Target a couple of weeks ago, as it was crashing too often with recent versions of apps (probably running out of RAM). My iPad 3 continues to cope just fine.

In the case of Nexus devices, the two issues were the file system drastically slowing down with age, which they seem to have fixed, and that Google has declared you only get new OSes for 18 months.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

I know on the iPhone, and I assume on the Nexus, you can actually turn off mobile data in the settings panel. This should prevent you from using data *at all* unless you were either on wi-fi or went in to explicitly turn it on.

[billroper]

Thanks for the pointer! I actually found that setting while spelunking yesterday, but if I hadn't, it would be really good to know.

[whl.livejournal.com]

And, of course, as Tings home page points out:

"Ting wireless network services are provided on the Nationwide Sprint Network"

So you already have a good feel for the coverage.

[hms42]

Good luck with the new phone and service.

[joecoustic.livejournal.com]

Hope it works out well for you! I'll be interested to hear how it goes. I was just reading about Republic again the other day and that one sounds interesting too, if you have access to wi-fi.