Mobile phones - advice?

[teamsaint]

TS, I would be most interested to know what this main basic thing is!

well it is basic for me.

I have a company phone which uses EE network. I live in an area with poor to non-existent EE signal.

Many networks and phones are set up to allow calls texts and email to be delivered over the broadband network. But it turns out that although my old blackberry could do this, over the Orange( EE) network, my new Iphone 5 S doesn't have the same capability as yet.

This likely wouldn't apply to you, but it is important to me, although I had no choice, but it would have been worth checking if I did.

[Nick Armstrong]

David, I am a dedicated Mac-ophile but I can't get on with the iPhone user interface at all.

That sums up my situation as well.

To my surprise, the youthful staff, slightly older than my phone, but not much, did not show the scorn for my phone which I had anticipated. In fact they seemed impressed, as if handling an ancient relic. One could recall "his Mum having a phone like that"

I had a similar experience only yesterday! Having been issued by work with a blackberry for email purposes, I saw no reason to change the phone I got on its appearance in 2005, a distinctly non-smart Sony Ericsson K750i





(Actually, I had a spare brand new one that I started using maybe 3 years ago so the current one I have looks almost new).

In a restaurant last night, I had it on the table as someone was late and texting progress. The youthful waiter caught sight of it and said 'Wow I really love your phone!! It's the one my parents had when I was about 8' ...

It's got great sound both for calls and via stereo earphones listening to its very good FM radio (it's what I have on in the background while cycling in the park), and a battery charge can last 3 days. Plus it's so TINY! it fits anywhere. All these attributes seem (from what I can gather) to set it aside from smarter more modern phones which seem huge if thin, and use battery charge like water running through a colander by comparison.

Frankly, David-G, I'd consider getting a new 'old' phone - you can get one like mine or similar for abut £15 on ebay or amazon, with an unlocked SIM facility which will work on any network.

People won't laugh at you. You'll have huge amounts of retro chic - and your battery will be going strong when others' slick smartypants phones are just so much dead tech which is too big to fit in their top pocket.

[teamsaint]

if I wanted a phone just for texts and calls, I'd buy a £9 nokia or Samsung at Tesco and get a £10 capped monthly contract at Tesco.

(we have had four of us on these kind of deals for years, and I can really recommend them).

no hassle, no harm done if you lose it/drop it in the water/throw it at an opera director in disgust.

[Stunsworth]

I've been using iPhones for the last 6 years or so. I've not felt any desire to move to another platform.

it's replaced my Palm Pilot (remember those?), point and shoot camera, Walkman/iPod, Sat Nav and has many other uses. Personally I'd really miss it if it wasn't there.

I think you need to ask yourself what you want to use the new phone for. If it's just for making calls, get a cheap supermarket phone. If you want to do more get an iPhone or Android.

[teamsaint]

incidentally, one of my favourite old phones was a Motorola, whose USP was that the if the battery pack failed, it could be replaced by 2 X AA batteries. I still have it I think.

[gurnemanz]

Yes, I've returned all my Apple products and I cannot recommend them. Apple have not delivered on their responsibility to manage Chinese employment law, and how Chinese companies treat their employees.

A rather shocking programme, but I am sure that they are not the only ones at fault. I am not an Apple user and have no reason to defend them. My wife uses an ipad and I don't like their the operating system. It was a present from our daughter who is a film editor and Apple maniac who uses a high end Apple set-up for her work.

[Bryn]

A rather shocking programme, but I am sure that they are not the only ones at fault. I am not an Apple user and have no reason to defend them. My wife uses an ipad and I don't like their the operating system. It was a present from our daughter who is a film editor and Apple maniac who uses a high end Apple set-up for her work.

Oh, by no means, but Apple trade heavily on their speciously
claimed high environmental and employment standards.

[Beef Oven!]

Oh, by no means, but Apple trade heavily on their speciously
claimed high environmental and employment standards.

Sadly, most firms do, whether it's real or not. Reminds me of the hollow claims of "we are an equal opportunities employer" claims from the 1980s and 1990s.

[Dave2002]

if I wanted a phone just for texts and calls, I'd buy a £9 nokia or Samsung at Tesco and get a £10 capped monthly contract at Tesco.

(we have had four of us on these kind of deals for years, and I can really recommend them).

no hassle, no harm done if you lose it/drop it in the water/throw it at an opera director in disgust.

We're even meaner, and use Tesco PAYGO. If we anticipate making a lot of calls, we top up by £10 or £15 which triples the value for about a month. The only thing is to remember to make one or two calls every six moths. Annual cost this way is about £60.

i can't beat caliban's "vintage" phone, but I think mine is a slightly later 810i model, which has Bluetooth, so that I can use it in my car. I bought that in 2007. I do have some other even older vintage phones, which I do not use, though I think they still work.

I have recently been given a Sony Xperia E3 as a present - which has some nice features, but also a glaringly stupid limitation. It has limited memory - around 1.5 Gbytes. It can support an additional 32 Gbytes of memory with a memory card - which sounds a good thing. Because of this I bought and excitedly installed a 32 Gbyte card.

However, not all Apps can actually use the extra memory, and in particular BBC iPlayer fails in this regard. According to the iPlayer website, the BBC is prohibited from permitting downloaded programmes to be transferred off the device with a memory card, so essentially the option to download TV programmes is not usable.
The iPlayer App itself can be loaded onto the memory card, but even if most of the Apps are moved to the memory card, there is very unlikely ever to be enough device memory to permit watching a downloaded program. Some Apps are not recommended to be run off the memory card anyway, as apparently they may run slower, though I have had iPlayer working OK. Some Apps just won't go to the memory card.

iPlayer itself does work, but only in streaming mode, which means a good Wi-Fi connection to a broadband service is required. This may be a nuisance for some, and would tend to mitigate against the use of the phone for offline viewing, such as on trains or aircraft. There may be a way, for the very determined,
using (for example) the VLC app, and other non DRM videos which could be downloaded to the memory card by other means.

My suspicion is that iPhones will not have this major limitation, though they have the "benefit" of much higher costs - £00s rather than the somewhat less than £100 which I believe my device was purchased for. Other Android devices may have the same issue.
Music playing may not be so restrictive.

This really is a pity - as otherwise this Sony phone is quite nice - but the same limitation may apply to many other Android phones. It's no good having extra memory capacity if in fact there is no easy practical way of using it for some wanted applications.

[Don Petter]

We're even meaner, and use Tesco PAYGO. If we anticipate making a lot of calls, we top up by £10 or £15 which triples the value for about a month. The only thing is to remember to make one or two calls every six moths. Annual cost this way is about £60.

We also use Tesco 'Pay as you Go'. Haven't come across the triple value offer yet, but I would estimate we put £10 on the phone about three times a year, so still only spend about half of your budget. (We pay 10p/min to standard numbers and 5p/text.)

[teamsaint]

We also use Tesco 'Pay as you Go'. Haven't come across the triple value offer yet, but I would estimate we put £10 on the phone about three times a year, so still only spend about half of your budget. (We pay 10p/min to standard numbers and 5p/text.)

if you only put on £30 a year, the triple credit probably wont help unless you have a heavy months usage straight after topping up.
there is no down side, and is easy to register for by phoning an automated line IIRC.

Tesco PAYG is excellent for light use.

[Nick Armstrong]

i can't beat caliban's "vintage" phone, but I think mine is a slightly later 810i model, which has Bluetooth, so that I can use it in my car. I bought that in 2007.

Yes my 2005 K750i also works perfectly well via bluetooth on the 2013 vintage car phone system!

[Dave2002]

if you only put on £30 a year, the triple credit probably wont help unless you have a heavy months usage straight after topping up.
there is no down side, and is easy to register for by phoning an automated line IIRC.

Tesco PAYG is excellent for light use.

We have found that Tesco PAYG is very good for our needs/wants, and the triple credit can be very useful. Triple credit is useful in situations such as buying or renting a house,, or for dealing with famly emergencies, or if someone is in hospital, when there can indeed be periods of high use, but which perhaps only last for a short period.

The other thing about triple credit is that the tops ups can be spaced out, to maximise their effectiveness. For example top ups could be done just before, or during significant trips within the UK. In some years gone by, we only did top ups once or twice a year, reducing the overall cost to perhaps £20 per year. The size of the top up can also be optimised. For some people a £10 top up - tripled to £30 - will be more than enough, while others might find that spending an extra £5 would be worthwhile. The extra credit dies within about a month, so paying for extra credit which doesn't get used is counter productive for the user. During the low use periods just run the remaining credit down, but don't top up unless you have to.

One of our cars has an in built phone - the Tesco PAYG card hardly ever gets topped up, so the average cost is probably about £10 per year (max). However, a recent event has suggested that although having a phone built into a car is very useful (it certainly is), there can be merits in also having a separate phone. Some friends recently had a problem with their car when driving in a flooded area. Finally all the car electrics failed, so calling for help would have been impossible using a phone built into the car - not a nice situation to be in.

Another aspect of mobile phones which I've only just become aware of is dual SIM phones, or even multi SIM phones. See http://pocketnow.com/2014/05/20/why-...t#!prettyPhoto[gallery]/2/ for more information.

Also see http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_SIM

[Sydney Grew]

(In regard to "Apple" and "Motorola")
I never use American-made equipment. I have been boycotting them since the Viet-Nam wars of the sixties of the last century. I would encourage other right-thinking members to do likewise. What horrors!

[P. G. Tipps]

(In regard to "Apple" and "Motorola")
I never use American-made equipment. I have been boycotting them since the Viet-Nam wars of the sixties of the last century. I would encourage other right-thinking members to do likewise. What horrors!

Whilst I often display a distinct antipathy towards telephones as such (probably a result of a lifelong employment in business) I can well see their value in certain circumstances ... medical and other emergencies and speaking directly to far-flung and dearly-loved relatives at Christmastide, for example.

E-mail is surely a more civilised form of communication where the sender has time to think before very likely putting his/her foot in it, or forgetting to mention the only thing of any real importance, and the recipient can choose a convenient time to respond, if indeed at all.

Accordingly, I have a Nexus 7-2 Google Android tablet rather than a 'smartfone' and it is of Japanese design, manufactured in Hong Kong, and this despite WWII atrocities and Tiananmen Square (not to mention rather more recent events).

Mr Grew might be interested in the following article which, noting the year it was produced, may be now itself somewhat of an under-estimation ...

https://www.techinasia.com/vietnam-100-people-145-mobile-phones/