We’ve been with Verizon Wireless for years. When it came time to upgrade our phones we bought them from Verizon and stayed with them (although I delayed upgrading every time by at least a year, sometimes longer). I never bought into the two-year upgrade marketing gravy train. We use our smartphones as real phones ( and texting with the wife and daughter). You know, real communications. We have apps (never pay for any) as a convenience. No games (that’s the reason for a tablet or two). Any photos we take with our phones are managed on our laptops with Photoshop. We don’t even have music on our phones. Real smartphone Luddites.
We’re three years plus into our current phones (Droid Razr Maxx). They continue to function quite well, but in the past six months I’ve detected a definite slowdown in ability. I put on my conspiracy hat here and state I believe planned obsolescence is in play. I know that the internal batteries may have a limited life as well, since we’re recharging perhaps once a day now instead of the typical every five to seven days. (As I said already we use our phones as phones, and little else. We don’t have umbilical cords to our phones like so many others. We use tablets and laptops at home for that. But I digress.)
We’re considering the Google Pixel phones, and along with it Google’s own wireless network (Project Fi). Google doesn’t actually have a wireless network. Instead they partner with three wireless carriers so when using the phone it automatically connects to the best available 4LTE partner network at the moment.
We have no contract with Verizon. It’s month to month. Verizon merely carries over our old plan. Our bill runs around $140 a month for two phones (we have limited minutes and texts that we’ve never exceeded and share 4 GB of data a month that we also have never exceeded). Google’s Project Fi equivalency should run us about $75 a month, but with unlimited minutes, unlimited texts, free hotspots and the same GB usage (but credit for unused GBs).
Anyone using Google’s Project Fi? Your opinion?