Cell phone blues - need help choosing

In My Humble Opinion
1

Actually, i need help understanding, also. Right now, the choices are overwhelming, so i’m looking for some advice.

I am not big on texting, but i think part of the reason for this is the crappy phones ive had in the past and their crappy keypads. So, what i’d like to have is something like (or something EXACTLY like) a blackberry. My provider doesnt really offer a decent blackberry or blackberry type phone, so i have a question regarding jailbreaking a phone.

I have found the exact phone i want on ebay for about $100, and it is jailbroken, which i assume means it is not tied to any carrier and i could use it on my network. Is this true? If i do buy it, can my carrier put an end to my using the phone if they somehow have a way to detect what kind of phone i have, or am i home free?

I did something really dumb about two months ago. I went ahead and bought an htc phone, which isnt bad… If you have the fingers of A FIVE YEAR OLD. I cant type messages for shit, i cant even see the damn apps i’m running, so as nice and light this phone is, it is virtually useless to me. I had to buy a phone quickly because my wife decided to wash mine. So, i ended up getting one of the last of the 3 G’s “on sale!” (yeah right… Jist checked, and it’s fifty bucks cheaper today. Bastards.

So the dumb thing was that since i was pressed for time, i bought a phone that i didnt check out.very well. Now that i have it, i find it very counter intuitive to use. I hate it.

So the questions i have are

  1. can i return my current phone (i havent tampered with it at all), or is it going to be “i’m sorry, that phone is on clearance and we won’t take it back for you”’

  2. if i buy a jailbroken phone, is it safe to assume that, if it was done properly, that i could use it with my current carrier with no penalties to me personally?

  3. can anyone recommend a phone for a guy with big hands and fingers, who likes a raised keyboard like the blackberry, which is easy to type and surf the web with?

Thanks for your time and suggestions in advance.

2

These answers are US biased, so what I say might not apply to you if you’re not in the US.

You probably can’t return it, because most carriers have a 30-day return policy. There’s no reason once you have a new phone that you can’t sell your current one, though. Don’t expect to get much for it, though, because it sounds like it’s an older model. No danger in asking. Go to a corporate store and say you got this phone a few months ago and you hate it, is there anything they can do as far as getting you into a new one?

There’s a couple different terms that people get a bit confused on. “Jailbreaking” is when the operating system on an iphone is hacked so that non-Apple approved things can be done with it. This term has been expanded to include “rooting” an Android based phone, which is a bit different. The other important term is “unlocked” which means that restrictions on which carrier the phone can be used with have been removed. Be careful, because a phone can be jailbroken without being unlocked, though jailbreaking a phone may make it much easier to unlock.

As long as the radio in the phone you want will work with the towers of the company you want to connect to, then they probably don’t care how you got the phone*. Some of the different carriers use compatible technology. Phones often require unlocking to move from one carrier to another. For example, I could unlock my AT&T phone and use it on T-Mobile, but nothing I do with the phone will let me use it on Verizon. This can be exceedingly complicated, because many of the manufacturers make the same model of phone, but with different radios to allow them to work on different carriers.

The best way to be safe is to ask specific questions. “Will a Sansumg Prostate II from Sprint work on Verizon?” “Will an unlocked THC Verb from T-Mobile work on Virgin?”

*The exception is if the phone is stolen, then all of the carriers use a blacklist to ban that phone. If you are buying from a reputable seller of used phones—a company that deals in this kind of thing—then you are probably ok. A scam, and I don’t know how common it is, is for somebody to sell their phone, and then claim that it was stolen and collect the insurance. The buyer is now out the money, and has a phone which none of the carriers will touch.

The Samsung Note 2? It’s a huge phone with 7" screen or something. I was with you in insisting on a keyboard, but the touch screens on the better phones have gotten very good, and I haven’t missed one in 3 years. The trouble is on the cheap phones they can be crap. Go to the store and play with some is the only answer. For the touch screen phones, try both vertical and horizontal orientations, as the keys change sizes in the different orientations.

3

Thanks for these great answers, echoreply. I confess that I am a bit closer to understanding jail breaking, but I’m not there yet. It’s ok… I didn’t actually need a jail broken phone. But it seems that my phone company isn’t carrying a number of phones I have heard good things about.

Thank you for the suggestion on the Samsung. I will definitely take a look at it.

I will also try to call my carrier to find out if they would give me a new phone and give me some credit for mine. It is a 3G, so it won’t be much, even though I paid an inflated price at the time. Not doing my research will cost me some money, but I just can’t use this phone, and it is primarily useless to me except for answering calls, and placing calls if I am completely stationary. I simply can’t type on the damn thing.

A 7 inch screen might do the trick. And if I could find one with a raised keyboard, I might have hit the jackpot!

One final question:

Is HTC an operating system or a phone company, or what? As I understad it, there seems to be three operating systems, apple, android and Microsoft. Is this correct, or is the android a phone, like the htc?

Thanks for help with this one. This really has me more confused than it should. I think I have finally reached the point where technology has passed me by. :frowning:

I can eventually figure something out, but not without reading about it first, then asking a ton of questions, and then experimenting with it. I used to be able to just pick something up and learn on the fly. Oh well.

4

HTC is a hardware manufacturer. They make a bunch of phones. Most of them run the Android operating system.

Other operating systems in the market at iOS (Apple), Windows (Microsoft), and Blackberry OS. RIM, the company that makes Blackberries, will be releasing a new OS in a month or two.

Only Apple makes phones running iOS. Only RIM makes phones running Blackberry OS and the upcoming BB10. Multiple companies make Android phones. Multiple companies make Windows phones.
-D/a

5

I would suggest you look into VirginMobile.

  1. It costs less than any other provider.

  2. They have a nice little Kyocera Rise that has a slide-out keyboard, giving it bigger keys than a Blackberry. It’s also Android.

  3. No long-term commitment. You can quit at any time.

  4. Basic plan is unlimited text and data and 300 minutes of airtime for $35. Supposedly now they’re 4G.
    Disadvantages:

  5. Network is smaller; they cover most areas, but there are some places they don’t reach. All major US cities are covered, as is Europe and South Africa, so there’s a good chance you get coverage, but you will need to check.

  6. You pay full price for the phone. This actually is the sensible way to do it (most carriers give you the phone cheap and then charge more than what you save on it over the course of the contract). The Kyocera Rise was $99.

Note: Order from their website. The sell the plans in stores, but you get better support for the phone hardware if you order for them (plans and such are just as good no matter where you buy it).

6

What carrier are you with now? Are you on contract, and is so, for how much longer?

What is the model of the HTC phone you bought? Does it have a hardware keyboard that you don’t like, or is it the touchscreen keyboard that you’re having trouble typing with?

ETA: Go ahead and link to the phone you’re looking at on ebay, if you want specific advice on it and whether it will work with your carrier.