They’re all bad. Every. Last. One.
Yeah. I don’t want them to take the extra time and effort to BREAK a phone. I don’t want THEM to do ANYTHING except LEAVE MY PHONE ALONE.
The least expensive service I could find was Virgin Mobile - $25 per month (NO CONTRACT - pay as you go) gets 300 anytime minutes and unlimited text and data. The other restraint Virgin puts is what phones you can use. I called them two weeks ago to find out if any Sprint phone was usable, since they were bought by Sprint and are on the Sprint network, and they said yes. So I bought the phone of my dreams (within my budget) and found out no, I actually could not use the Sprint phone. I had to use a VM phone.
Then I got a VM phone that was completely unhackable (Rumor 2), but I didn’t know that until I spent hours trying to figure it out and finally realized that smarter folks than me had determined that no, it could not be hacked. The Touch could, though - awkwardly, but it could.
And it’s not really a “hack” so much as a workaround.
Now if I could find a consistent, reliable way to turn MP3s to Purevoice files (changing extensions works sometimes, but other times it doesn’t and I can’t figure out why) it would be easier. And it would be great if the phone didn’t insist on zapping the names of the files and making them long number strings.
But such is life.
So tell me… is it even possible to buy a phone that has had no carrier tampering? I know that “unlocked” phones are available, but they tend to be either bad ESN or one way or another originally designed to work on one network or another.
What I’m driving at is this: the software in the phone, the calendar, media player, whatever…isn’t all that always tied to some carrier at some stage? Is it possible to legally and legitimately purchase a phone that has not been modified to work with a particular carrier, that has software unrelated to the carrier? (Aside from iphone)
::delurked for this thread::
I work for a cell phone company–not one that’s been named here so far–and I like to think we are not evil. We don’t always have the latest and greatest when it comes to phones but we offer a whole lot more than other companies that makes up for it.
Battery dead? Forgot to charge it? No problem. Stop by one of our stores and swap it out for free.
Worried about you or anyone else on your plan going over their minutes or text limits? No problem. We’ll send you a text when you’ve reached 75% of your plan. And we’ll send another one when you’ve reached 100%.
Need to change your plan? We’ve got your back. Change it at anytime for no charge or without renewing your contract. We’ll even backdate it for you to cover any overages you may have at that point.
Finally, why pay when someone calls or texts you? All incoming calls and texts are free. Your plan minutes only apply to calls you make–same with texts.
If that’s evil then I don’t want to be good.
(I have not named the company I work for because I don’t want this post to seem like an advertisement–but after reading it it sounds exactly like that. Mods, if it went to far please feel free to remove the offending parts.)
Each carrier is going to modify the software to some extent–some more than others. Most of the mods are to make sure the phone works as advertised on the carrier’s network. In addition, Verizon adds a bunch of crap and restricts some features so you’ll purchase the features from them. Other companies will just add their logo to the splash screen.
There are programs available that will allow you to “flash” another company’s software onto your phone. You just need the program and a copy of the current software for your phone.
Judging by your OP, it seems that AT&T suited your needs except for price.
You get what you pay for. I’ve had a Virgin pay-as-you-go for almost four years, and I’ve found it to be adequate for my needs. It’s inexpensive, and one of the reasons it’s inexpensive is a lack of bells and whistles. If your needs include bells and whistles, you’ve chosen the wrong provider.
Are people from other countries, especially Asia, reading this thread and laughing in disbelief?
(I have a Tracfone myself because even though I list after an iPhone, I refuse to be under contract with anyone. Maybe in a decade or two Tracfone will offer iPhone-like phones. A girl can dream.)
Sounds like you’re in the market for a smart phone of some sort. You can totally get those free of carrier tethers. I have a G1 running cyanogenmod I’m pretty happy with. About the only entanglement it has with the carrier is My Account App I found on Android market for free. It lets me check my account balance, and the phone and text, of course… Other then that ring tones are made from music files off the sd card. It charges off a standard miniusb plug, and I can also a usb 2.0 cable to connect it to the computer like a flash drive and copy files to it’s storage. It came with a weird shaped usb cable, but it works with normal 2.0 ones, but not 1.1.
The player happily plays standard music files and video. Pictures and video are saved to the internal sd card and I can easily copy them to my computer. Calender, contacts, and email services come from google and I use a gmail account I’ve had since 2006 for that. So my contacts, calender, and stuff is automatically backup online.
Edit: also I get GPS navigation for free as part of the google maps app.
Son Ericsson sells truly unlocked phones. I think the Satio and AINO are pretty cute. Spendy though, without the carrier subsidy.
Nope, that’s just them being cats.
I’m using this thread to bitch about cell phone apps.
Well, not the apps themselves, but the idea that apps are somehow life-changing and necessary software. The prime example of this is that ad that starts with an old couple watching the inauguration of their son as President, and flashes back through their entire lives all the way to the moment they met, at a train station, where the man used a cell phone app to buy a ticket for the train that the alluring young woman who had caught his eye was riding. President? Really? Why not an ad that promises big titties in my face if I buy your phone? It would be just as blatant.
Or how about the ad where the girl has a phone that allows her to receive an email update informing her that Common (or ?uestlove, or whatever shitty, safe suburban hip-hop for white undergrads was being cross-promoted) is playing some super secret and exclusive show that she totally gets to attend, thanks to her phone, because it’s sooooooooooo important that she always have social activities to attend in between all the time she spends dashing around the city in a cab and wasting her daddy’s money on clothes.
I’m tired of these ads. Nobody needs an app that delivers a daily lolcat or makes various fart noises or buys you shit 5 seconds faster. This ticky-tack technology is not revolutionary, and it is not going to improve our lives to any appreciable degree.
Well, certainly not the Canadians. It’s much, much worse here. Actually, it can be kind of comical —my smartphone, for example, lets you put on your own MP3s, and you can use them for whatever you want, including alarms and text-message buzzes, and… not ringtones. Those are locked. But only those. Of course, for a cheap phone on the same service, everything’s locked. They also charge you for data transfer… and then set up the phone so you will accidentally open up the internet browser. They’re pretty much just bastards.
I use my phone to make and receive calls, and very occasionally check email when I can’t get wifi. I’d be happy if Verizon would give me a phone that actually worked! I am on my third phone in the last six months and need to take this one in too, as it can no longer store information on missed calls, and occasionally it puts itself in locked mode. The phone before that used to randomly turn itself off and also more frequently locked than this one. I forget what the first one was doing.
The worst part, other than the waste of my time? I have to pay to reload the email app each time they swap out the phone. It’s only $5 but it’s irritating as hell to have to pay because they can’t seem to give me a phone that will work for more than a month or two.
No; Verizon’s restrictions are on the phone itself and the OS it uses. It’s not scaled to whatever plan you use.
At least we’re getting unlocked iPhones. Took the cellphone companies ten years to get to that point–no, wait. It wasn’t the cellphone companies. Apple decided to do that, and the cellphone companies had to tag along.
There is finally talk in the media about unlocking phones and free competition between carriers. And the NDP is promoting a bill that would require carrier to unlock their phones once the contracts were ended. (At that point, the subsidy provided by the carrier, which enabled you to get the phone at a low price, should be paid back).
I have a very simple phone with no real apps to speak of but if my phone sent me LOLcats I would totally pay extra for that. You know what’s better than the 30 bajillion apps on the iPhone? Kitties.
Hi Cell Guy, welcome!
I think your company is the one my SOs use (mine’s through work, so I’m not on that plan). US Cellular, yes? Overall, they’ve been pretty happy with the service. The only gripe I’ve heard is having to dial the area code for every single call.
But if I understood correctly my conversation with the company rep the other day, you only allow USC phones and have no SIM cards - same complaint Stoid had about VM below. So there’s no possibility of purchasing the phone I want to use, only the ones you allow. Right?
nevermind
I’ve never had a problem with getting stuff onto phones except for Motorola phones, even on Verizon. Granted that you generally need third-party software and potentially a third-party USB cable, but it almost always works for me on LG phones.
I upgraded to a Motorola Droid the other week, and it too only needs the USB hookup to put whatever you want on there.
A lot of this is the interaction of the phone software and Verizon/your-carrier-here, not really in the carrier itself. If the phone has the (to my way of thinking in this day and age) basic functionality of being able to be a USB data device, you can generally put stuff on it without Verizon’s fees.