Cellphone Industry: I Pit Thee!

The BBQ Pit
21

I’m more annoyed with the ‘plans’ than with the phones. We’re in the market for a new cell phone provider because we’re tired of being told to ‘bend over!’ by Sprint. Fair and Flexible, my ass.

All of the providers offer free phones, so we’re really not picky about which one we choose. However, we don’t use our phones that much. Last month, we used 377 minutes between the two of us, and that was only because we were traveling, so I used my phone a bit more to call friends on the road. Other than that, I usually have a 10 minute call to my mom every day when I go to pick up my son after work, and aside from that, it’s calls to the husband to see when he’ll be home. He uses his phone even less than I do.

So we’re searching for a new plan. Even a bare bones plan with 500 minutes plus unlimited nights and weekends for two phones will run us $60 a month. Alltell offers free calls to 10 different numbers - that’s fine, I don’t even think I call 10 people on a regular basis. Or we can go with Verizon, as most of our family is on Verizon, and have mobile-to-mobile calls free. That plan runs $70 a month, though.

All I want is a bare bones 300 minutes a month family plan for under $50. I know it’s probably going to be impossible to find that, but not all of us live on our cell phones. We thought about prepaid, but we don’t want to get screwed on charges if we’re traveling.

E.

22

If you’re shopping for complete plans, I recommend using one of the online middlemen to help you save time and aggravation on the comparisons. You can specify what you’re looking for, and the middleman site will bring up side-by-side comparisons of various carriers to help you make your decision.

Disclaimer: I’m not shilling for the company linked to in the next paragraph, I’m just offering my own experience. You can find plenty of middleman sites just by Googling “cellphone plans.”

When I was looking for a new carrier, I used these guys. I got exactly the plan I was shopping for and actually found a better deal through them than I would have if I went directly to the provider I ended up with - not only because I got three Motorola RAZRs free, but because the provider was offering exclusive deals through that agent (my daughter and I communicate a lot through texting, and we all have unlimited text/video/picture messaging for a third of the price the carrier was offering it for direct, for example.)

23

Exactly!

Cell phones are getting smaller, but it seems to me that if they left off the circuitry for the camera and video, took out all the extra memory storage for this, and left out the actual camera hardware they could make the phone really small.

I really don’t want a big phone. I’m not worried about losing it. What I don’t like is carrying my current phone in my pocket and looking like I’m sporting half a staff all the time.

Also, if they left out the extras, they should be able to replace the cheap plastic case with something more durable and still charge the same price.

I’m up for a new phone in a few months, and I haven’t had any luck finding a phone that suits me.

I really wish they would also put a ringer speaker in that makes more noise than found in a relatively quiet bar. Even with my ring turned all the way up and with the phone on vibrate, I still miss calls if there is much ambient noise.

24

Yep, used 'em. Thanks for the suggestion. We’re considering one of the plans without unlimited nights and weekends just to keep it cheap, but if we look for the plan with unlimited nights and weekends, we can’t find anything less than $59 a month. Even so - since we rarely use our phones, we might be okay without nights and weekends.

I hate cell phone plan shopping. I’m actually looking forward to a new phone (I’ve had the same one for over 3 years, and it’s at the point where it’s slowly dying…it doesn’t hold a charge for longer than about an hour of talk time, if that), but I hate looking for a new plan.

E.

25

What would be wrong with creating a really basic, compact phone with great battery life, excellent signal reception and rock-solid reliability, then equipping it with one and only one concession to modern usability; Bluetooth.

Then any and all additional features, such as messaging, photography, music, web browsing, etc, could be built into a PDA - in fact the PDA could also incorporate a headset function so that you never need take the phone out of your pocket, unless you happen to be in that subset of users that only bought the phone, because you only wanted a basic phone.

26

Part of it is the ability to make calls too. There’s a celltower I can see outside my window at work (hi!). When I was with ATT, I could make calls inside the freakin’ elevator at 5 bars, which worked for me. Cingular bought them out & suddenly no bars (they decided not to lease that tower). I switched to Verizon, I deal with their capability-deactivated-at-the-factory phones, but I’ve got my 5 bars back again.

PS- Reason number 596 of Why I Hate Camera Doohickey Phones: The side buttons.

The side buttons always turn on the camera inside my jacket pocket, leaving me with, by the time I discover it, about one millionth of a jule of battery energy left. Enough to flash “low power” (in order to suck-out even more energy?) and then have it auto turn off. Have I mentioned that I only discover this when I’m looking for my phone to make an outbound call? :mad:

Wireless!!! To the last, I will grapple with thee! From hell’s heart, I stab at thee. For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee…!

27

Yes, there’s a tower up the hill from me and I still only get 0 or 1 bars at home. I went with Verizon since it’s their tower and I got a Nokia model since it was free with the plan. Occasionally I hit the GET IT NOW! button for web stuff but I quickly End and that’s that.

I couldn’t believe how small it was when it arrived. I ordered everything on-line and only had to talk to someone to activate the phone.

28

T-Mobile has a family plan for $49.99 that includes 1000 minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile. Even without nights and weekends, I think that would fit your needs.

Sorry for continually flogging T-Mobile, but I’ve been with them for years and they’re one company that truly has managed to make me a happy customer.

29

Yeah, I did see that one. I had T-Mobile a few years ago, and wasn’t thrilled with them, but they’ve probably improved since I had them.

I’m also balking at paying activation fees :D. Verizon has free activation if you activate online, but the cheapest plan I can find with them is $69.99, so we’d end up paying more in service over three months that to activate two phones through T-Mobile. Now that I write it out, it sounds silly - we should just pay for the activation and get the cheaper plan because we’ll save money in the long run.

E.

30

Also, proprietary cables are the work of Satan. South Korea and China have sought to exorcise the demon; with luck, the effects will spill over into the US market.

31

My Virgin Mobile cell phone is just a phone. It’s one of them prepay things, costs $60/year. Obviously not unlimited minutes, but more than enough given that if I want to call people up just to talk, I use the landline.

32

I want something that will make phone calls, store moderately long text notes so I can check if we already have some CD/DVD, and do data synch/recharge functions using a normal mini-USB cable.

A camera I can take or leave; ability to hold a memory card and act like a flash drive is nice but not essential.

33

At the risk of going against the grain of the OP and the intent of this thread: Get yourself a Treo!
It hotsync’s over Bluetooth, so there is no cable involved there. Of course, you do have a regular charging cable, but it does everything else so well: scheduling, email, mp3 player, password database, contacts management, and plenty of apps for handling things such as your list of DVDs (how about an Excel spreadsheet?). If you ever lose or break your device, your data is still all safe on your desktop machine, and your replacement will magically hotsync with the data and be just like the old one was.

34

My current phone allegedly hotsyncs over Bluetooth, except it doesn’t. I’m not inclined to trust it.

35

I went for the old maid package: single person 450 minutes at $39.99. I wanted to activate on-line and asked their customer service e-mail about it. But I ended up having to activate over the phone. One e-mail back said I should not be charged, and the other said I would be charged because I didn’t by through their company website?? verizonwireless.com is not a company website?? I saved the one I liked and will fight over the activation fee.

36

Oh yeah!

I hate the chargers that Mr. Neville’s and my Verizon phones use. They’re fussy- you have to plug them into the phone in exactly the right way. They’re also fragile- they have four little tiny wires, and stop working if one of those wires gets bent a little bit. I used to have a phone that slid onto a bigger charger. It was hard to break the charger, and easy to get the phone onto it properly (and easy to tell if you hadn’t). I miss that phone.

I got rid of that phone because it didn’t survive being dropped onto the concrete floor of our parking garage. I want a phone that can survive being dropped onto concrete from 6 feet up, too…

37

I’ve been a T-Mobile customer for about a year, and I’m reasonably happy, but there’s one annoyance that’s a minor thorn in my side.

They won’t let you turn off text messages. I don’t like text messages, and I definitely don’t like the $1-2 added to my bill every month from messages I get. I’ve tried asking my friends not to send text messages, but they often don’t remember, and it’s too small an amount to make a big deal over. What I really want is to just have the message bounce with “This user cannot receive text messages.” They won’t do it. No way, no how. Every other major carrier will let you, but not T-Mobile.

38

I love my Virgin mobile phone. I’ve had it since december 05. You have to put $20.00 on it every 3 months to keep it active, so I’ve put…$100 on it and at this moment have $36.95 worth of minutes left. Pretty damn good for over a year of cell service.

39

Last week, my exceedingly basic LG flip phone would run out of charge in like 4 hours on standby. It was 3 years old. I walked into the Cingular store, looking to replace it and the guy asked me all these questions, looked at my bill online and hooked me up.

Turns out there is this huge corporate discount at my employer that I neglected to take advantage of. He got me that discount retroactive through last year. I got this phone:

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/B000J2FOF0/ref=s9_asin_title_2/103-1187716-4123833

Which is just about the greatest phone on the planet. I got it for free, got a $250.00 credit on my bill for last year, upgraded my service to include internet and data for less than I was paying before, and got a 1 gig Memorystick and a bluetooth earpiece to boot!

Now, I can browse, text, take 2 megapixel videos and photos, Watch TV, Carry around all my MP3s like an ipod, use it as a remote for the TV, or as a portable wireless modem for my laptop, all for less than I was paying before.

It’s the cat’s ass! Listen to you fucking whiners bemoaning Ye olden days when cell phones were shitty and basic. Embrace the future!

This thing is fucking great. It has a “magic word.” If I say that magic word it turns on voice commands and I can operate the phone hands free. The other night I got into an argument with my wife while I was driving home, and the phone interrupted us, mediated so that we each understood and sympathized with the other’s postion, and when we got home it cooked us Lobsters and dispensed birth control while playing sultry music.

But no, you just wanna make calls. Fuck off. If you just want to communicate use smoke signals and morse codes. If your gonna be a pretentious stuck up prick self-important enough to have a cell phone, than I say have a cool fucking cell phone and stop pretending how you despise the artifice of all the bells whistles and frills that come with it.

Because if your really despised it you wouldn’t have a cell phone.

You’re all old enough to have gotten along fine before they came along. You know they’re toys. At least have a cool toy.

Like me.

(look at that phone again. You want it, don’t you?)

40

Not really. Don’t like SE’s interface design. But if it’s good for you, then good for you. But I am with you on wondering why some extras on a phone are so damned awful.

I’m a Nokia fan, currently using an N73. 3.2 MP camera with a mechanical auto-focus lens and shutter and an excellent flash and macro mode. 40 MB of internal storage and a 1 GB memory card. Stereo speakers, a very good MP3 player. Opera web browser, MS Office-compatible document editors, Adobe Reader, and hundreds of third-party apps easily available. My favorite phone so far, but I’m such a phone dork that I think I already have my next one picked out. Now I just have to wait for it to come out.