Huh? How does that work? Are your eyeballs in your ears?
No. Obviously, you are using an earpiece to talk on the phone and during the conversation need to look something up. I do it all the time.
Actually, I don’t have an earpiece - I just put the call on speakerphone, look up what I want on the web, and take the call off of speakerphone.
Me, too. I love when I’m having an argument with someone about something easily googleable, and can look it up on the fly. If I’m out in public, I try to plug in my headphones first, though, just to avoid the momentary toolishness I would otherwise need to use speakerphone. It doesn’t come up often. I’m usually in a spot I can do speaker without bothering others.
A RAZR uses micro USB. You can pick up several six inch cables for about $3 each and never sorry about being able to charge again. I keep one at work, one in my laptop bag, one with my home PC, one in a wall charger in the kitchen, and one on my bedside table.
This nay seem excessive but they serve my wife’s phone, our e-readers, and our mp3 players, too. Open standards rock.
I use daydeal.com for my online ordering of cell accessories. I’ve used them since my first smartphone in - 2005? All kinds of cases as low as $10 (a lot of the more expensive cases have demo videos, too, so you can see what you’re getting), plus all the accessories. I carry a retractable USB cable in my bag, I think those run abut $10. The nice neat package it makes with the retractor is worth a few extra bucks to me. Free shipping, and their customer service is outstanding. When I was not happy with the quality of a couple cases I took a chance on in November, when I told them, they let me choose two more of same pricing and didn’t need to send the others back. Possibly my purchase history had something to do with that, but I tell everyone I can about that website, I think having the selection all in one place is great, and it’s one of the nicer sites out there for navigating.
You can go to monoprice and get iPhone cables for like $1.20 each. They ship from California in the regular mail so shipping is cheap an you’ll get them in a day or two. You can your micro USB cables there for about the same price and really cheap HDMI cables as well.
This.
However, there might be some group discounts on the service, through your employer or perhaps some non-employer groups. I get a 22% discount on my service (but not, oddly, the data for my husband’s phone, which is on my shared account).
The iPhone itself, however - as others have noted, no discount on the purchase.
How did I get one for $50 then?
As I noted above, I did earn some breaks for having been with them for years without upgrading. Granted, it was only a $50 credit, but that knocked the price of the phone down to much more comfortable levels. And I got a $30 credit for the phone I traded in (which I put toward a case for the phone). AND … I also get a company discount that I wasn’t getting before.
So I kind of made out on this one.
Well, since you had an iPod already, probably not a big deal for you, but when I finally upgraded to my first smartphone, and first apple product , I found out that with an iPhone, you REALLY need to be running iTunes on something. If that something is a PC, you will find that iTunes is the worst sort of resource sucking bloatware imaginable. Bad enough to make me suspect that apple did it intentionally to make people think their PCs were horrible slow machines that needed to be replaced with a Mac. So I keep iTunes shutdown except for the occasional sync, check for iOS updates, etc. Other than the iTunes thing, pretty happy with the iPhone 4 (non S)
So you went with Android. What version of Android is it? If it’s still 2.2 (Froyo), you can use ear buds while making or receiving calls; the device still has to be reasonably close to your mouth for the mike to work, but it makes it a whole lot easier when you are navigating automated menus or when you just need to listen to the other person for a long time. The next OS version up is Gingerbread (2.3.*). A Gingerbread bug prevents ear buds from being used this way, although they still work for media listening. I’m sticking with Froyo until they get that fixed.
Before accepting any over-the-air (OTA) operating system updates from your carrier or manufacturer, do your homework. Check out the extensive online communities of Android users, e.g. Android Central., especially its forums. There are sub-forums for scores and scores of different makes and models, including yours. Usually, that should be a good place for you to check out pending updates, and, if necessary, find fixes and rollbacks for updates that didn’t work out. The Sprint OTA from Froyo to Gingerbread turned out to be a fiasco, which is why those of us on Sprint contracts or Sprint-branded devices are mostly still running Froyo.
ETA: Android versions are named for different desserts in ascending alphabetical order. So there’s been Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, and Ice Cream Sandwich. I think there was something beginning with H as well, but that was just for tablets.
You didn’t get an iPhone, you got an Android phone, which is a whole other animal. Or so I thought. iPhones use the iOS operating system developed by Apple; Android based phones use the Android OS, developed by Google. Google and Apple are like the Pepsi and Coke of mobile OS/software technology. (You should read about how Jobs was after Google with an almost religious fervor, before his death.)
ETA: Sorry LWITBR, for some reason I thought you were the OP. Never mind.
I need to chime in here. Smartphone battery life is TERRIBLE across the board because ironically, smartphones are really dumb at battery management.
I use a droid bionic. Battery life was terrible - I’d leave the house fully charged and head to work; by the time 5 PM rolled around I’d be in red battery, 15% or less. I don’t know if the RAZR is any better.
But now’s my time to schill! (Not really, I have no stake in the app I’m about to link. But it works great, though it’s a paid app - I think it was $4.99 for me?)
Ultimate Juice Defender was a godsend for me. It does a couple of smart things my phone should do, but that it doesn’t. Namely:
When the phone is idle for X minutes, disable wifi
When the phone is idle for X minutes, disable 4G
Probably other things, but you can just read the app description.
It does have the phone “log in” (turning stuff back on while idle) once or twice an hour (you can set this, IIRC) to grab stuff like texts, FB updates, tweets, etc.
The improvement in battery life is huge. Probably double my normal battery life on my usage. My usage is - wake up, check email/FB/Twitter on my phone. Go to work. Toss the phone on my desk. Spend an hour or two in the lab. Check phone again. Repeat.
The one downside is that when you wake the phone up, it does take maybe 20-40 seconds for wifi/4G to reestablish the connection. A minor bother, IMO, for getting like twice the battery life.
But I really recommend this app, or one like it. You really can stretch smartphone battery life with an app that knows what to disable when the phone is idle.
No, I got an iPhone 4 for $50 from Verizon. I know the difference between an Android and iPhone.
I’m on 2.3.5 and talking on the phone with earbuds in seems to work for me. Was listening to podcasts or something the other day when my wife called and I left the earbuds in and just lifted the phone up to talk into it.
Honeycomb was the tablet one. Ice Cream Sandwich is now for both tablets and phones.
How do I figure out which version Android I’m rocking?
This tends to vary a bit from phone to phone (because nearly every Android phone manufacturer tends to “improve” the OS interface so as to have a marketing advantage over its competitors), but on my phone (a Motorola Droid X with Motorola’s “Motoblur” enhancements) you go to “settings”, then “About Phone” (it’s at the bottom of the list), and then look at the “Android Version” value. Mine’s 2.3.3.