I’ve got it paired to my computer and my car. Changed the ringtone to one of the stock ones. I didn’t see anything in the manual about how to get a custom one.
I’d like to get a weather app, a traffic app, and a GPS moving map app, but the manual doesn’t say how to do that.
OK… By hitting the microphone icon on the google box, I can just ask for weather and it gives me weather.
I see that there’s a button for Traffic on Google Maps, which I tried and it showed me green lines where I live. (The only time ‘traffic’ is slow here is the 4th of July.) I’ll have to try it when I’m in Seattle Monday.
There’s Google Maps. I don’t know if that includes GPS, but it knows where I am.
Back in June I was exactly where you are. I was looking to kill my landline and ultimately save bucks. First, a few stats which might be useful …
I started June 12 with a Trac Fone deal – 1200 minutes, 1200 outgoing messages, unlimited incoming messages, and 1200MB, for $120 including the phone (LGL41C). And a year’s service in which to use it up.
In almost exactly 3 months:
I’ve used 762 minutes. 150 minutes a month is WAY more than I expected it to be. I don’t make or take many calls from friends or family, but I learned that what calls I do make tend to be long ones.
I’ve used 21 messages. Um, not much interested in those.
I’ve used 120 megs of data. I’m pretty sure that it would have been a lot more, but I use a navigation system that doesn’t need any internet connection.
Let’s see: useful apps:
To be ruthlessly honest, I’ve only found only a couple.
One allows me to use the built-in camera flash as a constantly-on flashlight.
Another shows our local city buses mapped in real-time along with route and schedule information.
Someone’s already mentioned weather radar.
And there’s a bunch of phone versions of typical programs: Youtube, Chrome, Rhapsody, …
I’ve become ridiculously dependent on it.
June the 12th was my birthday. 
Mrs. L.A. had a TracFone. I think it might have cost $50 for the non-smartphone from Wal-Mart, and it cost her something like $50/year. No Internet. She saw no reason to have a smartphone, nor to pay an outrageous sum every month to use it. (You know that commercial where people literally cut their bills in half? She was like, ‘Who spends $200 a month on a phone?’) I think she thought smartphones were silly. She loaned her TracFone to me (but I didn’t need to use it) for the couple of days between breaking my Pantech and receiving the LG. There’s something like 700 minutes remaining.
When she started her new job she was required to have a smartphone. The company pays her a $50/month subsidy, so it only costs her like $3/month out-of-pocket. She uses the heck out of it, from looking up drugs (instead of using her book), to phone meetings, to calling patients and doctors and having them call her, to checking the weather. For her, it’s indispensable.
To find apps click GooglePlay that most likely is an icon on your main screen. Many, many are free. All you have to do is search then download them.
When I moved from a tracfone to a smart phone, it was an amazing upgrade. I had a bunch of mp3s on my phone, videos, games, email, etc. A smartphone is a mini computer which happens to make phone calls.
8GB of data is enough unless you stream videos. Video can eat up data fast, but other than that you are fine with that amount. I barely hit 1-2GB a month.
I think youtube eats about 1-5 MB per minute of streaming.
Posting from my phone.
First Internet usage.
Spell check will both be your friend and your enemy. Get ready for that.
Whaddya know? It worked! I thought I hit a wrong key on the phone and backed out of it.
Here’s the things I don’t like about them. First, most of the apps I’ve found – there’s no way to close them. Instead, you just go back to your home screen and open something else. I had to find an app to use to kill other apps that I wasn’t currently using but were still on in the background and taking up memory.
And the other thing is that, it’s kind of erratic whether you can get back into an app at the same place you left it. You click on an icon and it might go back to where you left, or it might re-open to the first screen.
My phone’s in the kitchen, charging right now. At the bottom of the screen is an arrow that curves 180º (the ‘go back’ button), the ‘home’ icon (shaped like a house), and another icon that looks like two pages with one on top of the other. I decided to click that one. It displayed all of the open windows from the apps I’d clicked on. There was a ‘clear all’ button, and when I clicked that, it said something like ‘no open apps’.
I’m glad I discovered what that button did, as I was wondering if the apps stayed open after hitting the Home button.
Heartily endorsed and seconded, based on nearly three and a half years with three different Android devices.
Regarding the Tribute generally, first the bad news: It’s rather an outdated model, so much so that I can’t find a separate sub-forum for it in the Android Central Forums. Still, a few people over there have been asking about how they might root it. Rooting is another thing you’ll want to look into; by rooting and perhaps flashing a custom ROM (OS), you can greatly improve your phone’s performance. Whether or not you will be able to root, you should still check out the Android Central community; there’s a lot of useful information there.
The good news is that even though the memory and processor specs are a bit outdated, as I’ve moved to successively more powerful Android handsets, the observable performance level has improved only incrementally. My daily driver phone today is a Galaxy S5, itself recently dethroned by the S6 as the top of Samsung’s line. But I still have the Galaxy S2 from which I upgraded to it, and that one still works very well on a good wifi connection. In fact, from a quick glance at the specs, your Tribute is pretty much like my Galaxy S2 and, I would think, should perform similarly. The S2 does have a higher resolution camera, though.
If your carrier starts throwing the 5.0 (“Lollipop”) at you, it would probably be best if you don’t install it.
Android actively manages apps and doesn’t use memory the way a normal computer does, so it’s not an issue if the memory is currently being almost entirely used. Android is designed to run that way. It will kill apps as needed to free up memory for new apps. You don’t have to close them manually unless you are having buggy problems. That’s why apps that need to be “always on” such as alarm clock apps, will have a notification tray icon. Apps that have that icon are marked by Android as “very important” and will never be killed to free up memory.
Google maps does have GPS capability. You can search for an address and then get turn by turn directions just like a normal GPS. You can save important addresses as starred items. You can look at traffic. Click on a business and it’ll give you as much data as Google has about it (hours, menu, prices, etc) It’ll take some getting used to figure out how to get in and around it, but it’s a very powerful app. Extremely useful on vacations and trips to unfamiliar locations (the main reason I got a smartphone).
As mentioned more apps are had through Google Play. Many are free.
Other useful apps I use:
an advanced alarm clock app to wake me up in the morning (it also has timers so I can do laundry efficiently, steep tea, etc - it saves timers so I just hit start on a premade timer)
an app for geocaching
my bank’s app for check deposits and to check on my balances
whatsapp for messaging (photo messages are still a little squirrely between different carriers sometimes)
an advanced screen brightness app (phone was too bright in low light conditions for me)
an advanced launcher (this handles how the icon/app drawer/gestures/etc behave. Basically equivalent to a custom desktop interface on PC. One of those things you don’t realize how much you need until you have it)
llama, which is one of a kind for free apps I think - it sees your active cell tower, you label the cell towers as “areas” and so when you enter a specific cell tower’s zone of influence it changes settings on your phone. When I get home it turns on wifi automatically for me. When I leave it turns wifi off. When I get to work it changes the volume to vibrate. When I get to the movie theater it sets it to silent. When I get to the grocery store it auto opens my grocery list. Can handle a fair amount of other automated tasks too, stuff that can happen when you reboot, or when you turn on bluetooth, or charge your phone, etc.
And of course standards like facebook, youtube, netflix, wikipedia, amazon, etc.
Slowly learning how to use it. In reality, I barely use it – just like the dumb phone. I suppose I should learn how to take a picture and post it to Facebook. Actually, I thought about using the camera about an hour ago, when a couple of guys were having an argument at the supermarket. But I minded my own business.
My ‘normal’ GPS is the one in my car – with a database that was installed in 2005. 
Of the free apps, there are many very useful/entertaining ones that don’t hammer you with ads, or at least not blatantly so. IME it’s the free games you have to be really careful with, as you might run into such nuisances as screen-blocking ads or even some with sound.
Once, and only once, I downloaded and installed a silent camera app* but found that it drastically underused the resolution capability of the hardware. This is frequently if not always the case with free third-party camera apps. And irony of ironies–the one that I tested started playing an audio ad. Loudly.
*silent camera app: The stock camera SW in most phones these days does not allow you to turn off the shutter noise due to some countries having audible-shutter laws. I wouldn’t mind that so much if it were just a discrete “click” like that of an old fashioned point-and-shoot. But no. Smartphone cameras today have a wildly overblown and protracted audio sequence probably meant to resemble what you would hear from the elaborate setup of a professional photography. Or, what the OEMs imagine that people think a professional’s camera is meant to sound like. My smartphone camera begins with a sort of high pitched descending whine and ends with a solid, room-filling click that’s almost like a loud “clunk”==Nnnnnnwwwwhhhhhhrrrrrnnnnn–phaCLUNK. I think it’s also supposed to mimic the sound of the film advance mechanism. And, of course, let everyone know you’ve just taken a picture, even inside a large hall.
There are ways you can circumvent this without having to use a third-party app, though.
Start just by muting the phone. Mine shuts off the shutter sound if I just mute through the pull-down pane. It turns off notifications, but game and music sounds still work, as does the wake-up alarm. Everything else (ringer, texts, emails, facebook, camera) is silenced.
I do recommend for sure to figure out how to mute the camera if you’re going to try to take discreet pictures. I do it on the train if I need to document someone I end up reporting to the operator.
A brief aside - my good friend just got a smartphone yesterday. She installed the facebook app and also facebook messenger and immediately started messaging me in the wee hours of the morning (we’re both night owls). She then started tapping stuff and accidentally video chat called me. Luckily, we were both still wearing pants!
Speaking of posting, get the Tapatalk app for reading and posting on the Dope and other messageboards. Much easier to read and post than with a browser.
This is definitely a case of YMMV. I’ve usually found that muting the system volume may or may not work, and even when it works at all, the mute/volume settings revert themselves after one picture. Sometimes they revert even before the first picture is taken, presumably if too much time elapses in between. Because of the laws I mentioned, even though they don’t apply everywhere, the OEMs really, really want to prevent the option of shutter silence, and I hope they don’t eventually configure our devices in such a way that circumventing the shutter noise becomes impossible.
Given the way some pervs have abused phone cameras, though, I could see that happening. Beyond that, moreover, some cultures have strong attitudes against being photographed even if it happens inadvertently in public places. This can extend to people’s property and behavior as it relates to public spaces, for example the ₡10K fine for operating a dashboard camera in Austria.
I think most custom ROMs preserve that capability, then there’s also an app for that. This link mentions only the Galaxy S5, but I think the app works across Android devices generally. A particularly nice feature here is that your phone doesn’t have to be rooted.
(DISCLAIMER: The above link is offered on the assumption that silent shutter prohibitions, where applicable, ban the OEMs and carriers from providing the silencing feature, but do not prohibit end consumers from configuring their devices to do so.)
Good point! For many of the OP’s favorite websites, there will be apps designed for better mobile usability. If you want to stream radio, you usually need to download the station or network’s app, since doing so in a regular browser usually requires Adobe Flash.
Good to know. I figured since my GS6 did that, all Samsungs did that. My GS4 had a shutter silence option in the camera settings menu. This one does not, but the mute button works no problem. I figured it was Samsung’s way to circumvent the requirement without actually circumventing it, yanno?