Hello fellow Motorola user! My G30 has NFC though I have never used it.
This is a very well featured low budget phone for my needs. Fast and responsive, with Android11 and a fancy camera and all these other expensive looking things I never use. Recommended.
Can you just have 4 icons on your home screen, all of them on the bottom of your screen?
iOS mandates that you start from the top left of your screen and work across and down. At least now they allow widgets so you can avoid apps at the top left of the screen, which is also the hardest place to reach if using a phone one handed in your right hand.
I haven’t quite figured out how to move them from one screen to another. It’s not a pressing issue, so I haven’t googled it.
I ended up going with an unlocked Google Pixel 4a last August (14 months ago) and have been quite pleased with it. It works with any towers, so you can switch around between Verizon or AT&T or whatever you want. I don’t know if they all do that or not.
My data usage is almost nothing* because I would never watch streaming on my phone; I stream with a $30 Roku stick on my television. I’m also not a selfie person so the 128 GB that comes with the 4a is about 100 more than I need.
Because I’m cheap I was laser focused on third party providers. I tried US Mobile (Verizon towers) for a few months, which was okay but didn’t work great in my local grocery stores and Walmarts. So then I tried Tello (T-Mobile towers). Their service is actually much, much worse in my area, but they seamlessly integrate Wi-Fi calling so in practice it’s essentially flawless where the US Mobile service frequently dropped calls. (Apparently I could have set up Wi-Fi calling with US Mobile but it wasn’t set up by default like with Tello.)
As I said my data needs are modest, so I went with the cheapest plans on both that had unlimited voice and text. US Mobile was $20 a month, but Tello is a shockingly low $10 a month.
If you’ve been using Android I might consider a Google Pixel 5 for the 5G. The Apple SE was my second choice, but I went with the Pixel 4a because I like the freedom of vanilla Android.
I dismissed Samsung out of hand because the cons listed when I was researching was that it was sluggish, at least in the budget $400 range phones I was looking at.
*Looking up my data usage right now, phone says there are 19 days left in the current month’s billing cycle, and so far this month I’ve used 5.28 megabytes. Literally almost nothing.
You just hold your finger on them until they start to shake and then drag them to a different screen.
That’s what I thought. Maybe before I didn’t drag them right. I know I did it on my iPhone 6S, but I seem to recall I had trouble with it.
It can in fact be finicky to move icons, whether they are being moved around on the same screen, to another screen or to/from a “folder”. You probably just didn’t drag them correctly but don’t feel bad, it is indeed hard to get right.
Earlier versions of Apple iTunes allowed me to connect the phone to my PC and then manage the placement of the apps on the PC, so I could create folders or move things around on the PC rather than doing so on the phone itself (which can be awkward). But I think they dropped that ability in later versions of iTunes.
Another vote for a Pixel…purchased from Google. It’s a clean version of Android with updates for at least three years.
Samsung does (did?) put tons of non-removable (w/o rooting) bloatware on their phones. Even phones from Verizon come with their own proprietary non-removable bloatware.
Annoying, but less important the more memory you have. Waste 5 GB on a 32 GB phone? Obscene. Waste 5 GB on a 128 GB phone? Minor annoyance.
It’s more than that because it also takes up memory when it runs (& can’t be disabled/deleted, which means it starts up again even if you force stop it) & in some cases, just calling it bloatware is nice, it’s really spyware as it’s really third-party software where I’m sure that company paid Samsung lots of money to have it come with the phone & not be deleted.
I don’t know what they do currently, because I haven’t had a Samsung phone in years because of what they used to do. My guess is all of that crap is still there.
Do you mean the custom UI? Because I was thinking of additional apps, which do not have to run all the time.
Apple has a 14 day return policy on iPhones. Also, if you’re near an Apple Store, you can stay in there for hours examining an iPhone, they won’t kick you out. Well, unless there are new covid rules or something. Point being, it’s a good place to get your hands on one to check out for yourself.
Based on some of the things you’ve said, one reason to switch is that iPhones don’t come with undeleteable third party crapware. Another reason which has been pointed out a few times already is that they are pretty much unbeatable in terms of support and longevity. There are other intangibles that may or not may not appeal to you, such as Apple’s somewhat more firm consideration of privacy compared to Google.
Since you don’t seem to be a camera person, it’s an easy bet that, no matter iPhone or Android, 256GB is going to be more than enough for you even over the next 5 years.
I had a lot of trouble with this for a long time. You have to drag the icon to the edge of the screen, hold it so half of the icon is “off” the screen, and wait about half a second for it to turn to the next page.
I use my current phone for calls, text messaging, web browsing, navigating in unfamiliar places, photography, generating barcodes, a couple dating apps, and as a clock and calendar. I’d like to use it for e-mail and Slack, but those apps aren’t working anymore. I haven’t used it for video calls, but might someday. I’d like a phone that can do more, so I can discover more things to do with it.
Budget is not unlimited, but I am pretty flush at the moment.
I’m not too worried about small details in the interface, like whether a particular control is at the top left or the top right. I don’t rearrange the icons on my phone; when I install a new app, I find the icon and just remember where it is.
What took me a long time to get used to was just the different mental models that are baked in to smartphones, but I never hear anyone else ever talk about. I mentioned already that I was used to closing a program when I wasn’t using it. I also can never seem to find the right method to turn certain options on or off.
When I’m at home, I’ll leave my phone on a table, or in my bedroom (where the charging cable is), so I need to be able to hear it. When I go somewhere, the phone will be in my pocket, so I change the notification from “sound” to “vibrate”. I thought “wouldn’t it be cool if my phone could detect when it’s away from home (like when it’s out-of-range of my home wifi) and make that change automatically”. The closest I found was an app that had hundreds of options and customizations, but I could never make it do exactly what I wanted.
My impression of Apple is that their products work great if you make all the same operating assumptions as their developers do, but no one will tell you what those assumptions are. You have to just know, and I usually don’t.
No the bloatware apps that I don’t want on my phone at all which run all of the time, taking up both (a relatively little bit of) storage & more importantly, memory.
I have my email app(s) set to both ring & vibrate, including a different sound & vibration pattern for each email so I can tell while my phone is still in my pocket which email address just got something.
You should also be able to customize settings via a home or work profile.
And what apps are those? I’ve never had a phone that had non-critical apps that couldn’t at least be disabled. I have around a dozen built-in apps disabled, including Gmail, Gboard, Duo, and Drive. So which apps do you have that aren’t important to the function of the phone that you can’t disable?
Well, if you aren’t doing anything really heavy-duty (nothing you listed is) I think you would be fine with the Galaxy A series instead of the Galaxy S. For instance, the A52:
The A72:
I don’t want to do it on an app-by-app basis. When I go out, I swipe down from the top edge the screen, and there are icons for wi-fi, location, notifications, screen rotation, and bluetooth. I tap the notification icon and it cycles from sound, to vibrate, to mute, and back to sound. That’s all I really need. When I’m home, make a noise; when I’m out, vibrate.
The app that I tried to use would let me change the volume, or ring-and-vibrate, or a dozen other things, but I never found a way to do the one thing I wanted.
Ah, so! It’s the ‘waiting on the line’ that I didn’t know about. I moved an app from the third screen to the first screen. Thank you,