Mobile Phones

[Tizer]

Mrs Tiz has been wondering whether a `phablet' might satisfy her wish for something that will act as both a mobile phone and an e-reader when travelling. The screens seem to be about 5 to 7 inches in diagonal size. Have any of you got experience with them?

[PanBiker]

Mrs Tiz has been wondering whether a `phablet' might satisfy her wish for something that will act as both a mobile phone and an e-reader when travelling. The screens seem to be about 5 to 7 inches in diagonal size. Have any of you got experience with them?

Sally has a Google Nexus 7 that I bought her a few years ago. she loves it for it's portability, it's WiFi enabled but does not have any phone capabilities you can get similar that are though. It always comes on holiday with us and is very useful for internet related stuff. It's Android based so has access to thousands of apps if you want them on the device.

[Tripps]

Despite having a box full of redundant cell phones I pushed the boat out a few weeks ago, and bought one of these - Wileyfox Swift

I am a bit behind the curve on these matters - forgive me if you have all had one similar for ages, and this is not news. The novelty is starting to wear off a bit, but it is wonderful. In fact I would say it does everything that every gadget I have bought in the last 10 - 15 years does - and mostly does it better. Camera. video camera, music/ video recorder/player, ebook, Skype, Spotify, The Daily Mail ! TV, etc etc.

The fact that it is a telephone seems to be merely incidental.

It has a 5" diagonal screen which is just about big enough to read from. Being a bargain hunter - I got it on a 'Black Friday' sort of promotion for £99. It's unlocked, and I've added an Asda pay as you go 30 day contract for voice, and some data. We'll see how that goes. Just one small problem - tried to top up credit at Tesco, and they (very childishly) rejected the top up card. I wonder if you can top up a Tesco card at Asda?

[PanBiker]

An Android phone by any other name there Tripps, screen is the same size as most other smartphones although there are some larger. Readers and tablets are usually a bit bigger to lend them more to reading or the visual style apps. As they get bigger, although they may be network enabled they get a bit less usable as a phone. It's a trade off depending on what your primary use is for any device. 7" - 10" for readers or primary internet usage is about the norm.

On the Pay as You Go top up. I have just swapped to a £1 weekly top up rather than the £10 a month I was on, there was no way that I could use all the free calls, texts and data that I got per month. The £1 a week still gives me sufficient data, free texts and calls so it's a no brainer. £10 lasts me 10 weeks instead of 4.

[Tizer]

Mrs Tiz has been listening to comments and noting what has been said above and is now favouring the purchase of the separate devices, a modest smartphone and an e-reader. The so-called phablets are expensive and I think she'd get more and better for her money with keeping the functions separate.

I'd never heard of Tripps's Wileyfox Swift and it seems cheaper than many smartphones even at it's full price of £130 on Amazon. They claim to be cheaper by selling only online and not needing a chain of shops. I assume their phones are all sold without a SIM card and you can get that wherever you choose. Ian, where did you get a £1 a week card?

[PanBiker]

I opted for the phone that has been voted best budget smartphone for the last 3 years. That is the Motorola Moto 4G (it's still the best one). I think I paid £129.00 for mine when I bought it from EE. That's where I get my PAYG deal at £1 per week. The deal gives me 10Mb of data which I tend not to use, 25mins of free calls and 50 texts per week. I think the data allowance accrues as I currently have 108Mb on my account (or I may have got a bonus for regular top ups). Makes no difference I don't really use the mobile data.


Sally got the same phone but a slightly later model from Carphone Warehouse but she's on a £10 per month deal, I can't convince her she's paying over the odds for her usage.

[Wendyf]

I have a £5 a month pay as you go deal with Virgin, but I don't use the internet away from home.

[PanBiker]

EE don't seem to do the Motorola now but they do supply a free SIM as long as you have a network free phone (or unlocked one) to put it in. You can then attach the SIM to any of the PAYG packages that they provide. Lots of Android phones to go at, go for a quad core processor if you can.

[Tizer]

Thanks for all the information. When buying a PAYG SIM am I committing myself to paying the fee every month? Or only when I want to top up? For example, what happens if I didn't use the phone for more than a month? (To those of you who've had smartphones for ages I must seem like someone asking a car salesman how do I stop it?)

[Tripps]

You commit yourself to nothing when you buy one. When you install, and register it with the service provider you take whatever deal you choose. At its simplest just put some money on, and use it on a pay as you go rate. This may be the best option if you use it only occasionally. I pay £7 per 30 days with Asda (many other deals are available). They send me a text message when it is due to run out - I then make sure there is enough credit to fund it, (carefully avoiding doing it at Tesco!) - or if there isn't - it just lapses.

Pans - My son says the same about the Motorola, and that was going to be my first choice, but the Wileyfox deal came up, and even he admits it is as good.

If I was starting again - I'd be tempted to try this Smartphone
It's by Lenovo which used to be IBM. I've been using one of their laptops for several years now, and it's fine. Cheap enough to experiment with. The whole deal would be cheaper than a month's rent on an iphone.

[PanBiker]

It's the same with EE's deal (now bought out by BT). If your credit on any deal runs out before renewal you can still use the phone but you will pay the providers standard tariff. I top up online with EE, I chuck a tenner on which now lasts me 10 weeks. They text me each week to say they are topping me up and when my credit is getting low. You can top up virtually anywhere nowadays, all the supermarkets, mini markets and most other businesses with a POS electronic till. Most ATM's will give you the option as well.

The Lenovo looks a good deal for sub £40 as well Tripps, can't really go far wrong at that price.

[Tizer]

I notice the Lenovo has only a 2MP camera and perhaps that's why it's so cheap. I don't know what bits add most to the cost in a smartphone! Mrs Tiz rates a camera fairly high in her list of wants so she wouldn't need to carry a camera as well as these gadgets. When she goes on her natural history trips she takes her Canon compact with her but sees other members of the group getting decent photos of flowers and birds with their smartphone.

Thanks to the comments above we're now better understanding the world of smartphones!

[PanBiker]

For reference, my Motorola has a 5Mp main and 1.3Mp front camera. All the pictures in the Amateur Radio threads and the Kitchen Refurb thread were taken on the phone.

[Pluggy]

What happened to the Smartphone you bought last April Tiz ?

http://www.tesco.com/direct/tesco-mobil ... d=191-3510

The posh ones work pretty much exactly the same except they are faster, have bigger screens and better cameras.

I'm stiill on Three PAYG. I buy credit online a fiver at a time when it gets below a fiver, Generally lasts about 6 weeks. They expect you to make a paid call or text at least every six months or they suspend the number. The Lenovo is old stock, thats why its cheap, even low end phones are 4G and more than 512MB of ram these days. Lenovo didn't use to be IBM, they were separate companies and still are, but they did make IBM's PCs when they were still in the Market. Lenovo bought up the IBM PC tradenames when IBM got out, the best known of which is probably "Thinkpad"

[Pluggy]

Ah reading later in the old thread you fell out with Tesco and got your money back on the phone......

http://oneguyfrombarlick.co.uk/viewtopi ... 92&t=14255

[Stanley]

Tiz, I'm even further behind the curve than you! I can remember when you got the Post Office to put a phone in and that was it.....

[Tizer]

Pluggy, yes, I took it back to Tesco. I'd only wanted it for the camera and didn't expect to have to keep adding more money to it. Being described as PAYG I'd expected any credit to be carried over from month to month but it wasn't (even though two Tesco employees had assured me it would be carried over).

This time it's for Mrs Tiz, not me, and she wants to use it conventionally, although it will still be very low usage compared with the average owner. Ian's £1 a week SIM might well be enough for her and she could always upgrade if necessary. If she were like her sister she'd walk into a phone shop and simply buy the most expensive phone and contract but they are very different women!

[PanBiker]

I would go for the one with the best camera you can get for your budget, Quad Core processor and Android based for the range of free apps. Look for a decent amount of base memory and depending what that is think about putting some extra storage memory in (I have a 16Gb MMC). Then the cheapest deal Sim such as the one I use. The days of transferring credit on PAYG have long gone, Current deals are a PAYG and contract hybrid really. As Pluggy says, you have to use the phone occasionally to keep the account and number alive but apart from that you can have your own personal tri-quarter for little outlay and no pain.

[Tizer]

Thanks for the advice, Ian. We can still transfer credit on our non-smartphones; I think the companies took advantage of the introduction of smartphones to nudge people into the new non-credit system. The old phones also have the need for being used now and then. I don't think we've ever let ours go past the deadline but my father did. He had one for emergencies and we urged him to call us on it now and then but he wouldn't do it!

I'd forgotten OG had a `Mobile Phones' thread and should have posted there. But computers and mobiles are inextricably linked now.

[PanBiker]

There we go Tiz, I have moved all the mobile related posts into here. Even though I started the thread, I had forgotten we had one as well!

[Tizer]

Thanks, Ian, for fighting back against entropy!

Mrs Tiz seems keen on this Motorola from Carphone Warehouse. It's available on the £10/month PAYG with EE but she could presumably switch to the £1/week later. Any comments will be welcome!
Motorola Moto G 4G (3rd gen) on EE 4G Pay as you go £10 Everything pack

[plaques]

for fighting back against entropy!

'According to the second law of thermodynamics the entropy of an isolated system never decreases. Such a system spontaneously evolves towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the state with maximum entropy.'Wiki With Panbiker putting the 'Mobile Phone' back into its proper place he has reduced the entropy which is against its natural tendency to increase. It took a bit of thinking about but I think I got there in the end.

[Pluggy]

Thanks, Ian, for fighting back against entropy!

Mrs Tiz seems keen on this Motorola from Carphone Warehouse. It's available on the £10/month PAYG with EE but she could presumably switch to the £1/week later. Any comments will be welcome!
Motorola Moto G 4G (3rd gen) on EE 4G Pay as you go £10 Everything pack

If you want the £1 a week deal why not get it upfront ?

http://www.carphonewarehouse.com/buy/mo ... ept4-web10

Haven';t you said in the past that you could only get O2 inside your property (Tesco use O2) ? Getting a phone on EE doesn't sound like a very good move to me if thats the case.

[PanBiker]

I would agree with Pluggy if you want the £1 deal.

You only need to put a £10 initial top up along with the phone. This will put the phone price nearer to the SIM free price so they ensure they get at least an extra tenner off you at the start. Same phone as Sally got I think, slightly later model to mine. She got hers from Carphone Warehouse as EE no longer did it. If you look on the EE website at the PAYG packs you can change at any time. This deal looks like the one I got directly from EE when they did the phone. So, same phone, same network, same price just a different supplier.

Check network coverage here for EE.

EE of course now encompasses Orange and T Mobile and has now been sucked into the BT Group, no idea if this will have a knock on to coverage

EE Network Coverage

[Tizer]

It's good you've both raised the coverage factor. We would have said previously that Mrs Tiz wanted the phone primarily for when she was travelling, visiting people, going on courses, holidays etc so the signal strength at home wasn't really important. We still have the old phones at home - one on each of EE, O2 and Vodaphone which came about by accident rather than design. We get a signal OK on O2 but it's weak on the other two networks. What we've been missing is that data coverage is not the same as voice & texts. Also we'd assumed 4G would give better coverage. I've looked at the network checkers and none of O2, Vodaphone, EE or Three give good data coverage for our post code! That's a surprise about O2. We get excellent signal at home on the old O2 phone. When I had the Samsung on O2 I only tried it on the internet when we went on holiday just after the purchase so I hadn't realised about the bad data signal. You live and learn! Time for Plan B.