Last Person on Earth to get a SmartPhone - what are your likes/dislikes

[mtnlaurel]

I am finally considering making space in budget for a SmartPhone.

I have held off for many reasons.
Since I am currently not working outside of the home, I didn't see the need (although surprisingly there is one which I can totally work around - I have other parents text me when there are last minute activity changes on the fly) and wanted to spend the $$ on other things. Also, I wanted to wait for the technology to improve & prices to get cheaper.
I am getting ready to get ready to get back into the workforce (both kids will be in school full-time in the fall) and SmartPhone Technology, Apps, etc will come into play in my field and I don't want to appear to be the complete Luddite that I really am at heart. And I really would like to consolidate my music, calendar, and all the other nifty things you can streamline to one device.

We are on Verizon and have been for over 10 yrs - I am happy with them (enough).

I want a phone that takes Good Photos & Keep Battery Charge a long time.
I am a phone person and what my Grandmother always called a "good talker", so ease of use of the basic phone function and how it feels in my hand is also important to me.

I use a PC and have never found anything Apple/MAC to be intuitive to me.

My questions - and there are probably a million more I don't know:
- What kind of phone should I get?
- Do you like yours? If so, which one & why?
- Do you have one you DONT like? If so, which one & why?
- How much do you pay for your plan? With whom and what do you get?
- Or just any thoughts you have regarding your smartphone....
- Is there a good review website for the Tech UnSavvy?

And I know there are tons of us that don't have them, if you want to chime in with why you don't, feel free!

[JaneV2.0]

I had a Samsung briefly, and liked it. I'd consider the Samsung Galaxy or Note.

[herbgeek]

You aren't the last person to get a smart phone. I don't have one. I don't currently have a personal situation where I need one, but that could change, and then I would buy one. I'm usually either home or at work, and both places have internet and phone access. When I'm driving, I have voice/phone access. When I travel, I have both a tablet and an itouch to check mail, use apps and the like with wifi. There are few places I go where wi fi is not available SOME time during the day, and I have no one who needs instant access to me other than my spouse.

If you don't really want one, don't get one. Your kids can reach you a dumb phone too. Or if its just the technology you want to play with, you could get an itouch and not have to pay a monthly plan fee.

[gimmethesimplelife]

I had a Kyocera Rise for 24 hours last fall and it froze up on me several times those 24 hours and the Internet connection seemed unreliable and the learning curve involved seemed very annoying so I took it back for a refund and now proudly have a dumb phone - a Samsung Array slider phone, which is a step up from a flip phone and gives me unlimited talk and text which is all I really need. Personally I see myself keeping this phone for awhile, unless I should leave for a seasonal job - out in the middle of nowhere if you want a working cell phone you usually need to be with Verizon. Or if I start a small business of some kind and it takes off - I could see myself needing a smartphone then - otherwise, no, no, no!!!!! Don't need the learning curve and additional complexity in my life!!! Rob

[CeciliaW]

There is a Great thread over on Money Mustache about this topic and keeping the costs down, way down. Go read it and it will answer a lot of your questions.

[CeciliaW]

'Our new $10.00 per month iphone plans' is the name of the thread on Money Mustache.

[Life_is_Simple]

I have a Motorola Droid Bionic, which I got through Verizon. The 4 GB data package costs $30 monthly, additional to whatever one's verizon phone voice package is.

I got a smartphone because I would travel and have my motels reserved ahead of time. But then if I was caught in rain and stopped early, I would have to find a different motel. I ended up with a dumpy motel one time. Now that I have the Smartphone, I can look up motel ratings while on the road. I also got the phone for work, and work emails.

The good features are: camera, shopping list/to-do app, weather app, radio app for long distance travels.... Oh! I can deposit checks to my credit union through their app by taking a picture of the checks. That is so great! Also, I can look at Word or Excel docs, e.g., all my travel checklists etc.

When I was investigating what phone to get, I looked online, and went to the Verizon store a couple of times. But finally I just ordered the exact one my bf had! He had let me try his, but it seemed weird and foreign. But once I got my own, it took no time to figure stuff out. Allow yourself a 2-week time when you first get it to be mesmerized, fascinated, sometimes frustrated, but mostly amazed.

Um... I don't get commission on this.

But it can simplify things in your life by having everything in one little spot. I'm more about simplifying, than complete frugality, so take that into consideration when reading my 'review.'

On Edit: I got the Droid Bionic instead of the Razr because a person could get a longer life battery for the Bionic if they wanted (but not the Razr). My bf bought the longer life battery for his phone.

[SteveinMN]

We are an Apple family, so my next smartphone will be an iPhone. The iPhone fits neatly into many of the paradigms and hardware pieces we already have; for me, it's an easy choice. You don't have that, so the value of that fit is diminished. If you do happen to have a lot of DRM-protected content you've purchased from the iTunes Music Store, though, you might still want to consider an iPhone because it will have no issue playing that content while other phone operating systems may not.

My current smartphone is a Nokia E73 running the Symbian operating system. It's three years old and working just fine. Symbian was designed to be resource-efficient. I can easily go three days on a full charge before I have to juice up again. Call quality and signal strength also are above average, and the phone still feels like it was carved out of a single chunk of aluminum. However, Symbian as an operating system is dead, so updates are no more. The good thing about that is that there won't be new software screwing things up. And I still have email, Web access, and a GPS. There are Facebook and twitter and YouTube clients and apps for all kinds of purposes. I can connect securely to a computer network that accepts the VPN on the phone. I can view and open PDF and Microsoft Office files. There's even a Shazam client for Symbian. But I know my next phone will have to be something different.

I'm using the phone on T-Mobile. If you're never in deeply-rural or -mountainous areas, it's a good carrier. They're moving to 4G and LTE and are adding high speed GSM service in the same bands as at&t, so you could move an unlocked at&t phone to T-Mobile and use their cheaper rates. We have a family plan that translates to about $60 a month for this phone; it could be cheaper, but DW and I are waiting out the plan (early 2014) and then we'll do something else -- prepaid, maybe; maybe move DW to a prepaid because she has almost no use for a phone herself. DD will be on her own.

In the end, though, I think your choice will be either iOS (iPhone) or Android. I think Blackberry is pretty much dead, partially because it took them way too long to modernize and partly because none of the cool kids are carrying Blackberries anymore and -- sorry -- that has a chilling effect on the market. (Don't think so? What major improvements have been made to "dumbphones" since smartphones became > 50% of activations). Windows Phone is not bad based on what I've seen of it, but Microsoft has had a long history of making hash out of portable operating systems -- updates that left out recently-released phones, big paradigm changes between versions. In fact, I just read that Microsoft will be making 18-month updates to Windows Phone and not worrying that older phones can be upgraded. Given that most phone contracts run 24 months, well, I just don't see the point of it from the consumer's side of things.

Android is a good operating system, though it could be much more efficient. I think part of the problem there is that the OS is licensed for whoever wants to make an Android phone, so the OS has lots of hardware variation to deal with, and that's hard to make efficient. I also have a concern about Google (Android's owner/licenser). I know darn well any wireless carrier wants to monetize the daylights out of me. I know Apple keeps track of every song I buy or every book my wife downloads. But they're not tracking my Web queries or scanning my emails like Google does. And I don't want to encourage that kind of behavior by buying an Android phone. But other people have no worries about that at all. Your choice.

[redfox]

Since my iphone is my work phone, I use it nearly 7 hours a day - on a corded headset - and I love it. I can email on it when I'm on the road, though I prefer my ipad, which is my office-in-a-box. The two are indispensable to me. The photos my iphone 4 takes are good. My DH, who has a part time professional photography business, uses his iphone for some of his work. He uses specific development programs to process them; I can find out which ones if you're interested. Here I am in my home office, taking a break to converse with y'all, waiting for my 11:30 meeting -- oops! that's now! -- and snapping this goofy pic on my trusty ol' imac desktop! Bye!!!

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[leslieann]

I have been happy with my choice and surprised myself by how much utility I discovered in the smart phone. I got a galaxy nexus, but BF got the iphone and I wish we were on the same platform. However, two of my children are android users too, so I got some good user advice from them. Anyway, I didn't expect to like it so much, and I really didn't expect it to make things easier or simpler but both things have happened. Worth the money for me.