Smartphones

Alright, but if I gimp up the thread too much, you're to blame.

We are considering switching from ATT to T-mobile and their 4/$100 10GB 4G LTE plan which specifies 2.5 GB of LTE per phone. It also says unlimited talk/text/data.

a) Does that mean the unlimited data is at a slower speed?

b) Our house is also not in a 4G available area, it shows 2G. Does this mean data usage from our home would be unlimited, or count against the 10GB 4G LTE?

c) Should we buy phones from T-Mobile, or some other source?

d) Can one of the four lines be a tablet?

A: yes
B: 2g is edge and comparable to dial up. Good luck.
C: get a nexus 6 or one plus carriers screw you. Both will be available soonish
D: I doubt it


T-Mobile is great in cities not so much outside them. I would not look at then if I was in an area with just 2g.

Kedwyn_sl said:

A: yes
B: 2g is edge and comparable to dial up. Good luck.
C: get a nexus 6 or one plus carriers screw you. Both will be available soonish
D: I doubt it


T-Mobile is great in cities not so much outside them. I would not look at then if I was in an area with just 2g.

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All this seems kind of depressing, and I don't really understand what one plus carrier means.

Edit: google gives me Just My Size underwear (wtf) and air conditioners.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

So I need to prep my body for the iPhone 6 possibly having NFC, does anyone suggest a certain brand/supplier for tags?

I know a lot of android users here. I never played with it on my android phones but want to go all in on it with this if they do it.

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What are you planning on tagging? Maybe a dumb question, as I had to google what an nfc tag even was. Neat stuff though.

Gravy_sl said:

All this seems kind of depressing, and I don't really understand what one plus carrier means.

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Was written without correct punctuation to make it more clear for you Gravy. The phone names are "Nexus 6" or "One Plus (One)" , not just One Plus. AFAIK. Then, "Carriers screw you." This is correct. Verizon, Tmobile, Sprint, most all screw you on new phone purchase, especially if no contract.

If you can only get 2g with Tmobile, while their pricing is pretty good and easy, I would seriously consider looking into a different carrier. Maybe Verizon has better service where you live?

Thanks for the help, dudes. I'm sure I'll have more questions.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

So I need to prep my body for the iPhone 6 possibly having NFC, does anyone suggest a certain brand/supplier for tags?

I know a lot of android users here. I never played with it on my android phones but want to go all in on it with this if they do it.

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I used to work for a small startup that focused on NFC tech and can give you at least a little bit of information. I hope some of it is helpful.

Tag technology - Keep in mind that NFC reading/writing is quite slow. Though you can get some larger tags (usually max out around 8k bytes) the performance and user experience is quite bad. Stick with smaller tags when possible.

Tag types to use - There are a few types that work well with mobile technology. You'll see names like mifare, NXP, NTAG as the most common ones that work with most of the Broadcom controllers. Out of these, tags like the NTAG203 are great for shortened URLS. They have ~140 bytes of storage and are great for creating links to auto-open a website, address, one other type of information. When you want to add a bit more, you may want to consider something like the NTAG216. They have 888 bytes of data and are great for things like vcards that contain multiple fields. These are a bit more expensive, but can be great for throwing on the back side of a business card and allow people to scan that to pull your vcard information.

Locations to purchase tags - This can vary. I previously worked for a website called buynfctags.com (their website is fucking atrocious, I only worked with software testing) - While I don't care for the people who run it, they have some pretty decent packages of NFC tags in different forms that would allow you to try out things like keyfobs/etc.

I think the final question to ask is what you would like to do with NFC. Not much is known about what type of APIs will be available for Apple products, but I can guess that it will be quite locked down and may be mainly used for trying to push Apple's mobile payment system.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

I am hoping that you can use keywords for IFTTT on iOS to make NFC tags quick and useful. Are you familiar with that at all mageling?

Put the internet to work for you. - IFTTT

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I've heard of this app before, but I've never used it. I'll play around with it this weekend if I have time this weekend. It definitely sounds like a neat solution.

Yea, if you're outside of a big city, I'd suggest just staying with ATT (their new shared plan isn't really worse than T-mobile), or going with Verizon if you just can't stand ATT for some specific reason.

2G data speed is not fast enough for any kind of "smart phone" type stuff, many apps could refuse to work at dialup speed (ex: puzzle and dragons for sure). Yes, you could use the majority of your phone through wifi, but the best part about smartphones and paying the exhorbitant fee over a basic tablet and a basic dumbphone is that you can access your fast data... ANYWHERE. ex: 10gig shared data, 4 lines, would run 160 a month on ATT. Yes, 60 dollars more a month, and (possible) overage fees, so you wouldn't ever want to do something like stream internet radio or watch porn all day long, but comparing 4g speed to dialup speed isn't even a debate.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

I don't know a ton but you can program them to trigger things with your phone. Put one on your nightstand and when you set the phone on that it will turn on silent mode and do a wifi backup. Place one at your garage door and if your lights are connected to something smart you can bump the phone against it and turn on the lights. Different one for walking out that does the opposite.

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Hopefully it wont be awful like Windows Phone where they only give you NFC access to predetermined actions and you can't actually customize shit.

If I get any invites I'll share. Haven't gotten any yet. Phone is supposed to be available without one in October iirc

Janx_sl said:

Whats your opinion of it so far?

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I've only had it a couple of days.

Battery is on par with my Note 2 which was outstanding.

Screen is excellent. It lacks the over saturation you see on OMELDs and colors looks great.

Build quality is really solid. The backing is really neat on the device. Very soft sand paper would probably be a decent description.

OS is good. About what I expected being that I used AOSP type roms on my note and other devices.

Speedy, no hangups

call quality is good

camera is good

High end device for that price is pretty crazy.