Help choosing a smartphone

I have an "old" PAYG SIM, just pay for calls, at least one paid call per 3 months to keep it alive and NO monthly payments at all.

Does anyone do this now at all, I need another phone?

>BOGGLE<

How did you manage that!

Neil

I have an Alcatel smartphone on pay as you go, it costs £60 new from O2 and does almost the same as an expensive one, I use the internet a lot with it and it comes with 4G.

Martin P

I have an iphone 5S. If I lost it I would buy a Samsung and have a party!

If anyone using the old style sim needs to change the size you can buy a sim card cutter on EBAY for £3. Or go into your local phone shop or local guy in the market place and ask them to do it for you. I bought 1 and cut down sims as phones in the family were upgraded to later models. Saves all the messing about moving contacts etc if you are not tech savvy.

regards

Otley:

Possibly too late to be of help but a point to bear in mind if you are getting an Android phone and plan to keep it for a year or so is that at some stage the manufacturer will stop providing Android updates.

Google phones are sometimes recommended for the reason that the latest Android version will be available quickly but, of course, at some stage your hardware will not support the latest version.

And if you buy an iPhone bear in mind the updates will eventually end up larger than the memory in your phone... as some of my family members will tell you.

You can't win!

Neil

I forgot earlier to say that my Samsung phone didn't need unlocking to take the new SIM card as the card came from Gifgaff which belongs to 02 (Telefonica, Spain.) It is Gifgaff that sell "goodybags" of monthly allowances from 500mb for£5 and so on. I use the option of auto renewal by direct debit each month and works very well for me. Careful choice of Gifgaff out and about and make sure I change over to Plusnet wi fi at home, allows me to get away with only the minimum £5 /month.

John

... and some updates will render more than half your installed apps unusable and many (most) of those never get updated to do so - as I can tell you.

As I pointed out in my earlier post, this doesn't just apply to iPhones. My 2014 vintage Moto G reached this stage a few months ago and I had to replace it - I chose a Moto G5 Plus, which, for £156 for a 32GB model takes a lot of beating.

Gary (and any others with the MOTO G5),

What is the battery life like? I'd read one review where they said it might need charging every day. Is that the case?

Am thinking of upgrading my old phone and was put off the G5 for this reason, so would appreciate the view of someone who actually owns one.

Regards Tom

If you have poor mobile connection in you area or somewhere you frequent then getting a phone and service provider that can do call over wifi can be useful

Mike

Re: "What is the battery life like? I'd read one review where they said it might need charging every day. Is that the case? Am thinking of upgrading my old phone and was put off the G5 for this reason, so would appreciate the view of someone who actually owns one."

Obviously depends very much how it's used. If you keep 'location', Bluetooth & wifi on all the time then a day's use before recharge would be good going.
My G5 is never switched off (I stop most e-services overnight) and a daily top-up charge is often needed. However I think you'll find that most new smart phones will require a daily charge.

At least you can replace the battery in a G5 which is more than can be said for many new phones.

Get the Android app "Accubattery" it's an excellent way to monitor battery use and condition.

Fowlers,

Ok many thanks - as I thought.

Thanks for the tips re replacing battery and re Accubattery - much appreciated.

Regards Tom

I've just seen an ad. for an app(?) that controls the car radio. This could be useful if you have short arms.

I bought a PAYG iPhone on Three and pay about £10 a year mainly for surfing the net and text messages plus the occasional call. Three are very inexpensive compared to other networks.

Got a 100 quid samsung phone for work stuff, hate them and only use it when I have to. The video it takes is absolutely amazing though, 6 hours of good HD video from a wee phone. Would get another, it is good at what it does

Use a dumb phone for calls and texts a Doro 508

PAYG, does extra big text so you can read it without goggles, I originally got it for an 80 year old pal and was so impressed I bought one for myself

Got a windows tablet for net surfing

Edited By Ady1 on 28/02/2018 16:39:35

Only if you're prepared to stop the car and turn off the engine every time you want to adjust the wireless, as fiddling with your mobile whilst driving is illegal. In the event of use of such a device causing an accident could the purveyors be done for adding and abetting?

​I keep seeing adverts for new cars which go on about a touch screen in the car so you can control your phone whilst driving. If these aren't illegal they should be, anything which distracts from actually driving should be banned, 2 tons of iron at 70mph does a lot of damage if it hits you.

I've had my G5 Plus for about 6 weeks. I charge it overnight and it usually has about 75-80% left by the next night. I use the phone quite a lot, but almost never play games, watch videos, or anything else that has the display on for long periods.The battery of the G5 Plus is not replaceable.

So far I like it a lot (much better than my old Moto G) and would happily get another if I lost it.