Fucking Cell Phones

[Mongrel]

Or even a plain-old user-replaceable one, as a limited few phones still allow.

[mharr]

Aye, that's dying by inches - technically most batteries still are, for a given value of 'user-replacable', but knowing what's compatible and where to buy and having the tools and experience to not mangle anything in the process is a whole thing. DIY is fine if you're up for a new hobby.

[Mongrel]

Anybody got any experience with Motorola?

Still dragging my ass because Pixels around here are looking expensive at first glance. Only one my Carrier has is a pre-order for the Pixel 6 at $800 or $30/mo, 2 years, which is more than double what I'm willing to shell out for my minimal cell use. But there's a carrier deal as well as a Costco deal on a couple of Motorolas.

Carrier has the Moto 5 Power at $5/mo, 2 years, and Costco has the Moto 5 Play for $140 up front, unlocked. I'm generally not a fan of payment plans, but the Carrier's got a $100 discount for the Blackberry thing, so that's looking more attractive (numbers I quoted are post-discount).

Everything else my carrier has is Samsung, iphones, and one of the three-letter Chinese also-ran brands. Makes shopping a tough toss-up because they have the $100 off (and waiving the $50 connection fee. $50... WTF! Fuck you guys!), but their selection is tiny and shit.

[Niku]

My wife uses the Moto Power and has had pretty much zero complaints about it; the battery life is pretty impressive on it.

[Mongrel]

the battery life is pretty impressive on it.

Yeah I noted that bit in reviews and that's always something I like to see.

BTW, I saw that Motorola cameras are crap. I don't expect my phone to replace our actual DSLR and it's hard to imagine that a new Moto Power wouldn't automatically be an upgrade in terms of a 7-year old phone camera anyway, so I have pretty low standards there, but has she noticed that pictures are especially bad or anything?

[Niku]

It's definitely not up to the flagship iPhone/Samsung standards, but it's lightyears above what the LG she upgraded from was packing. I wouldn't expect much but it points and shoots well enough.

[Mongrel]

Probably just go with that then. Thanks man.

[Thad]

[Thad]

From 1923.

[nosimpleway]

Running for the train, haha, as though the very idea of mass transit in the USA wouldn't be so thoroughly discredited by then

[Yoji]

Also cute how they assumed phones would still sound like phones.

Phone: OOGA-CHAKA OOGA-CHAKA OOGA OOGA--
Dude: Hello? What's going- wait, it's spreading to his lungs??

[nosimpleway]

To shreds, you say...

[Yoji]

Is this the right thread to talk about phone apps? Because my wife could use an ID card wallet, and I've got questions.

The last time we went to the aquarium, we both forgot our membership cards. We were able to sort it out with a phone number lookup, but a couple weeks later she forgot her membership card for the zoo. It's becoming enough of a pattern that she was wondering if there was an app for just safely storing those on a phone instead.

I can see there's a few different ones to choose from, but I can't help but feel that the whole idea just isn't safe. Are there any decent ones around? Or should I not even touch that and stop being so scatterebrained?

[Silversong]

I've been with Republic Wireless for years now. I only pay $20 a month for 1 gb data which is fine because it's basically always running off wifi.
Got a notice they're changing how the service works and, depending what phone you have, MMS texts might only go over data.
If I need to increase my plan because of this, I want to change services. Anyone have one to recommend?

[Niku]

I've been good with Visible; prepaid $25 a month for unlimited data off of Verizon's network, though it starts at $40 until you jump through the hoop of joining a "party" which is basically a family plan that isn't tied to any particular family. Easy enough to just search up the reddit for it and join some randos or I can figure out how to invite on the one my wife and I are on.

Good service where we are and have never had any outages or surprises, but haven't looked into it any potential other shadiness on account of being Verizon and all.

[Silversong]

I ended up switching to Ting Mobile, because that's what my partner was using and it seems to work everywhere we go. $25 a month for 5GB of 5G, if I go over there's no cost increase it just switches to 2G. No need for a family plan.

I don't know if this is typical of having switched providers without changing phones, but looks like I have to reset to factory defaults to get MMS texting to work. ;___; the thought is stressing me out so I'm putting it off a while.

[Thad]

Anybody know a good Android program for copying entire SMS/MMS conversations?

The main ones I'm looking at right now are SMS Backup+ and Textra. Anybody have any experience with those or similar apps?

Alternately, is there a simple way to do it with ADB or just straight-up copying files?

I'm just looking for something that will allow me to copy an entire text conversation and then read it on another device. Ideally something that's OS-agnostic on the desktop side, though if you've got a recommendation for Windows- or Mac-specific software, feel free to share that too; I've got a Mac and a couple Windows machines I can use if I have to.

[Thad]

I wound up going with Textra. Kind of annoying how it won't work unless you set it as your primary SMS client, but it's fairly straightforward and will let you choose things like whether or not to include attachments.

Expects you to use the Share interface to put the file somewhere else, though. Because accessing the local filesystem is for olds.