Anyone using Project Fi? What's it like overall? Does it constantly switch from WiFi to cell service in an attempt to find the best connection or could you set it to only use the cell radio when you're on the go? If it is the former, how does that affect battery life of the phone?
It seems rather interesting and I could see porting my number from my $30/mo TMobile plan (partly because I find the minute allotment restricting, but not restricting enough to jump up $10-$15/mo for a ATT Prepaid or next level Tmobile plan), especially since I'm thinking of replacing my Nexus 4 with a 5X.
So here's the thing with fi...
I have T-Mobile right now and my town is very well covered by T-Mobile. I see zero difference in reception between my fi sim and T-mobile one. In my office they are both dead, not even the CDMA punch of Sprint can get through. So I just toss it on airplane mode and use wifi calling to get through with Fi. With T-Mobile I'd flip my phone to "wifi calling" only and call it a day. I'd flip back to cellular preferred when I was leaving.
I don't notice any real switching. I've only found one wifi spot that it autoconnects the phone to. But other than that it's worked well. The Wifi calling/texting reliability is hands down better than T-Mobile. T-Mobile still does some kind of sim card validation and at least have a dozen times a day I'd think it was on wifi calling mode only to find that everything was stuck sending and I wasn't getting anything back to me.
Fi works much, much better than T-Mobile in that regard.
I do miss the unlimited streaming of T-Mobile. I forgot to turn off cellular data on Google music and it ripped through 40 meg of data in a few minutes of time. Doh. Certainly a step back knowing that there is a dollar cost to every bit of data. It's not as oppressive as Verizon overage charges, but it's certainly a bit more restrictive feeling than the unlimited hose of bandwith T-Mobile will give me.
My biggest problem is that I live in a cellular dead zone. I still need to get calls and texts through. I tried T-Mobile and just found their wifi calling spotty. There's an extra handshake or something in there that leaves the phones flaky.
With fi once you go on wifi you are golden. No hiccups that I've found. I've also never watched it flip signals nor really gave it much mind. If it's on wifi, it will try and call/text over that instead.
Plan on using a gig of data month. Just in little stuff like google searches, email, navigation, ect it all adds up. So just bank on it costing you $30 a month for very good wifi calling and fairly fast mobile data when you need it.