I have been using AT&T cellular for years (probably 15+) and have a simple plan - 2 unlocked Galaxy S5s (SM-G900T) + 1 OldSkool Dumb phone w/ txting only (MIL who cannot control herself from gambling and doing anything to get rid of her $$ as fast as possible). This is on a paltry 1GB/Mo shared plane (bet you didn't think they came that low did you?) and I am paying $100/MO which I know is straight out ridiculous and know I am getting bent over by AT&T. For the last couple of years, to say that the servics has been abysmal would be an understatement on the 2 Galaxy S5s that are at the property I live at. I have had the same issue with either the stock T-Mobile ROM that came on the phone or the LineageOS (v14.1) that I am running now - basically no cell service probably 50% of the time I pickup the phone. The dumb phone works fine at the location it is at.
Recently a friend was over and he had a T-Mobile phone and he had 75% signal strength for the day he was here, so I kind of feel this to be an AT&T issue. I have an old iPhone 4S that is unlocked w/ a T-Mobile sim that I plan on signing up to see what my results are, but again, this is an old iPhone so not sure how that would play into the equation. Figure I can give it a try since my current plan is bending me over pretty good.
Here is the advice I am needing:
I need 3 phones (2smart, 1dumb and locked down to just txting) that are at the very least comparable to the Galaxy S5 hardware wise and are rootable as the units I have I picked up off of SWAPPA some years ago. I picked up the S5s because you could get replacement batteries, but even when buying a 'new' battery, I do not get good battery life and I feel it is because of the horrible cell service (although my location shows up on the AT&T map as 'great' coverage, but I am thinking that they phone is needing to push the cell radios high and thus resulting in very little battery life - have to charge probably 2x/day) or these 'new' batteries are just so old and have been sitting in a warehouse or they are fake Samsung batteries - You pick what you feel is the correct answer.
I miss calls and will get notifications of a VM when the phones never ring. Sometimes this takes a restart of the phone to get service or 'pickup' the VM notification necessatating at least 1x/day if not more restarting, and sure enough I will have missed calls. This is getting to a serious level as I am missing doctors calls and other important calls, not just missing a friends call here and there. I would say at the minimum 35-45% of the time I pick up my phone, it will say 'No Cellular Service' or 'Emergency Calling Only'. Same thing with TXTing - I do not receive them or they do not go out. I have complained to AT&T about this multiple times and their 'fix' was to keep me on this ridiculous plan and send me some bottom of the line 'special;' AT&T phones and a device to plug into my home network so the phones could (I assume) use the home network (100Mb/s down / 10Mb/s up) as VOIP setup as I have A/B/G/N/AC network capabilities on my home network. Not an ideal situation because I do not need another failure point, even though my entire network is on UPSs, sometimes my home internet connection will have a hiccup and I really do not see how AT&T using my home network fixes the problem as they are just using my home internet for their service issue.
So, what are some recommendations for a pair of smart phones (prefer Android because iPhone keeps you so far away from doing anything deep, I want to peak under the hood and I just feel more comfortable w/ Android - not to say I couldn't get as comfortable with Apple, but some apps I use ALOT are not iOS ported) to replace the S5s? I have not kept up with the phones over the years, so like I said earlier, do not need the newest or fanciest. I would also like to have a plan w/ a bit more bandwidth allotment so I can stream Pandora, YouTube or tether my laptop when out when I want to and also I am just setting up FolderSync to be able to sync whichever folders on the phone to my home server via FTPS which would go onto a RAID1 Array on my Home Server which is then backed up to external HDDs. I would like to be able to root the phone and put on a stripped down Android install, do not want all the bloatware of a non-rooted phone and I am Not a FB user on the phone nor Instagram, Twitter, etc or really any social media. I do use the camera quite a bit using OpenCamera (not selfies, but pics for reference and instead of lugging around a seperate device as the cameras have come pretty far on even these S5s, they work good enough for me compared to a point and shoot digital I would pick up as I do not need a serious camera like a DSLR) and the calendar setup, this is imperative as my wife and I use the same GMail accout for our phones so our calendars are always sync'd up along w/ using GO Contact Sync Mod to sync it w/ Outlook for an additional backup/place to look up the calendar. GPS is important not only for directions but also for being able to keep track of the pics. Being able to tether is also important as I go to some places where it is the only network connection I have. Also, I do not want to get into a contract if possible, so either a decent used phone or ? I am thinking my price range for a used phone would be in the $200-$300 range, preferably less just because of the amount of use I get out it - my phones are not tied to my hip but when I want or need to use them, they need to work.
T-Mobile people - please speak up as to your experiences not only about their coverage but also their customer support. Hopefully I will not have to use them, but AT&T is getting worse and worse and the last thing I need is some a$$hole CS agent when I am having an issue with their product.
Please assist as this situation needs to get rectified and quick as the service is detiorating, and I am not sure if it is me, but even when I pay my AT&T bill, seems like many times the website is very slow and unresponsive giving me the impression that maybe AT&T maybe having other troubles than just what I am seeing - this is purely speculation, but when I do my bills, the AT&T site is always the slowest one to deal with, in fact I can do all my other monthly bills in the amount of time it takes the AT&T site to work and this is coming from my Laptop which a Thinkpad T440s w/ 8GB RAM & a 500GB SSD, connected either WIFI or even via ethernet.
Last, I am not brand loyal - whatever does at the very least what the S5 does and has better battery life than what I am getting would be great. FWIW, when at home, obviously I am on the home network if I look stuff up so a phone w/ A/B/G/N/AC wifi would be great.
Thanks in advance and I look forward to your recommendations,
Bob
EDIT: This next 'need' (as it is important as making call period for me) should have been in the this first post when I made it originally but it slipped my mind - please add this to my list and also I have refined the needs/wants/realities in post #12. Thanks for reading.
- One new question that I need to address that I completely forgot about in the first post was that I need a phone that will allow the recording of both sides of a phone call w/out a limitation of the length of a recording (obviously the size of the memory would be the limiting factor, but I can address that and just put a large SD card in the phone). One party recording is perfectly legal in my state and is (for me) an absolute necessity for some phone calls I make. The way I do it w/ the S5 is connect the S5 w/ a headphone/mic and use RecForge to record both sides of the conversation in excellent (at least for a phone call - 16bit, 22KHz, Mono) quality. I have RecForge to record directly to MP3 so not even a .wav -> MP3 conversion is necessary. Being a MP3 file, the fact that just about any device that plays digital music will play a MP3 audio file. Now the new question is would all phones do this or is it a trial and error type of situation and I would have to figure out which phones do this and if this is the case, how would I figure it out by looking at the spec sheet? Is there some spec listed on a phone that lets you know this type of recording is possible? I did not know that the S5 could even do this as there is not any spec that says it can do this, other than rumors of certain roms that offer the feature to record phone conversations, but even the roms that offered this option would usually not implement the feature. Is there anyway spec or wording that would let me know that both party call recording is part of the software implementation? I have to emphasize that any phone that would not allow this ability would be excluded completely regardless of everything else the phone offered, hell even if it was free and had 100% signal in my quasi Faraday cage condo.
Recently a friend was over and he had a T-Mobile phone and he had 75% signal strength for the day he was here, so I kind of feel this to be an AT&T issue. I have an old iPhone 4S that is unlocked w/ a T-Mobile sim that I plan on signing up to see what my results are, but again, this is an old iPhone so not sure how that would play into the equation. Figure I can give it a try since my current plan is bending me over pretty good.
Here is the advice I am needing:
I need 3 phones (2smart, 1dumb and locked down to just txting) that are at the very least comparable to the Galaxy S5 hardware wise and are rootable as the units I have I picked up off of SWAPPA some years ago. I picked up the S5s because you could get replacement batteries, but even when buying a 'new' battery, I do not get good battery life and I feel it is because of the horrible cell service (although my location shows up on the AT&T map as 'great' coverage, but I am thinking that they phone is needing to push the cell radios high and thus resulting in very little battery life - have to charge probably 2x/day) or these 'new' batteries are just so old and have been sitting in a warehouse or they are fake Samsung batteries - You pick what you feel is the correct answer.
I miss calls and will get notifications of a VM when the phones never ring. Sometimes this takes a restart of the phone to get service or 'pickup' the VM notification necessatating at least 1x/day if not more restarting, and sure enough I will have missed calls. This is getting to a serious level as I am missing doctors calls and other important calls, not just missing a friends call here and there. I would say at the minimum 35-45% of the time I pick up my phone, it will say 'No Cellular Service' or 'Emergency Calling Only'. Same thing with TXTing - I do not receive them or they do not go out. I have complained to AT&T about this multiple times and their 'fix' was to keep me on this ridiculous plan and send me some bottom of the line 'special;' AT&T phones and a device to plug into my home network so the phones could (I assume) use the home network (100Mb/s down / 10Mb/s up) as VOIP setup as I have A/B/G/N/AC network capabilities on my home network. Not an ideal situation because I do not need another failure point, even though my entire network is on UPSs, sometimes my home internet connection will have a hiccup and I really do not see how AT&T using my home network fixes the problem as they are just using my home internet for their service issue.
So, what are some recommendations for a pair of smart phones (prefer Android because iPhone keeps you so far away from doing anything deep, I want to peak under the hood and I just feel more comfortable w/ Android - not to say I couldn't get as comfortable with Apple, but some apps I use ALOT are not iOS ported) to replace the S5s? I have not kept up with the phones over the years, so like I said earlier, do not need the newest or fanciest. I would also like to have a plan w/ a bit more bandwidth allotment so I can stream Pandora, YouTube or tether my laptop when out when I want to and also I am just setting up FolderSync to be able to sync whichever folders on the phone to my home server via FTPS which would go onto a RAID1 Array on my Home Server which is then backed up to external HDDs. I would like to be able to root the phone and put on a stripped down Android install, do not want all the bloatware of a non-rooted phone and I am Not a FB user on the phone nor Instagram, Twitter, etc or really any social media. I do use the camera quite a bit using OpenCamera (not selfies, but pics for reference and instead of lugging around a seperate device as the cameras have come pretty far on even these S5s, they work good enough for me compared to a point and shoot digital I would pick up as I do not need a serious camera like a DSLR) and the calendar setup, this is imperative as my wife and I use the same GMail accout for our phones so our calendars are always sync'd up along w/ using GO Contact Sync Mod to sync it w/ Outlook for an additional backup/place to look up the calendar. GPS is important not only for directions but also for being able to keep track of the pics. Being able to tether is also important as I go to some places where it is the only network connection I have. Also, I do not want to get into a contract if possible, so either a decent used phone or ? I am thinking my price range for a used phone would be in the $200-$300 range, preferably less just because of the amount of use I get out it - my phones are not tied to my hip but when I want or need to use them, they need to work.
T-Mobile people - please speak up as to your experiences not only about their coverage but also their customer support. Hopefully I will not have to use them, but AT&T is getting worse and worse and the last thing I need is some a$$hole CS agent when I am having an issue with their product.
Please assist as this situation needs to get rectified and quick as the service is detiorating, and I am not sure if it is me, but even when I pay my AT&T bill, seems like many times the website is very slow and unresponsive giving me the impression that maybe AT&T maybe having other troubles than just what I am seeing - this is purely speculation, but when I do my bills, the AT&T site is always the slowest one to deal with, in fact I can do all my other monthly bills in the amount of time it takes the AT&T site to work and this is coming from my Laptop which a Thinkpad T440s w/ 8GB RAM & a 500GB SSD, connected either WIFI or even via ethernet.
Last, I am not brand loyal - whatever does at the very least what the S5 does and has better battery life than what I am getting would be great. FWIW, when at home, obviously I am on the home network if I look stuff up so a phone w/ A/B/G/N/AC wifi would be great.
Thanks in advance and I look forward to your recommendations,
Bob
EDIT: This next 'need' (as it is important as making call period for me) should have been in the this first post when I made it originally but it slipped my mind - please add this to my list and also I have refined the needs/wants/realities in post #12. Thanks for reading.
- One new question that I need to address that I completely forgot about in the first post was that I need a phone that will allow the recording of both sides of a phone call w/out a limitation of the length of a recording (obviously the size of the memory would be the limiting factor, but I can address that and just put a large SD card in the phone). One party recording is perfectly legal in my state and is (for me) an absolute necessity for some phone calls I make. The way I do it w/ the S5 is connect the S5 w/ a headphone/mic and use RecForge to record both sides of the conversation in excellent (at least for a phone call - 16bit, 22KHz, Mono) quality. I have RecForge to record directly to MP3 so not even a .wav -> MP3 conversion is necessary. Being a MP3 file, the fact that just about any device that plays digital music will play a MP3 audio file. Now the new question is would all phones do this or is it a trial and error type of situation and I would have to figure out which phones do this and if this is the case, how would I figure it out by looking at the spec sheet? Is there some spec listed on a phone that lets you know this type of recording is possible? I did not know that the S5 could even do this as there is not any spec that says it can do this, other than rumors of certain roms that offer the feature to record phone conversations, but even the roms that offered this option would usually not implement the feature. Is there anyway spec or wording that would let me know that both party call recording is part of the software implementation? I have to emphasize that any phone that would not allow this ability would be excluded completely regardless of everything else the phone offered, hell even if it was free and had 100% signal in my quasi Faraday cage condo.
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