Too much advice and too little

On several occasions this forum has come to my rescue. Having discovered that Three is the only mobile phone provider whose 4G signals can be used within my house, I set about recharging the batteries of my Doro 7020 with a view to switching from Vodafone to Three. This involves unlocking it, advice for which I have found online. But the Doro 7020, which cost £70, is no smart phone. You cannot point it at a QR code on a bus-stop and expect it to know when the next bus will arrive. In fact it cannot download apps at all. So what are the cheapest options for something that can? You will understand that the total number of phone calls that I have successfully made on the Doro has never reached double digits. The Covid lockdown and concerned children panicked me into buying it. So I do not want a contract, just pay-as-you-go for the rare occasions when I need to call a taxi from somewhere other than my landline’s phone at home.
I know that smartphones can do useful things, like measuring distances, cataloguing books on shelves, telling you the names of flowers and trees when you point at a leaf, and so on. But I am almost totally ignorant. My fingers have not yet learned how to swipe and poke. Asking advice from Google is hopeless: just bucketsfull of advertising jargon. Help.

I was a bit shaken to discover, last October, that without a smartphone you cannot park a car in the street, or charge it up if it is electric. My wife has been urging me to plunge into the 21-st century for a while now.

You cannot point it at a QR code on a bus-stop and expect it to know when the next bus will arrive.

Blindly following random QR codes is going to be a security nightmare soon enough. They’re like a real world equivalent of URL shortening services, and those pretty much died out exactly because of the issues of “where does this link actually go to?”.

So what are the cheapest options for something that can?

How much do you value your time? You can get fairly cheap and basic Android devices, but I can tell you from my experience with bottom end tablets (the sort they give away free with magazine subscriptions) that they are functional and they do work, they just do it really rather slowly. Spec is about the same(ish) as a Pi3 (4×1.2GHz, 2GB RAM, 16GB Flash, display often 1280×800 or something).

If you prefer a phone to be able to use apps out and about, you might want something a little nippier.
My most recent phones have been Xiaomi. This means China is spying on you in addition to America. The phones are actually pretty good for the price because they do things like only bother to fit USB 2.0 hardware, don’t fit wireless charging, use a cheaper display panel, no SD slot, in order to keep costs down. My previous Xiaomi had a rather naff LCD screen but by doing that they were able to shove into it the same processor chip as in the Samsung S20 that cost twice the price. Oh, and the camera is pretty impressive for the price, too.

just pay-as-you-go

I don’t know how it is in the UK, but over here mobile data burns through PAYG credit. If you find yourself looking up stuff or using apps when out and about, you might find a cheap contract might wind up cheaper than PAYG.

panicked me into buying it.

It’s not unreasonable. One really needs to have a mobile phone when out and about given that breakdowns and such still happen and those few callboxes that remain are often full of books…

But I am almost totally ignorant.

All that is by way of apps. There are so many apps for all sorts of things.

Distances? Probably Google Maps. It can also give you step by step directions how to get somewhere and if you want do a complete guided navigation for you using your GPS and giving audio prompts like “at the next roundabout, take the third exit”. I use this when I’m going somewhere new.

Cataloguing books? No idea, it’s not something I’ve needed to do.

Recognising plants? Possibly PlantNet, I use that for identifying things in the garden as I’m not mom so my plant knowledge is “purple, pretty”.

There’s also Netflix for movies, Amazon for ordering random crap, Snapseed for messing with photos, CreArt for easy AI generated imagery (useful for blog articles and desktop backdrops), CustomRadioPlayer for streaming radio (I listen to Love 80s or WZBA on the way home from work), Translate for making everybody else’s gibberish legible, YouCut for editing the videos I put on YouTube, and irplus to spit out custom IR codes in order to control my wall mounted heater (and some other stuff).

Plus the two banking apps because EU rules mean I have to demonstrate who I am using the app every 90 days in order to continue being able to access my bank accounts (by any means). This is done by going into the app and tapping in a special PIN. Seems to me that it is mostly security theatre.
On the other hand, one of the apps gives me an easy way to create virtual credit cards. So I can make, say, a MasterCard that can only be used once for a predetermined limit. It’s an easy way to knock internet card fraud on the head, because the numbers are effectively useless. PayPal gets a bit upset when it spots a different card each time, but whatever, I don’t use them much these days as I don’t appreciate crooks implying that I’m a crook.

Oh, and one of my phones has a brilliant chess app for people who like the idea of chess but want something more interesting. It’ll deal out a board that looks normal until you realise: three pawns, six knights, five queens, and so on. Then games get a lot more interesting. 😺

For many things, if you can think it, there’s probably an app.

Just don’t be surprised or horrified by the pervasive advertising. The word, I believe coined by Cory Doctorow, is “enshittification”. He isn’t wrong.

Smartphones are useful, I’m using one right now (and listening to Antenne Symphonic Rock from Germany), but privacy violations are rife. There’s a reason why so many apps want access to your location. And never ever let them get at your contacts list.
Android is getting better, but do keep in mind that it is made by one of the world’s biggest advert companies, who have been meddling and influencing browsers in order to weaken the power of add-ons in order to curtail anti-advertising measures. Google really ought to be broken up, but are the individual parts self sufficient?

My fingers have not yet learned how to swipe and poke.

It’s not that hard really. You’ll get used to warming up your thumbs.

or charge it up if it is electric

That is one of the things I have against electric cars.
Namely:

• Battery behaviour is so temperature dependent (going to work today at -1C took more charge than going to Big Town over twice as far away when it’s 10C).
• So many chargers are either the wrong type or are simply broken.
• Charging takes time (you can’t dump 800V at 120kW into my car).
• I’ve yet to find a charger that you can just plug in and give bank card details to. They want apps and accounts and sod all of that malarkey.

I was a bit shaken to discover

Nah, the thing that should shake you is that you get yourself a phone, you install the app of your electricity supplier or whatever, and it’s basically 20MB to do exactly what the website does, only on your phone the website tells you to install the app. It’s Kafkaesque.

What would shake me is that I’ve heard you don’t get given menus any more. You get a QR code to scan that…no, sorry, I’ll just wander over the the mediocrity that is McDonald’s rather than deal with that nonsense. If I’m eating in a decent restaurant, I want a proper printed menu with pretty pictures that look nothing like what actually arrives.

My wife has been urging me to plunge into the 21-st century for a while now.

If I were you, I’d ask for a refund. This millennium didn’t start well and, frankly, it’s just been getting worse.

I’ve yet to find a charger that you can just plug in and give bank card details to. They want apps and accounts and sod all of that malarkey.

In the UK, most public DC charging points (50kW and up) will accept a bank card. The lower-speed AC charging points tend to insist on apps: as a result I have 10 EV charging apps on my phone. So yes it is possible to charge an EV without a mobile phone, but it’s a lot easier if you do have one.

My wife has been urging me to plunge into the 21-st century for a while now.

IMHO she’s right. I’ve had a smartphone for some years now. I wouldn’t be without it. I’m not on it all the time, but it is a means to so many ends. I don’t know whether this includes you, but I very much have the impression that many people think of smartphones as ends in themselves. This is the wrong way to think of them. Think of what they will enable you to do.

There are two important tradeoffs: portability versus legibility (for us old gits!) and speed versus cost. Ask your friends, or conquer your fear and try some phone shops. You may or may not want to actually buy there though.

you might find a cheap contract might wind up cheaper than PAYG.

This is entirely plausible. There are very few real network operators (EE, Vodafone, O2, Three in the UK) and lots of MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) that resell the service of the majors but at a fraction of the price. You may not quite get the full service – check the T&Cs – but you’ll probably end up with enough. If you find you need to upgrade to a better service level, they’re normally happy to do that. (The other direction, not so much.)

Come on in, the water’s fine!

And IMHO don’t be tempted to save money by buying a second-hand phone. You want it to have security updates for several years.

Blindly following random QR codes is going to be a security nightmare soon enough. They’re like a real world equivalent of URL shortening services, and those pretty much died out exactly because of the issues of “where does this link actually go to?”.

Well, for the likes of pages hidden behind “bit.ly” and similar, the answer at work tends to be something in this IP range: 146.112.130.0/24

Standardised answer to this link (on a web page with a complete sentence displayed with a bit.ly link behind¹) needs unblocking is: paste that link into https://unshorten.it, and then you know the real URL.

The word, I believe coined by Cory Doctorow, is “enshittification”

Sounds Pratchett-esque – Cory would have been 12 when “The Colour of Magic” was first published, I bet he was² a Discworld fan.

If I were you, I’d ask for a refund. This millennium didn’t start well and, frankly, it’s just been getting worse.

There’s a nagging feeling that Putin or Trump may press the reset button, then lights in the sky read “Game Over” alternating with images of cockroaches that glow in the dark.
Never mind, for those that “do” there is always beer (GBBF Meeting at Stockport tomorrow :) )

¹ That level of stupid deserves special treatment – maybe a “hard reset” with a baseball bat to the back of the head?

Get something like a mid range Samsung A35 on contract from EE, not only does this give you free calls, text and 20GB of data a month, but you can pay for it over 2 or 3 years. Much better than paying up front for some Chinese tat, and then having to top up PAYG every month.

I found that Samsung weren’t very good at ongoing updates. I went OnePlus and got better phones at lower prices than the Samsung/Apple options and almost monthly updates/security fixes for Android.

My 4 year old S20FE is still getting regular OS upgrades. My now 9 year old S7 (which my 9 year old wants now my 11 year old has the A35 ready for big school later this year) was getting updates until a couple of years ago (2022 I believe). I’d be surprised if any Chinese makes are supported that long.

@ Gavin, I would not if you are only going to use a small amount of data a month, purchase a phone + sim from EE. Their Sim prices are geared to the heavy data user and they have just announced a £4 price rise in March for new users of a phone + Sim combo.
I would buy new, as second hand phone batteries are less efficient than new ones. Also buy Sim free and purchase a monthly fee Sim, a good price range for your usage is around about £10. (Smarty for instance are offering 40GB for £10 at the moment.)

Regards Ron.

Thanks for these advisements.
Can batteries not be replaced? Are they not standardized? Or am I dreaming of an alternative universe where public advantage comes first? I was going to say where public advantage trumps commercial but I had second thoughts about using a certain word, today of all days.

Can batteries not be replaced?

All too often they are glued into the phone, in a way that damn near requires the phone to be wrecked to get the thing out.

Are they not standardized?

Not even slightly. Modern phones are quite power hungry and the trend is for them to be as small and thin as possible, so it’s a battle between “enough power” and “small enough”.

Or am I dreaming of an alternative universe

I think the problem is that while it might be nice to have a phone that runs on a bunch of AA cells, they wouldn’t have enough power and it would be chunky – so people would be less likely to want it.

Can batteries not be replaced?

This will happen when the time is ripe. Although the mobile phone market is starting to mature, right now is not a good time to standardize on batteries. Battery technology is undergoing significant research effort and is improving rapidly.

Can batteries not be replaced?

Realistically, your phone is likely to be beyond support (and therefore less secure) before the battery needs replacing. The only phone I can think of with such a long support life that the battery will die first, is the Fairphone – but it is one of the few that has a replaceable battery.

If the phone has a setting to reduce the maximum charge level, use it. The battery’s overall life will be better if only charged to something like 80%.

significant research effort and is improving rapidly.

Smallest size, most capacity, least prone to blowing up – especially given the propensity of us meatsacks to drop the things onto hard surfaces.
It’s quite an engineering challenge.

Realistically, your phone is likely to be beyond support (and therefore less secure) before the battery needs replacing.

While this is true to a degree, it is worth noting that the EU wants to introduce a minimum duration of update support including making it mandatory to state when such support will end – partly because of the amount of never-supported crap that is out there.

Yes, I know you’re no longer in the EU, but it goes one of two ways. Either this pledge of longevity rubs off on you too, or you get all the crap that can’t be sold in the EU any more. ;)

It’s also worth noting that more and more core services are falling under the remit of Google Play Services. The paranoid might say it’s Google trying to tie more and more of the OS up in closed source parts (which is correct) but the flip side of the coin is that it allows for a lot of centralised patches and fixes to come straight from Google themselves, given that many manufacturers have a rather deplorable record in bothering to support their hardware. You might get a major update, once, or twice if it’s a flagship model. You’d hardly ever get the regular security releases.

As long as you take care with the apps you install and don’t visit dodgy sites and keep your browser up to date (and if Firefox, run every bit of web sanitisation you can install via the extensions), your phone will still function even after it’s past it’s prime. The phone I take with me is a Samsung S9 running, if I remember correctly, Android 8. The battery is not in great shape and the AMOLED screen has quite a bit of burn in, so I think the hardware will be what pushes me to switch to a different device.

Also very much worth pointing out that I got my S9 in February 2019 and it usually charges overnight (to 100%), every weekday and sometimes on Saturday if I went out someplace. That’s something like 1500 full charges (and possibly discharged a good way too, depending on use), and while the battery is nowhere near as good as it used to be, it’s still going. For now. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

But…I would whack it into a regular 2A capable charger for a slow charge. Heat will cause more trouble to the battery than being charged to 100%, and these fancy 65W or 80W chargers do cause the batteries to get warm. If I’m asleep, it can take it’s time. I don’t need flat to 80% in half an hour…it’s a phone, not an EV.

Finally, if you shove the thing into a drawer because you don’t use it, be sure to turn it fully off, then write a note on your calendar to pull it out in three month’s time to pop it on charge. Because if the battery goes completely flat, it’s toast.

Realistically, your phone is likely to be beyond support (and therefore less secure) before the battery needs replacing

The reason for replacing my previous work issue iPhone with the current one was that the battery swelled and forced the screen off.
No doubt if the battery could have been replaced it would have been on a battery replacement schedule, and I’d still have it.

There you go, a positive note about battery death.

the flip side of the coin is that it allows for a lot of centralised patches and fixes to come straight from Google themselves

This is definitely and explicitly the reason. Manufacturers were shipping products with the Android-of-the-day and then immediately abandoning them as they moved to the next new device. Google were forced to move to a much more modular OS model (like RO!) to enable them to update more of “the OS” without requiring manufacturers to do an OTA update… which they had demonstrably refused to do.

This is a good thing.

Finally, if you shove the thing into a drawer because you don’t use it

Set yourself an alarm to send a text message every month or you’ll likely lose the SIM. And find out when you need it the most. Ask me how I know.

This is a good thing.

Not quite so good when Google decide that the certificate on a Wi-Fi hotspot must be a public certificate and to remove the option to “not verify” when a typical large enterprise install offers a local cert (public cert is useless if you can’t connect through and the only connectivity is the Wi-Fi you’re refusing to use “because certificate” and the other, mobile, option won’t work through a load of concrete and steel)

Good thing when enough people have told Google they are a-holes and they revert.

to enable them to update more of “the OS” without requiring manufacturers to do an OTA update…

Given that the flash is a filesystem and it can be mounted writable (as the user data partition normally is) it seems odd to expect custom full updates rather than incremental fixes.

Of course, if the ARM ecosystem had developed with some sort of consistency, things much be simpler…

Android is immutable, which is a fancy way of saying it tries to act like a ROM – but actually more like a pair of EEPROMs. When it updates it completely overwrites the second partition and then switches to it, leaving the old one for recovery.

A mobile phone can teach the swiss army knife a trick or two.

My favourite function is the “flashlight” or torch as we benighted brit english call it.

On my Motorola a simple shake turns the torch on and a shake turns it off. The magic of this is that the phone is never far from my hand so there is always a torch when I shut up the house at night or go up the garden to lock up the chickens.