An iPhone story
 

So I decided to join the 21st century. I'd been thinking about getting a smart phone for a while as a way to keep connected with my son as he doesn't check email and rarely actually answers his cell phone with his voice. If you want to talk to the young these days, you text.
His birthday is coming up and he said he'd like to upgrade his old iPhone 3GS to something better, a 4S maybe. He uses prepaid with TMobile as we are all of one mind in this family: contracts are for suckers.
So I start looking at iPhones on Craigslist and discover a heretofore unknown to me world of scammers and lowlifes.
Finally I find an ad that has TWO current model iPhones for sale for 350 bucks total. A 32gig 5S and a 16gig 5C. The 5c has a cracked screen. I call. "Are they unlocked I say and can you prove it?" Nice lady says we are new employees at NAU and got phone service through the university but it's Verizon and we can't use our GSM phones. We've paid off our old ATT contract and we're waiting for verification of unlock." I say OK, call me when you have the confirmation. She says OK. I don't expect to here from her based on the other scumbags I've been dealing with on Cl. In a couple of days she calls. They're unlocked and ready to go, I printed the emails for you if you're still interested. Meantime I had checked with a 3rd party Apple repair shop and got a quote of 129 dollars to fix the 5C screen with an assurance that they were genuine apple parts including the Retina display. So we go see the phones. The 5S is gorgeous, not a mark on it. The 5C works fine too but has a vertical crack in the screen. I tell the nice new professor lady how much it'll cost to repair the screen and she says "oh my goodness, well if you want them both how about 300 dollars?" I had checked the prices for new unlocked versions of these phones with apple and the two together would cost a good ways north of a thousand dollars, so 300 is basically free. I bought them on the spot.
Sonny boy, happy as a pig in shlt pops his Tmobile sim into the 5S and is hooked up in a heartbeat. I packaged the 5C and sent it off to Tempe to the Apple Exchange for a screen repair while waiting for my TMobile sim to arrive. A day or two later the Apple Exchange calls and says we have your phone but it won't power up and we can't replace the screen and are sending it back.
When the phone got back sure enough it appeared to have been damaged in the mail. I had bought insurance on it for 300 dollars. I called AppleCare as it was still under warranty. The guy says "There is no such thing as genuine apple parts used in iPhone repairs by anybody. That business is lying to you and so is anyone else who claims to repair iPhones with Apple parts. We don't repair phones. If your phone needs repair we send you a new one. We can send you a new one for 269 dollars. So a couple of days later a prepaid FedEx arrives with a brand new 5C, and I get email confirmation from the USPS that my insurance claim has been approved and a check will be issued within 48 hours. So I have a brand spanking new iPhone 5C for a hundred bucks, junior has a pristine 5S for 200, and we're both paying 40 bucks a month to TMobile for unlimited talk and text and 500Mb of data a month.
Sometimes you get lucky.

We went with Net10. You get unlimited data, unlimited texts, and calls for $45 on the first one and $40 on the second one. The GSM Iphone with Net10 would run off the AT&T towers on 4g speed. AT&T has great coverage.

I'm on Verizon. Got myself a 5S. Excellent phone, but I like Android better personally. If you like simple operating systems. Get an iPhone no doubt. I've been enjoying 4G.

That's the thing too about texting --- I hate it. If you don't call me at least once in awhile I stop answering you period. Even though I have the phone for it, I still use it very little.

Seems so. I looked at the web hard for a couple of weeks trying to figure an angle to save a few hundred bucks. But I've gone through grief trying to make cheaper used phones work and decided it wasn't worth the grief. Just a week or two w/o a phone could cost me considerably.

I decided to go the easy deluxe route and got the 5s from T Mobile, this after having had the HTC M8 for almost all of the two week refund period. Took a $50 restocking/recycling fee hit but oh well. The M8 just felt too big to me. I also didn't like the business of tapping the screen twice to wake it up. Maybe you get a touch for it but I frequently had trouble with that. Didn't like the keyboard either. Could barely see the dimmer punctuation symbols on top of the keys - you hold it down a bit longer to get the symbol.

The Apple is small enough to keep in my shirt pocket, in my Otter Box. I like the keyboard, the voice to text is more reliable, and the push button turn on and thumbprint reader is more certain than the HTC double tap. I'm liking it more and more but I still have a lot to learn.

Me too, a smart phone virgin. I lave pretty slender fingers and still make a lot of errors on the keypad, hitting adjacent keys. I love the speech to text for that reason. Speaking in a modulated voice and using standard english it's remarkably accurate.

It don't speak southern yet.

naw, it don't. Don' espeek spanglish too

or that other one, what's it called, Ebola?

Paula Poundstone: Texting would be a great invention, if somebody hadn't already have invented the telephone.


You Suck, Siwi . ..

It's a necessary evil for me for work. Not an iPhone per se, just a smart phone. My ol' 4S is getting a bit worse for wear (no home button for past year+, thankfully the virtual home button suffices most of the time, freezing up more often, maxed out with memory, phone function is spotty-sometimes caller can't hear me :rolleyes:) so I'll have to bite the bullet and upgrade at some point.

I'm not personally beholden to the iPhone but we supply all of our reps with them and iPads so for the sake of ease of transfer and modification it's easiest to all be on the same platform.

That's pretty much my issue with all of the other options. I really don't want a handheld tablet. The iPhone seems to be a decent compromise of size and features.

The changing demographic of a sizable number of our customers (getting much younger-from 50's to late 20's & early 30's) has dictated a change towards more texting for info, setting up appointments, order taking, order status updates, delivery notifications, etc.

Numerous calls, emails and voicemails would go unanswered while a text would be responded to within minutes of sending them. I've got a couple sales reps who are dinosaurs, that was a huge change for them. In the sales game, it was adapt or die for them.

It's kind of sad, but after corresponding so often with them and my younger reps via text, I find myself preferring it. :o

LG makes the F3, which is actually slightly smaller than an iPhone. Only 4GB of onboard, but that's easily expanded with a 32GB storage card.

That is a slick deal. I'm considering getting a smartphone next summer... or maybe the summer after that... we'll see. I really like my old Nokia, but the smartphone has many plusses -- easy texting, camera, internet -- that my phone with no camera or internet access doesn't have.

The main reason I'm keeping the Nokia for now is that it's indestructible and costs me a little over $100 a year.

Glad to see more tmob buyers. The larger the customer base, the more towers....

Text me for info or to set up an appointment, fine. Attempt to use back-and-forth texting as a substitute for a phone call or IM, I will hunt you down...