Studio711.com – Ben Martens

We have had an Amazon Echo in our kitchen/living room area for the last three years. It’s used almost exclusively for playing music from Spotify and setting timers, but over the past months it has become more and more insistent on giving us ads and tips after completing a command. My family starts laughing every time it says “By the way, did you know” because I immediately yell “ALEXA! STOP!” There are settings you can change to make this less frequent and I’ve changed them all long ago but it’s still super annoying. I finally had enough and I pulled the plug. I used the Amazon trade in program and got $30 back for it.

I ordered a Google Nest Audio on sale and happily swapped it in for the Echo. It’s pretty similar functionally, but so far there are no annoying “by the way” style comments. Maybe they’ll come some day, but beyond that, there are a few reasons why I prefer the Google device to the Amazon device:

1. I’m an Android user and I use Google reminders a LOT. I regularly talk to my phone and ask it to remind me to do something at a specific time. Now even if I don’t have my phone handy, I can tell the Google speaker to do it and get the same behavior.
2. The Google speaker recognizes our voices so if Tyla tells it to set a reminder, it will only go to her account. If Elijah asks it to play a song, it will play it from his Spotify account instead of mine (which means that my music won’t stop if I’m listening in another room.)
3. It’s a Chromecast endpoint and that is our preferred way to cast audio and video around the house. Even if there isn’t an obvious voice command to play something on the speaker, there’s usually a Chromecast button that we can hit on our phone or laptop to play it.
4. There’s a setting to tell the speaker which device to use for displaying video so we can talk to the speaker and have it play videos on our TV. That’s not something we’ll do a ton but sometimes it’s handy to pause via voice commands.
5. We can add various Chromecast devices into a group and it will play back in sync across all the devices.

I’ve had a Google Mini out in the garage workshop for a couple years and I’m happy to have another one in the house, but mostly I’m happy to not hear “By the way” anymore.

We’re about five months into our experiment with Xfinity Mobile (see previous posts) and we’re still really happy with it. The service feels identical to what we had with Verizon, and that makes sense because it runs on the same network. I wondered how easy it would be to switch between plans from month to month and I don’t think it could be easier. I just click a couple buttons on my phone and it’s done. I did go through a couple support calls though to understand how the billing works so I’ll share my experience here.

• Bumping up your plan: When you go over your data for the month, buy extra gigabytes gets more expensive than if you just had a bigger plan. But don’t worry. Even if you catch it after you’ve gone over, you can change your plan and just be on a bigger plan as if the overage never happened. So we just leave our plan set to 1GB and then a day or two before the end of the billing cycle, I look to see if we should have a bigger plan and I make the adjustment.
• Decreasing your plan: Similarly, at the end of the month, if you’ve been paying for the 10GB plan but you only used 3GB then switch down to the 3GB plan before your billing date and voila, cheaper plan.

We also spent a month on the unlimited plan. I just flipped it on for both lines and we did whatever we wanted for a month. the next month we were back down to the 1GB plan.

I love how easy it is to switch and how cheap the service is. As I mentioned before, we’re already used to light data use on our phones and we spend most of the day at the house with WiFi anyway, so many months we end up with a total cell phone bill (including both lines) for under $20. If you have Xfinity internet and you get a good Verizon signal at your house, this service is a winner.

If only their Internet and TV side of the business bore any resemblance to the way the Mobile division is run…

It’s been just over one month since we switched from Verizon to Xfinity Mobile. We have two phone lines and I started us with just 1GB of shared data between us. We were used to sharing 2GB before, but during the pandemic, I’ve been working from home and we were only averaging around 0.9GB/month. I really wanted to see if the bill would actually be under $20 so I left my data off all month.

The month is up and *drumroll* here’s the bill…

It actually worked! This feels so much better than the $80/month we were paying for almost exactly the same thing before. (It literally is the same cell network behind the scenes.) At some point in the next couple months, we’ll be in a situation where I think I’ll switch us to unlimited data for a bit but it’s very nice to be able to adjust up and down just by clicking a button in the app on my phone. Our choices right now (before taxes) are:

• 1GB $15
• 3GB $30
• 10GB $60
• Unlimited $80. Technically we could switch one phone line to unlimited for $45 and leave the other one one the shared 1GB plan but we’ll generally want to switch both phones to unlimited.

Anything that bills us monthly gets extra attention from me so I’m very happy to have this bill be more reasonable and under our control. I do have to say that it annoys me that I didn’t do this last fall when we got our new phones and this carrier switch possibility opened up to us. We easily wasted $300+ by not doing this sooner. Better late than never though!

Last week I wrote that I had signed up for Xfinity Mobile. As a reminder, my bill is dropping from $76.40 (including an $8 monthly discount) to $19.70 total for two lines. when we left off, I was waiting for the SIM cards to arrive.

It took a while for them to arrive but we finally got them on Sunday evening. I opened the website and filled out the form to activate my line and switch my number from Verizon and was immediately greeted with an error saying that I needed to call tech support which of course wasn’t open until the next day. I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say that getting both lines converted wasn’t easy. Here’s what I learned which would have made my life easier:

• We had “Number Lock” enabled on both of our Verizon lines which means that nobody can switch the number away from our account. That needs to be disabled before activating the new line.
• I had to generate a Number Transfer Pin from my Verizon account to allow Xfinity Mobile to take over. I assumed there would be one number for each line so I didn’t save the pin after I used it. Wrong. It applies to all lines on your account. Canceling a pin and regenerating a new pin isn’t easy so make sure you write down that number.
• After getting through all those problems with multiple calls to each side, the transfer process went through but my phone refused to make any calls. It turns out that my two SIM cards had come mislabeled and I was trying to activate Tyla’s SIM card on my phone. There’s no way you could know that ahead of time but it’s something to keep in mind I guess.

I’m thankful that we did this toward the end of our Verizon billing cycle. We have about a week left and I expected a refund for the remainder of the month. No such luck.

So now we’re paying under $20 for two phone lines with 1GB of shared data. That will cover our lockdown life but as we emerge from our bunker I’ll probably bump it up to 3GB which will be $35. There’s an app that lets me make adjustments on the fly without talking to any service reps or signing new contracts so it will be easy for us to bump up to unlimited when we take trips and then save money again when we get home.

I’ll provide an update in another month or two once we have time to use the service for a while, but for now, I love looking at my phone and knowing that I’m saving ~$60/month!

If you look through my history of cell phones, you’ll see that that my last purchase was a Samsung S7 in October of 2016. That was our first Android phone and I went for a top of the line experience. I wanted to see the best of Android as I switched platforms.

Fast forward almost FOUR YEARS and those phones are still chugging along, but they’re getting pretty sluggish and the batteries are annoyingly week. By lunch time I’m lucky to have a 30-40% charge. Last fall when we hit the three year point, I decided to push the purchase out a bit longer and wait for the Pixel 4a. That announcement usually happens in May but COVID. Yada yada yada, we finally got our new phones! After having them for a couple weeks, here are some thoughts:

Pros

• Google gave us $58 each for our old S7’s. That brought the total with tax to $636.44 for two phones. That’s less than we paid for one of the S7’s. With many flagship phones over $1000, I’m ready to give a mid-range phone a chance and see how that goes. If we got 4 years out of a flagship and we get 2 years out of these, I’ll be happy and ready to upgrade.
• The camera is gorgeous. I don’t have experience with other modern phones, but the reviews seem to indicate that this is a really solid camera. The Night Sight feature is incredible and really does work as well as the reviews say.
• The phone doesn’t have expandable storage, but it comes with 128GB. We were living with 32GB internal + 64 SD storage on our own phones and never came close to filling that up so I expect this will be fine for us.
• MORE POWER! While I’m sure a flagship phone would still trounce the 4a, these are way faster than the S7. For example, I’ve been playing with some autonomous drone software (Dronelink) and it didn’t work at all with the S7. It’s not flawless with the 4a but it’s plenty good. And when Elijah and I play Mario Kart Tour together, I don’t have to think about how his cheapo tablet is so much faster than my phone. Android Auto in my truck is much snappier too.

Cons

• There’s no water resistance rating on these phones. While we’re careful and wouldn’t expect to take our phones into a pool, it’s nice to not worry about the phone if you’re out in a drizzle.
• I really loved the wireless charging on my S7. I used it a lot especially as my battery was dying off. I can’t imagine that’s a super expensive part given that the tech has been around for so long, but they left it out of the 4a.
• The screens are only 1080p. I did enjoy the WQHD (2560 × 1440) resolution on the S7’s but most of the time I don’t notice.

All in all we’re thrilled with these new phones. They’re so much faster than our old ones and the photos are amazing. They’re a perfect fit for us and since they were on the cheaper end of the phone spectrum, I won’t feel as bad about replacing them in a couple years when (hopefully) 5g is more prevalent.