Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have a lot of minutes on Trac from 10 years of being a customer. My old phone, a Samsung slider, was wearing out after 3 years. I wanted a smartphone because having data and apps is a lot more useful. You are lugging the thing around, why not have the camera, the music player, the GPS tracker, maps, TV Guide, whatever? It works on wifi so most of your data can come from wifi, not minutes. The deal is this, It's triple time but data is one minute = one MB of data. Not much data. But there's more. You can buy minutes and you have to maintain 'days', but if you have days in your bank, you can buy MBs of data with no days or minutes attached. It is getting a little complicated. Basically, data costs about 2.6 cents if you buy it direct. Minutes are more, even though they are tripled. I figure you do not want to use much data with this phone, but if you use small amounts, maybe 500 mb a month, it's a good deal. First off, it's Verizon, but it's the old 3G network. Good and broad, but slow. The 500 MB of data costs about $13 a month, and the phone time, the days, plus another 100 minutes runs maybe $8 a minute with a year card, to give you the days. That's $20 a month and nothing is that cheap that I could find. Remember, the huge advantage of Trac is that the minutes and the data roll over as long as you have days. Most data just evaporates on the renewal day. The nature of this phone makes it hard to eat up a lot of minutes. Stay away from video. You don't want to waste the data. My advice is to turn it off if you don't need it. You can end up using data if the wifi goes down, or something like that. Just turn it off and turn it one only when you need it, if you want to protect your data in the bank. The phone is low resolution, which hurts web browsing. You should use apps for news, weather, etc. You can surf the web, but set the screen to rotate. The mail apps are good. If you have Gmail and other Google services you get them with ease. The camera is nothing special though bright sun pix are OK. You can shoot pictures for emails or to show how you took something apart. The are a lot of fun apps like My Tracks from Google. It used the GPS to track you when you walk, run, bike, etc. It shows a map of where you want, how fast, and even how many calories. Free. Just download. Smartphones are fun and this phone puts it within reach of more people Learn how to not waste you data, and you'll get a lot for a little. The phone as a phone seemed to be OK, but I don't have much experience. These are quick impressions, just because I like Trac and this is a nice addition to what they do. They do things their way, but a lot of it works if you are the right kind of customer. The rollover data is great. Update: There is one glitch with this phone, with a simple solution. If you hold the phone in your left hand, dial voice mail, and try to enter you password, the screen blacks and it is hard to finish the entry. If you hold the phone in your right hand, and use your left hand (fingers) to enter the codes, it works. There's a proximity sensor or something that blanks the screen, but I'm not sure. There is a big advantage to a basic smartphone. It is impossible to use a lot of data if you keep it simple. I took the phone to the emergency room and ended up in care facilities for 3 weeks. I used this phone and it was fine. I ended up using a tiny amount of data for everything, mail, weather, searches, news, sports. I'm not talking any video, anything streaming. My only gripe is that Verizon to renting off their 3g network and it is not what it was. So it seems to be slow and weak almost everywhere I go. It works, but I have an LTE device I sometimes use, and it is more universal now, by far. Verizon is playing games with the 3g making it seem like it is something like the high cost network. I don't think so. It is more like Sprint where you get it where you get it (cities and highways) and then you don't. And a lot of times it is slow. I had a Tracfone flipfone before this, and the difference is huge. I'm using so little data the cost is barely worth worrying about, maybe a few bucks a month. The smartphone is a better phone. I use it in speaker mode and hold it in front of me. If you want a phone with a lot of functionality on the web, the premium stuff is the way to go. If you want a lot of apps, this phone will bog down. But this phone is much smaller than a premium smartphone, so it really is more of a phone with advanced data features. You'll still have music to listen to. I've read Kindle books. If you put 10 gigs of music on the SD card, it will slow the start up, adding at least 5 minutes. Updated May 9, 2014