Samsung Messager Touch and Cricket Wireless

Introduction:

Like probably everyone else in middle-class America right now, I’m constantly searching for new ways to save money. My first volley was to dump our cable & internet provider (Comcast) and go for a cheaper mobile solution. Next up on the chopping block was my wireless phone plan. My experience when trying to cut features with AT&T was quite similar to that of Comcast: whenever I asked to remove or reduce some feature, other features increased in price.

AT&T gave me the added insult of saying certain things simply couldn’t be dropped. It’s AT&T corporate policy that any iPhone on their network have a data plan, for instance. The iPhone has the ability to work as “just a phone” with data going over wifi. AT&T executives don’t like that idea so they mandate a data plan for everyone. The cheapest plan available at the time of this rant was $15 for a ridiculously tiny 200MB a month. A regular Pandora Radio user would blow through that in a couple of days.

Having received no help from AT&T in my bill-reducing quest, I decided to jump ship. My contract for the iPhone was up several months ago, so I didn’t have to pay any “charge you just because we can” ETF fees.

I looked at the other major providers first. Verizon has customer service on par with Comcast and AT&T, which is to say you’re better off trying to calculate curvature of the earth to twelve decimal places using only an abacus. (Don’t email me if you can actually do that.) Sprint is a big unknown because no one I know has ever used them. Since I’m not sure what I really want from a cell phone at this point I also wasn’t keen on having to sign away 2 years for what might turn out to be a mistake.

Several smaller wireless companies offer service in my area including T-Mobile, Boost, and Cricket. The one with the most enticing no-contract plan was Cricket, so I decided to give them a try. I was aware that moving away from AT&T would mean I’d need a new phone, and since I can still do all the cool app stuff with the iPhone over wifi I decided to see what I could get in the “just a phone” price range.

Customer Service:

The sales team for Cricket seems to be based in the US. I say this because the person I talked to to set up my service was very courteous and spoke perfect non-accented English. This was a pleasant experience. She took her time and explained everything to me in as much detail as I wanted, and even offered personal experience with the model of phone I selected.

They hook you in with a pleasant sales experience. My dealings once I received my phone were less pleasant. For instance, the automated system for entering your phone number just plain sucks. I had to re-enter my phone number six times before their system recognized it. Either it didn’t hear my key presses, or it heard them wrong. You can’t get any further in the menu until it verifies the number, and there’s no option to just speak it or talk to a human being. Once their computer finally did pick up my number correctly, I was given to a real person in a call center overseas.

Call me culturally insensitive if you must, but I prefer to deal with operators who do not have thick accents. It makes it very difficult for me to understand the terms and conditions they’re rattling off if I add a language barrier to the mix. To their credit, both call center operators I spoke with were helpful and willing to work with me to resolve my issues. I just wish I didn’t have to ask them to repeat themselves quite so much.

Getting a hold of a support rep when your phone isn’t working is also quite a hassle. They have live chat on the website for sales, but not for technical issues. You have to send them an email and wait for a response. This could be handled better. I ran into this problem when I called to have my phone number transferred over from my AT&T service to Cricket. They said it would take about 3 hours, and during that time one or both of my phones may lose service. I got the “No Service” message on my iPhone an hour later and it stayed there. My Cricket phone likewise wouldn’t connect for the duration of the changeover.

A day and a half later, neither of my phones worked. I couldn’t even dial Cricket to ask them what went wrong. My email to customer service (sent roughly 6 hours after the initial request) went unanswered.
Reading through the FAQs on their site it is stated that the process to change over numbers is done through a third party and it’s up to them to determine how long the process will take. Apparently that means it can take up to several days. The exact time frame isn’t listed anywhere. It would have been nice had someone warned me ahead of time that I’d be without a phone for that long.

I finally gave up and called Cricket’s customer support, and they told me the process had finished the day before, and all I had to do was press *228 to finish the programming. Of course, because that’s completely obvious.

I asked why no one thought it might be a good idea to tell me about this, and they said usually a text message is sent to the customer before the changeover is finished. However, in my case their system deactivated my temporary Cricket phone number before they could send the text, effectively cutting me off from both phones. That’s some nice work there, Lou.

Coverage and Plans:

From my less than stellar signal experience with the iPhone and AT&T, I had a few test scenarios already in mind when I purchased the Cricket phone. The first and most important case was of course my house. I got 3 to 4 bars on the Messager in various spots around my house, which is similar to the signal my iPhone reported. Given that there’s no regulation across carriers on what “4 bars” means it’s kind of hard to judge if this is an improvement, but I was able to place and receive clear calls all around my house.

The second test case was my office in downtown Houston. Normally any wireless carrier has full signal (5 bars) in my office, even though my building has lots of thick concrete walls. The Cricket service was no exception. This is on par with my AT&T/iPhone signal.

Finally, an oddity: our local Target is an AT&T dead zone. It’s maybe 500 feet away from an AT&T store (which itself only gets 1 or 2 bars reception). I walked in with the Cricket phone and found, sadly, it got no better signal. Perhaps it’s an issue with the structure of the building. To clarify, I can receive and send calls and text messages inside the Target with both my iPhone and the Cricket phone, but 3G data is very slow or non-existent on both devices the deeper I walk into the store.

The final verdict? Cricket’s coverage for my most frequently visited areas is no different (better or worse) than AT&T. This made me suspicious, but according to the Wikipedia Page Cricket actually piggybacks off of Sprint’s network, not AT&T.

If I were to choose one or the other on this criteria alone it would be a wash. Thankfully, Cricket has a price point that tips things in their favor. At the time of this article, I paid AT&T the following for just my primary phone line (not including my wife’s iPhone):

• 700 Minutes of daytime talking
• Unlimited Night-time and Weekend talking (starting at 9pm)
• Unlimited talking to other AT&T customers
• 200MB of mobile data downloads ($15 extra on top of plan)
• Unlimited Family Text Messaging for me and my wife ($30 extra on top of plan)

Total per month just for the main line: $107
Grand Total when my wife’s iPhone plan is included: $172

The $45 plan I chose from Cricket gives me infinite minutes at any time of the day to anyone on any network, infinite text messages, and as much mobile web browsing as I want. Given, I didn’t choose a smart phone (which would have required a marginally more expensive $55/mo. plan), but it’s still a competitive offer. It’s worth noting that even the $55/mo. smart phone plan from Cricket has unlimited data, something AT&T and most major carriers no longer offer.

Cricket advertises that their “unlimited” really means “unlimited.” I haven’t done a great deal of data downloading (only a couple hundred MB over a week) so I can’t say if there’s a cap somewhere they just don’t tell you about, but so far I’ve enjoyed using all the features my phone offers without having to count my megabytes, minutes, or texts. If I had a smart phone device (say, with the Pandora Radio app) I might make more use of the unlimited data. With just a phone, not so much.

I’ve noticed while using my phone that any time I choose an option, (say from their app store) that’s going to cost me money over and above my monthly rate plan, I’m warned about it. In fact, you can’t purchase apps from their store without adding funds to your virtual “wallet” on the Cricket site (essentially pre-paying), so this makes Cricket a nice choice for parents worried about surprises on their bill.

Hardware:

The Samsung Messager Touch is just a phone. Let me get that out of the way up front. It’s not a “smart” device and it doesn’t run Android, Blackberry or iOS. I’m not really sure what OS it’s running, but for the features the phone offers this is a moot point. I purchased the device knowing full well that it was not supposed to be a replacement for my iPhone in any capacity except that it’s a phone.

 

The device cost me $109, with the promise of a $30 rebate when I mail the UPC back to Cricket. Cricket has you buy the devices outright rather than subsidizing, but their purchase prices tend to be much lower than larger carriers in my experience. The phone shipped overnight Federal Express, and it was in perfect condition when I received it. The activation process was relatively painless. A 1-800 number was listed on the instructions on the back of the packing slip. I called it, waited a few seconds, and was told my phone had been activated. So far so good.

On first handling, I was pleasantly surprised at the weight of the phone. Some “feature phones” like this can feel awfully light and (for lack of a better term) “plasticky.” The Messager Touch has some bulk to it and the body of it is actually metal, although the front and back parts that touch your hand when you hold it are a slightly rubberized plastic.

Many moons ago, I owned “just a phone” before the iPhone 3G went on sale for $99. Going from a numberpad-only “dumb” phone to the iPhone was a pleasant move for things like text messages. I very much like individual letter keys when I’m trying to type something and the iPhone onscreen keyboard was good for this. With that in mind, I knew that in order to deal with a non-smartphone it would have to have a dedicated QWERTY keyboard. The Messager Touch has this. It’s a design you’ve probably seen a hundred times over: the phone splits longways and the screen slides up and locks in place.

The keyboard layout didn’t feel especially cramped. The keys were responsive and didn’t feel squishy or cheap. Within a few minutes I felt comfortable using the keyboard to type out text messages. Adding in numbers and special characters was a little bit awkward (there’s a Function key for it) but it was still slightly less work than the iPhone’s software keyboard.

One thing I noticed right away when searching for a car charger for the Messager Touch was how cheaply you can obtain third-party accessories. This is probably true of most non-Apple devices, but I’d been so used to paying $15-30 for a charger or a USB cable that it was a pleasant change. I found a kit on Amazon for $8 (with shipping) that included a wall charger, car charger, USB data cable, and a belt-clip case. Even if the case sucks, and it probably will, that sets me up with all the accessories I’ll need for some time.

I purchased a Samsung WEP 700 bluetooth wireless ear piece for my iPhone several years ago, and it paired easily with the Messager Touch. Calls were clear and I had no issues in my initial testing of it. Interestingly, unlike the setup on my iPhone, the WEP 700 didn’t ask me to enter a syncing code when pairing with the Messager Touch.

I filled up a microSD card with about a gigabyte of music and popped it into the slot on the side of the Messager. It automatically set the phone to save all my pictures and downloaded multimedia to it. It was a nice touch. There is a media player on the device that will detect MP3/WMA/WAV music. The phone recognized the tracks and organized them by artist and album. So far so good. On top of the phone is a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, into which I plugged some headphones.

When I went to actually play the tracks, the result was less than pleasant. Although the songs sound fine once they’ve started playing, there’s a strange sound when the track changes. The best description I can give is it sounds like the heads of an old magnetic tape recorder being pressed down. Anyone who’s ever made a mix tape knows that sound. It was extremely odd, and rather off-putting. I don’t see myself using this phone as a backup music player (say, at the gym) for this reason.

The touch screen on the Messager isn’t capacitive. This means that in order to select something you have to apply a little pressure. These older-style touchscreens aren’t my favorite, but to its credit the Messager Touch generally responded well to my taps and swipes. It took some getting used to coming from the exceptionally sensitive iPhone.

I don’t take many pictures at all, and if I do it’s usually just something silly I’m going to send via text message to my family. For that purpose, the simple flashless camera in the Messager Touch performs just fine. Technically it’s capable of pictures up to 1600x1200 resolution, but I find that to be a little bit optimistic in practice. Pictures I took with the phone’s camera came out muddy and blurry, even when I set it on a table to stabilize it. To make a long story short, don’t buy this phone for the camera.

Battery life on the Messager Touch is pretty anemic. Bluetooth and any kind of mobile web will suck the power right out of it, but I’ve found that idle time and just voice/texting doesn’t drain it too badly. Still, this isn’t the kind of phone you can just charge every couple of days; it will need nightly attention.

Software:

As I said before, I have no idea what OS the Messager Touch runs, but it operates well for what it is. I used it extensively for the first week I had the phone and it didn’t crash or freeze on me. The main menu is accessed by touching the blue ellipsis button (…), and it’s divided into three tabs. The first one has the usual default phone apps, including a tip calculator, regular calculator, calendar, alarm, and menus for various configuration options on the phone itself.

The second tab is Apps. When you activate the phone, Cricket downloads a number of apps for you, both demos and full versions. Cricket includes a number of small but useful applications on their store, some of which are free depending on what plan you choose. My plan, for instance, includes free access to Cricket Navigator. There’s a mobile email app that isn’t free. You can purchase access to many common email services (Gmail, Yahoo, MSN) for $5 a month.

The Cricket store is not an “App Store” on par with Apple or Android. It offers a handful of utilities and simple mobile games at ridiculous prices, but these are no different than any other mobile storefronts for non-smartphones that I’ve ever seen. My very old Nokia candy bar phone had similar options.

I played with Cricket Navigator, and found it useful but not exactly earth-shattering. It does offer voice navigation with turn-by-turn instructions, which is something you don’t get free on the iPhone. The display was pretty cluttered and ugly, but the actual GPS was slightly more accurate than the one in the iPhone. It identified my house within the block, whereas the iPhone generally shows the next street over.

Navigator also lets you search for restaurants and other points of interest near you, but I was never able to get it to work. The “movie showtimes” feature did work however. My only major complaint about Cricket Navigator was that the voice directions weren’t very loud, and were basically inaudible on the freeway, even at the highest volume setting.

This can be mitigated by wearing a bluetooth headset, as the Messager Touch will pipe pretty much any sound that comes from the phone over bluetooth, unlike my iPhone. It’s not a perfect solution (and I recommend you have a car charger so you don’t kill your battery) but it works.

Some other odds and ends show up in the “Apps” tab from the get-go. There is a small news app, as well as one for sports and weather. The news app is very limited, showing only half a dozen headlines in one of several pre-defined categories (Offbeat, Top Stories, People, Sports). Clicking a headline takes you to a small mobile web page with the story on it.

The weather app shows basic weather information (no more than the default Apple weather app) and lets you set multiple locations. There is a “Weather+” app as well, but I can’t seem to figure out the difference between it and the regular “Weather” app. You can put icons to these apps on your home screen (which has 3 pages you can swipe between).

You can also download “widgets” from the Cricket Store for free. These offer basically the same interface as the News app but for specific channels like Engadget, Reuters Tech, Politics, etc. You see a headline and perhaps a small graphic and are taken to a mobile-friendly page of text when you click it.

Instead of being a comfort in my post-smartphone days, these apps just served to further frustrate me at how limited the web browser is on the Messager Touch. I expected to deal with this sort of thing, and I’ll probably learn to live with it. After all, the phone was never marketed as anything other than a phone.

Conclusion:

There were definitely some bumps on the road swapping over from AT&T to Cricket, and the customer service experience isn’t the best I’ve ever dealt with. However imperfect it may have been to get set up, so far I haven’t had any serious issues using Cricket as my wireless carrier. Can I possibly make do with “just a phone”? That’s a story for another rant.

The Samsung Messager Touch is a competent voice and texting phone with just enough pseudo-smartphone features to frustrate you. There’s no other way to say this: the camera, web browser and music player are just plain awful. I appreciate that Samsung (and Cricket) tried to offer them, but I think perhaps they shouldn’t have (unless of course the purpose of the Messager Touch is to fuel Android handset upgrades).