Introduction
Those of you who follow my site probably know of my constant fights with mobile phone companies. Their contracts suck, their service sucks, or their phones suck. I can't seem to find one company with whom I can remain for more than about six months at a time. I've left a string of discarded phones, unanswered customer service tickets and early termination fees in my wake.
Two months ago I jumped ship from AT&T again. The deciding factor was something I should have seen coming because it was exactly the same reason I left them the first time - price. I simply couldn't convince them to let me have an iPhone on their network for any less than $100 a month.
I even considered (briefly) if I could simplify my phone the same way I had my laptop and television rigs. Could I make it on a "dumb" phone? What did I really use the iPhone for, truthfully? Was it a phone any more or just a toy? Could I let another phone handle the useful parts and just play with it as an iTouch?
I looked at the prepaid options from AT&T (GoPhone) and Verizon (PayAsYouGo). Neither one offered a decent phone, and AT&T gave me the added insult of telling me I couldn't port my number! Now, I'm aware this isn't true. There's kind of a federal law against it. When I told the rep that, he then tried to tell me that the prepaid phones used a different network that isn't as good as their subscriber one. I had to call and verify with several phone reps that this is also not true. I scratched AT&T off the list on principle after that.
I already tried Sprint, and Verizon used a different kind of radio that would prevent me from recycling my iPhone, so in an act of desperation I looked at T-Mobile. They gave me a microSIM and did the proper phone-wrangling to get my iPhone working on their network. They offered a $50/month no-contract plan with unlimited everything (data was speed throttled past 100MB), and all was well.
As I used my iPhone on their service, I made a conscious effort to pare down my apps and usage patterns to use less data and provide less distractions. I eventually got to the point where I'd uninstalled or disabled the vast majority of things that made the iPhone worthwhile. I got awesome battery life, but didn't really use it for much more than talking and texting.
I couldn't help but wonder if I could pull off using a dumb phone instead. I knew from previous trials that any "dumb" phone I picked up would need either an exceptional software keyboard or (more likely) a decent physical one. I spent some time researching dumb phones from T-Mobile and settled on the ZTE Aspect.
I couldn't help but wonder if I could pull off using a dumb phone instead. I knew from previous trials that any "dumb" phone I picked up would need either an exceptional software keyboard or (more likely) a decent physical one. I spent some time researching dumb phones from T-Mobile and settled on the ZTE Aspect.
Uboxing and Initial Setup
I ordered the phone from T-Mobile directly, which is something I won't likely ever do again. The transaction took 2 days to go through and only then did they ship the device. The total time from purchase to receiving my item was 5 days (3 business days and a weekend between). I could have walked to the Wal-Mart in the next town 20 miles away, bought the phone and walked back in less time. I honestly don't know what I was thinking.
The actual model name for the phone is the ZTE F555, humorously called "Wombat" when it was first introduced to the FCC for certification. I can see why they changed it. It retails for around $75 after tax and free shipping. In a time when the newest iPhone or Galaxy will cost you $500-700USD contract-free, that's a significant difference. Of course, the Aspect doesn't have a tenth of the feature set you find in a flagship phone.
Side note - this is essentially the same phone as the AT&T Z431, released under their GoPhone brand. Most of my comments about the Aspect probably apply to the AT&T version. Do with that as you will.
Side note - this is essentially the same phone as the AT&T Z431, released under their GoPhone brand. Most of my comments about the Aspect probably apply to the AT&T version. Do with that as you will.
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| Image Courtesy of ZTE USA |
As you can see, it follows the "Blackberry-clone" form factor. The screen doesn't take touch input - all your navigation is done through the directional pad or using the QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard is backlit (an unexpected bonus). The battery is a replaceable lithium-ion you can probably buy cheaply online if you ever need a spare, and the phone charges via a standard microUSB port that all phones besides the iPhone use these days. A wall charger and separate USB cable are included.
Getting the phone set up wasn't quite as easy as I hoped. The Aspect uses an older "full-size" SIM card, rather than the microSIM my iPhone used, so I had to actually call up T-Mobile and change the active SIM on my account rather than just swap them out. There apparently used to be a way to do this on their website but the support document I found was out of date. At least it was relatively quick and painless once I got a human being on the phone. The swap-over was almost instantaneous.
There was a software update available as soon as I turned on the phone. I let it load. It's good to know T-Mobile supports their prepaid handsets with updates. Many other companies just toss these devices out into the wild as throwaway devices and never bother to update them.
The battery came with about 10 minutes worth of charge out of the box, and I plugged it in immediately as soon as it started to bark at me. The manual recommends a full drain followed by a full charge the first couple of times, so I did that overnight.
The next morning I unplugged the phone and it still said it hadn't charged more than about 75%. It's hard to tell exactly because there's no percentage indicator. I plugged it into my computer at work very briefly to test the USB connection and that jumped to 100%. I'm not sure what happened there, but I'm guessing the system just isn't calibrated to what "100%" really means yet since this is its first power cycle. Laptops can get out of sync like that.
By the end of the first day, with slightly heavier-than-normal use (I had to set up a few things so I spent a lot more time entering contacts and messing around in the menus than I usually would) the battery indicator was at roughly the same 75% it was in the morning.
I left the phone off the charger overnight and by noon the second day it was down to about 50%. Again, I wish there was a more exact metric, but the battery graphic looked pretty much half-full to my eyes. That's with normal use for texting, several 3-5 minute phone calls and email auto-checks every half hour. The screen was set to "energy saver" this whole time as well.
On the morning of day 3 the battery read what looked like 25%. I continued to use it as normal, which included a few text and pictures messages, email auto-checks every 30 minutes and listening to music for half an hour on my bus commute. The battery held up through an entire workday and didn't move into the red until around 3pm that afternoon (around the time I was ready to go home).
For my normal usage pattern, the ZTE Aspect lasts 3 full days (give or take) on a single charge. This caused me to rethink my previous charging strategies. First off, I didn't necessarily need a charger at work, nor did I need one in my car (I kept them anyway, for emergencies). With my iPhone I had to make sure I could charge at any time. With the Aspect, that's no longer a concern.
I probably don't have to go into too much detail about the software on it - this is a phone, plain and simple. It has the same small apps you might have seen on a Nokia from the mid-1990s: calendar, alarm, calculator, world clock, picture viewer and a very limited music player that pulls from a microSD card if you have one. The slot for it is inside the phone, next to the SIM card and under the battery.
I tried adding files to the SD card by plugging the phone into my computer at work using the included USB cable. Strangely, it showed up as a modem in Windows 7 and wouldn't allow me to browse it like a flash drive. I'm investigating this. It's not necessarily a deal-breaker for me, because I can still pop the microSD into my laptop and transfer files that way...it's just not as convenient. I have to turn off the phone and remove the battery to take out the card.
Out of curiosity I tried to set up my Gmail account to sync with the "Mail" program on the Aspect.
It let me log in with no issues using the IMAP protocol. My conversation threads were displayed as individual messages, which was a pain, but I was able to read and respond to emails just fine.
I tried sending myself a picture taken with the camera via email, but it said it was larger than the maximum email size. Boo. I tried again to send it MMS, and that worked. The phone will probably just be a glorified pager for my email, anyway. I'll use it to receive notification of the message and be able to read it, but to do any real work I'll need to find a computer.
The phone comes with a couple of game demos - Bejeweled and Tetris. They're basically the stripped-down Java versions of the game, but they get the job done. When you close them down, the web browser brings up the T-Mobile "Mall," which is basically a very limited app store. There were a number of apps available, but I didn't care enough to try them. Most were overpriced ($2.99-6.99). If you want lots of apps, get a different phone.
Calling and texting are done using the keyboard, and from my initial week of use I found the phone acceptable for both. Messaging took some getting used to, since I have large fingers and the buttons are kind of tiny. They stuck out enough though that it didn't take too long to adjust. The keypad is plastic, but not too mushy. The keys have a nice solid click to them.
Entering contacts was a manual process. Because of this, the phone forced me to take a good hard look at who I really needed to have in my list. I managed to pare it down from about 50 contacts to a list of less than a dozen. It was oddly satisfying.
There were a few little features on the phone that I liked and didn't realize I'd missed from having an iPhone for years. First off - the idea of being able to "lock" a text message against accidental deletion was nice. I use it for text messages from T-Mobile about my billing status. It may be a silly thing, but I noticed. Also, the textured plastic on the back of the phone feels good in my hand. It's warmer than the slick glass back of the iPhone.
Calls came through clearly on both ends. Most people never knew I'd changed phones. The reception didn't seem to be any better or worse than my iPhone for my coverage area. I was a little disappointed by this, because when I have "just a phone" I expect it to really hit the "phone" duties out of the ballpark. I mean, what other hardware did they really have to focus on?
The ringtones and vibration are pretty weak. I missed a few calls and several text messages over the course of my testing because I just couldn't hear or feel the phone going off unless I had my hand on it (like when it was in my pocket) or I was in a quiet room. I'm guessing the speaker and vibration hardware are just cheaper than I'm used to.
Speaking of cutting corners - the 2.0MP camera is quite frankly crap. As you can see above, pictures are fuzzy and colors are washed-out. It also has no flash. The pictures I took for testing came out maybe a hair better than the VGA webcam I had on my old PowerMac from 1992 - not exactly museum quality. This isn't a big deal for me because I don't take pictures much. When I do it's just silly things like a funny bumper sticker or a sales tag in a store. I tend to snap them, send them to someone via MMS and then immediately delete them. I don't plan on taking anything I want to keep with this phone.
The phone does 3G-only, no wifi, so if you're really hard pressed to use it to browse the web make sure your plan has you covered. For the sake of this review, I tried loading Ars Technica on it. The results were about as I expected. You can technically browse the internet - but you won't want to. It's messy, slow and AOL-ugly.
The music player also won't win any awards, but I loaded a few albums onto a MicroSD and they played just fine. Sound over the speaker was surprisingly loud (though a little tinny). Sound over headphones was decent, but not quite up to par with an iPhone or my Sansa. I heard very faint clicks over my headphones when the tracks changed (almost like an old analog cassette tape). This is pretty common for dumb phones. I can only guess it's a limitation of the OS.
I wasn't looking for an iPhone replacement with the Aspect. If I were I'd have spent more than $75 and picked up something that ran Android instead. What I was looking for was a competent, low-cost "just-a-phone" that wouldn't make me have to charge it twice a day - and have so little functionality that I wouldn't be tempted to fiddle with it during meetings.
The ZTE Aspect (F555) performs that role very well. I honestly don't know if I'll be able to adjust my lifestyle to function without a smartphone - I've tried before and failed - but I'm giving it a month to find out. Worst case scenario I'll have a competent backup phone should I drop my iPhone 4S in a toilet, and the people around me will have a couple of weeks of entertainment as they watch me fume, fumble and curse before ultimately returning to the iPhone. I'll report back should one of those things happen.
Getting the phone set up wasn't quite as easy as I hoped. The Aspect uses an older "full-size" SIM card, rather than the microSIM my iPhone used, so I had to actually call up T-Mobile and change the active SIM on my account rather than just swap them out. There apparently used to be a way to do this on their website but the support document I found was out of date. At least it was relatively quick and painless once I got a human being on the phone. The swap-over was almost instantaneous.
There was a software update available as soon as I turned on the phone. I let it load. It's good to know T-Mobile supports their prepaid handsets with updates. Many other companies just toss these devices out into the wild as throwaway devices and never bother to update them.
Battery Life
The battery came with about 10 minutes worth of charge out of the box, and I plugged it in immediately as soon as it started to bark at me. The manual recommends a full drain followed by a full charge the first couple of times, so I did that overnight.
The next morning I unplugged the phone and it still said it hadn't charged more than about 75%. It's hard to tell exactly because there's no percentage indicator. I plugged it into my computer at work very briefly to test the USB connection and that jumped to 100%. I'm not sure what happened there, but I'm guessing the system just isn't calibrated to what "100%" really means yet since this is its first power cycle. Laptops can get out of sync like that.
By the end of the first day, with slightly heavier-than-normal use (I had to set up a few things so I spent a lot more time entering contacts and messing around in the menus than I usually would) the battery indicator was at roughly the same 75% it was in the morning.
I left the phone off the charger overnight and by noon the second day it was down to about 50%. Again, I wish there was a more exact metric, but the battery graphic looked pretty much half-full to my eyes. That's with normal use for texting, several 3-5 minute phone calls and email auto-checks every half hour. The screen was set to "energy saver" this whole time as well.
On the morning of day 3 the battery read what looked like 25%. I continued to use it as normal, which included a few text and pictures messages, email auto-checks every 30 minutes and listening to music for half an hour on my bus commute. The battery held up through an entire workday and didn't move into the red until around 3pm that afternoon (around the time I was ready to go home).
For my normal usage pattern, the ZTE Aspect lasts 3 full days (give or take) on a single charge. This caused me to rethink my previous charging strategies. First off, I didn't necessarily need a charger at work, nor did I need one in my car (I kept them anyway, for emergencies). With my iPhone I had to make sure I could charge at any time. With the Aspect, that's no longer a concern.
Applications & Multimedia
I probably don't have to go into too much detail about the software on it - this is a phone, plain and simple. It has the same small apps you might have seen on a Nokia from the mid-1990s: calendar, alarm, calculator, world clock, picture viewer and a very limited music player that pulls from a microSD card if you have one. The slot for it is inside the phone, next to the SIM card and under the battery.
I tried adding files to the SD card by plugging the phone into my computer at work using the included USB cable. Strangely, it showed up as a modem in Windows 7 and wouldn't allow me to browse it like a flash drive. I'm investigating this. It's not necessarily a deal-breaker for me, because I can still pop the microSD into my laptop and transfer files that way...it's just not as convenient. I have to turn off the phone and remove the battery to take out the card.
Out of curiosity I tried to set up my Gmail account to sync with the "Mail" program on the Aspect.
It let me log in with no issues using the IMAP protocol. My conversation threads were displayed as individual messages, which was a pain, but I was able to read and respond to emails just fine.
I tried sending myself a picture taken with the camera via email, but it said it was larger than the maximum email size. Boo. I tried again to send it MMS, and that worked. The phone will probably just be a glorified pager for my email, anyway. I'll use it to receive notification of the message and be able to read it, but to do any real work I'll need to find a computer.
The phone comes with a couple of game demos - Bejeweled and Tetris. They're basically the stripped-down Java versions of the game, but they get the job done. When you close them down, the web browser brings up the T-Mobile "Mall," which is basically a very limited app store. There were a number of apps available, but I didn't care enough to try them. Most were overpriced ($2.99-6.99). If you want lots of apps, get a different phone.
Calling and texting are done using the keyboard, and from my initial week of use I found the phone acceptable for both. Messaging took some getting used to, since I have large fingers and the buttons are kind of tiny. They stuck out enough though that it didn't take too long to adjust. The keypad is plastic, but not too mushy. The keys have a nice solid click to them.
Entering contacts was a manual process. Because of this, the phone forced me to take a good hard look at who I really needed to have in my list. I managed to pare it down from about 50 contacts to a list of less than a dozen. It was oddly satisfying.
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| Image courtesy of ZTE USA |
There were a few little features on the phone that I liked and didn't realize I'd missed from having an iPhone for years. First off - the idea of being able to "lock" a text message against accidental deletion was nice. I use it for text messages from T-Mobile about my billing status. It may be a silly thing, but I noticed. Also, the textured plastic on the back of the phone feels good in my hand. It's warmer than the slick glass back of the iPhone.
Calls came through clearly on both ends. Most people never knew I'd changed phones. The reception didn't seem to be any better or worse than my iPhone for my coverage area. I was a little disappointed by this, because when I have "just a phone" I expect it to really hit the "phone" duties out of the ballpark. I mean, what other hardware did they really have to focus on?
The ringtones and vibration are pretty weak. I missed a few calls and several text messages over the course of my testing because I just couldn't hear or feel the phone going off unless I had my hand on it (like when it was in my pocket) or I was in a quiet room. I'm guessing the speaker and vibration hardware are just cheaper than I'm used to.
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| Sample Shot taken on HIGH quality from the ZTE Aspect |
Speaking of cutting corners - the 2.0MP camera is quite frankly crap. As you can see above, pictures are fuzzy and colors are washed-out. It also has no flash. The pictures I took for testing came out maybe a hair better than the VGA webcam I had on my old PowerMac from 1992 - not exactly museum quality. This isn't a big deal for me because I don't take pictures much. When I do it's just silly things like a funny bumper sticker or a sales tag in a store. I tend to snap them, send them to someone via MMS and then immediately delete them. I don't plan on taking anything I want to keep with this phone.
The phone does 3G-only, no wifi, so if you're really hard pressed to use it to browse the web make sure your plan has you covered. For the sake of this review, I tried loading Ars Technica on it. The results were about as I expected. You can technically browse the internet - but you won't want to. It's messy, slow and AOL-ugly.
The music player also won't win any awards, but I loaded a few albums onto a MicroSD and they played just fine. Sound over the speaker was surprisingly loud (though a little tinny). Sound over headphones was decent, but not quite up to par with an iPhone or my Sansa. I heard very faint clicks over my headphones when the tracks changed (almost like an old analog cassette tape). This is pretty common for dumb phones. I can only guess it's a limitation of the OS.
Conclusion
I wasn't looking for an iPhone replacement with the Aspect. If I were I'd have spent more than $75 and picked up something that ran Android instead. What I was looking for was a competent, low-cost "just-a-phone" that wouldn't make me have to charge it twice a day - and have so little functionality that I wouldn't be tempted to fiddle with it during meetings.
The ZTE Aspect (F555) performs that role very well. I honestly don't know if I'll be able to adjust my lifestyle to function without a smartphone - I've tried before and failed - but I'm giving it a month to find out. Worst case scenario I'll have a competent backup phone should I drop my iPhone 4S in a toilet, and the people around me will have a couple of weeks of entertainment as they watch me fume, fumble and curse before ultimately returning to the iPhone. I'll report back should one of those things happen.
Updates
For more of my experiences with the ZTE Aspect over the course of my trial month, see my other posts here:
Thanks for sharing such useful information for iphone users. I searched for the same on many websites. But all were just wastage of time. While searching I went on a blog, randomely, still have bookmarked where I read the discussion about Locking sim card. And this is very easy and time saver. Now I am not afraid of misusing my sim by any other, if I ever forget or lose my device. But still I am searching for some method for unlocking an iphone. Any help would be appreciated.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
Unlocking phones without the permission of the carrier recently became illegal in the US, so the only real way to unlock an iPhone is to call whoever your cell provider is (AT&T, Verizon, etc) and ask them to unlock it. If you're no longer on contract most will unlock it without any trouble. I've never had an unlock request denied as long as the device wasn't on contract.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this review. I'm considering this phone as all I really want is talk and text and this review helps greatly.
ReplyDeleteEveryone I know, other than my parents and wife, have a smart phone with a data plan. They all try to convert me, but I just can't do it. I'm sorry but ~$15 per month is way too much to pay for such an internet experience.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your posts I think I may be the last person to give up my non-data plan. I'm scared to get hooked...
$15 a month is sadly quite cheap for a data plan. Most "smartphone" plans on major carriers near me range from $30 upwards. Stay strong, sir. Stay strong.
Delete