Re: Disabling answering the phone.

On Mon, 15 Apr 2024, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

On Sun, 14 Apr 2024, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

Do it! I haven't had a smartphone for about 5 years or so and I love it!
The highest price I pay is not being able to get ?ber taxis so I pay about
3x the price with a regular taxi

>
I never started using a smartphone, and I recently ran into my

>
You are very strong with the force! Much respect.
>

first financial disadvantage resulting from that. I got a
Mastercard gift card as part of a promotion, which I'd made a
deliberate effort to obtain, and it turns out I need a smartphone
app to activate it. Old forum threads suggest that there used to be
a way to do it on their mastercardgift.com.au website, but that
seems to have gone because of course everyone has a smartphone now.
>
To be fair, so far I've only established that it can't be used
online without setting it up in the app, I still need to find an
appropriate time and place to try using it in-store.

>
Well, if you won it as a reward, then I'm sure you can just ask your
company to add it to your salary? The card they can just reuse the next
time someone does something good. =)

>
Oh not that sort of "promotion", I mean the reward was for not
buying someone else's product. :)
>
Actually it was a bribe to make me switch away from a service that
the provider wanted to discontinue, onto one which will cost me
more than the gift card's value in the long run of course. Actually
in my case it was a reward for dragging my heels for as long as I
possibly could, ignoring previous warnings if impending
discontinuation. I can hope that a similar thing will happen with
the 3G turn-off, but it probably won't with the cheap telcos at
least.

Ahh got it. Well, then it does seem like more of a problem. In my case, what my provider did was to just increas the price until it wasn't justifiable any longer. =( For decades I had an ADSL provider with the benefit of giving me a static ip!! They were great but the problem was that they basically were reselling the service of the biggest telco. So while they were happy campers, the big telco wanted to get rid of their copper infrastructure in favour of mobile only, so they kept increasing the monthly fee to my isp, and they passed it on. Best isp I ever had, small, personal and very flexible, but eventually it wasn't financially feasible any longer. =(

But I'm still sticking to dumb phones. Only I stuffed up trying to
find a cheap 4G one with good reception - it won't talk to the
telco I use. Previous network-locked phones didn't care whether the
network they were locked to was accessed via an account with a
reseller using that phone network, but apparantly they've been
silently shifting the goalposts.

>
I've had a nokia 220 4g and a nokia 110 4g and both work great with 3g and
4g. Actually I turn off the 4g to save on battery. But maybe you tried
those already?

>
I haven't tried those but at the moment I'm comparing reception
between a Nokia 2660 Flip and an Alcatel 3080T, the latter being
the network-locked one but I can buy them unlocked from Ebay.
>
The Alcatel claims to have two more reception bars than the Nokia
most of the time, but I think its bars might be deceptively scaled.

Hmm, I did look at an alcatel but rejected it for some reason. I _think_ it was due to all the information they were leaking to china that was stated in small print in their manual. On the other hand, since the nokias are probably manufactured in the very same factory, I doubt there's much of a difference.
But let's see... nokia/hmd will release some new 4g dumbphones within the next few months (they already released this years 2g phones) so maybe it's time for an upgrade. My wife scolds me because I buy new phones too often, but I counter-scold her, because my phones cost 40-70 EUR and her phones cost 1000 to 1400 EUR, so I think should be allowed to upgrade every 1-2 years or so. ;)