Domestic cellphone solution: G’zOne Ravine 2

November 28th, 2012 Posted in Cloud Tech, Recommendations
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Casio G'Zone Ravine 2 mobile phone

Casio G’zOne Ravine 2

Frequent readers of this blog know about my dumbphone+tablet strategy, and why I recommend it for other world travelers. Here’s an update to say that I found the “plain jane” phone I was looking for a month or two ago. Well actually, this is more of a G.I. Jane phone…

The Casio G’zOne Ravine 2 (Yes, THAT Casio. Who knew?) has all the settings you need as a phone, it has more to but they keep these functions out of the way and allow you to program your own shortcuts very simply.  It works without a sim in the US on CDMA with Verizon, but with a sim for other countries as a quad-band GSM phone.

This phone is compatible with 2012 technology (including Bluetooth 2.0), charges from USB with a separate headset port so you can use both at once, AND you can talk for 4+ hours without having to plug it in. It has very high usability displays & numeric keypad, and is bright enough to use as a flashlight for finding your keys or opening a combo lock at night as I often do. I love that it holds reception where other phones never have in the hills of West Marin, and that it has truly usable speakerphone. This thing generally feels much like you’d imagine Captain James T. Kirk’s original communicator would. Plus it’s rugged and dependable as they come, it withstands shock, dust, vibration, low and high temperatures, and even immersion in water. About the only thing it doesn’t do that I need is sync contacts with my computer, but that’s not the phone’s fault. It seems that AppleSync has been phased out of the operating system, probably to sell more iPhones. Silly Apple.

G'zone underwater

Seriously? Yes, waterproof.

CNET has a good review of this phone that sold me. The camera is not great by today’s standards, but it’s good enough to take pictures of a car accident for insurance purposes in a pinch (which is about all I’d ever use it for when my trusty iPad has a camera anyway). The texting is slow without a qwerty keyboard, but if you’re texting through GoogleVoice or Skype on your tablet, who cares?

People in the SF Bay Area sometimes look at me with amusement when I pull out this honking brick of a phone. But then I throw it on the ground, pour a glass of water on it, pick it up, and make my phonecall. Try that with your pansy smartphone beeotch! 

This is the smartest dumbphone I have ever met. After almost 2 months of using this phone, I am still pleased and impressed. I love it when good design wins.

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iPhones for the world traveler?

September 14th, 2012 Posted in Travel Tech
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The iPhone 5 was just announced this week, something that I’ve been waiting for before finally retiring my old Motorola RAZR V3 that I use when I’m home in the USA.  There have been some very good articles about international traveling with the iPhone 5 already. If you’re into that kinda thing, go check out Which iPhone 5 Lets You Roam Where You Want? and Which iPhone 5 for a Global Traveller?. But as I posted last year on this blog, I favor the “dumbphone + smarttablet” approach for many reasons. This is only more true now. Here’s why…

Smart Tablet, Now Smarter

Recently I upgraded from my “classic” iPad 3G to the newest version. Why? To get tethering within the US (which has been available with many overseas carriers since the iPhone debuted), and the fact that with the new iOS, my old one will be obsolete. The camera sure is nice too. The addition of domestic tethering means that it can be the center of my digital universe. I can now work on my laptops via my iPad from most anywhere, and that makes a big difference in my quality of life. No more hunting down free wifi in a new place, buying food/coffee I don’t want just to get a connection code, or just straight up paying for it in places like airports when I only have a 90min layover and have to buy an all-day pass. Blech!

The iOS upgrade comes out next month for the iPad, and I don’t know about you, but most of the new bells & whistles that I care about from the new iPhone 5 will be included.

Dumber Phone for a Smarter You

Mobile communications companies make serious money off of pretending that voice, data, SMS text, MMS text, and international texts are somehow different. As far as the networks that handle these are concerned, they’re not. It’s all just 0′s and 1′s, nobody is analog anymore. Get any phone that’s just a phone, and you will automatically save yourself all the tempting fees that the provider will “accidentally” sneak on your bill and then try to convince you that you need to pay for separately. You don’t. Keep your phone as a phone, turn off all the extras, and it will work better as well as cheaper. True.

I have an array of cheap dumbphones that were each purchased for the country they’re from. They generally only work as Prepaids in that country, which is fine. I currently have an Australian phone, a New Zealand phone, a Canadian phone, and a European phone (with a swappable card for Switzerland, which is different). It’s been too much of a hassle or too short of a trip to get a unique phone from some of the other countries I’ve visited. In places like Brazil, I just trim down to iPad-only mode and forgo the cell. You know what? Every place I go, I have the right charger, without an adapter. I also have all the local numbers of my people there, ready to go. And with prepaid, month-to-month service, I’m not paying to be in two places at the same time. All is well.

I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

Finally there is a decent data & voice plan available within the US on month-to-month! It’s called the Share Everything plan, and it’s with Verizon. With this you can share from 2-12GB of data across all your devices on plan (dumphone, smartphone, tablet, wifi-hub, whatever…) and get unlimited talk/text, for a predictable flat fee. It’s not exactly cheap, but it’s less than anywhere else. I pay $120/mo for 10GB of net, plus my dumbphone and iPad. And I’m thinking of throwing my brother on this plan for a while to help him out, it’s only $10 bucks extra per month (now that is cheap).

Most people upgrade hardware & sign up for the standard 2-year agreement to get this plan, that’s what Verizon expects you to do too. But if you own your devices outright, you can just dive right in without signing your life away. I paid the full $750 for my new iPad to be able to do this. To me it’s simply worth it. Due to a couple very bad customer service incidents back when, I had previously decided that I hated Verizon. This plan brought me back, and so far they haven’t screwed it up.

Verizon is THE carrier to get with your modern iDevices because:

  1. They have the best US coverage (honest).
  2. They work on the biggest exception-of-a-network on the globe (CDMA).
  3. They still work with the GSM that the rest of the world uses (iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad 3).
  4. They’ll unlock it for you (if you ask nicely and pay your bills on time).
  5. They are the ONLY provider with a month-to-month option like this that isn’t prepaid (last time I checked).

Going month-to-month is critical for someone who plans to spend lots of time overseas. Why keep paying for pricey service in the country you’re not in? If you want to cancel it or minimize your rate as much as possible when you’re gone, you will need to be off-contract. If you want to drop a local simcard into your already global-ready phone (like an iPhone 4S or 5) and not pay your home carrier, you’ll need to be off-contract. If you want to have the leverage to push back on a customer service call when your carrier is trying to screw you over, you’ll need to be off-contract. C’mon, it’s the only thing that makes sense.

Seeking Plain Jane Phone

I am still looking for the US phone to compliment my new iPad (3rd gen). Whatever I get will just be a phone, and it will be soon. It will work on Bluetooth (mostly to sync with my computer), have a 3.5mm plug for standard headphones. It will be able to charge as fast as consumes power (I would prefer that it charge from a USB port), and it will work on Verizon. It doesn’t need to work anywhere else. I have other phones for that, thank you.

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iPad + dumbphone > smartphone

July 27th, 2011 Posted in Cloud Life FAQ, Cloud Tech, Recommendations
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People see me with my iPad all the time, and often ask how I like it. Along with an inexpensive cellphone, the iPad 3G is now a critical component of my Cloud Living lifestyle, and in this post I’ll explore why.

I started off with the bottom of the line, wi-fi only, 8GB iPad, which I got right when they came out. At the time I was doing app development for iPhones and iPads, so it made sense to have one for testing purposes. I got the cheapest one available, $499 brand-new. I quickly realized how great it was, and how much better it would be to have 3G connectivity, so I sold it for retail price again and traded up to my current 16GB 3G iPad for another $130. It changed my life. No, I don’t have an iPad 2 yet, or an iPhone at all anymore. I’d be happy to have either, but instead I upgraded my laptop this year, and in truth I’m good with what I’ve got.

I downgraded from my iPhone almost a year ago. My cellphone is now anything BUT a smartphone. The model I use depends on which country I’m in, but I have a few Motorola RAZRs that I tend to prefer most of the time. This is my local, voice-only communications device, and my watch. Y’know, kinda like what cellphones used to be until things got all crazy a couple years ago? It’s enough, and in my experience it’s hard enough just to get any mobile device to hold calls and deliver messages well. Why ask it to do more when the basics have yet to improve? I don’t call anyplace but the country that I’m in with my mobile, though people in other countries can still reach me as needed by calling one of my numbers back home. I’ll detail how I pull this off and handle phonecalls globally in a future post. But yes, of course the cellphone is my only physical phone.

Trust me, traveling internationally with a smartphone is an expensive exercise in frustration due to the variety of ways that phones are regulated and billed in different countries. I found when I brought my iPhone 3G to Australia in 2009, that it would cost me $150/month to make it work…without even turning it on! Over and above that, it was something near $1/min to talk to the US, $1.25/min to make calls within Oz, and $.50/text. I spent about $35 in airtime with AT&T to figure this out once there, getting completely different answers than when I had done my research from the US. Thank you, but no friggin’ way! After shopping around to every single provider in the country, I found that there were no legal means to purchase a sim card that would make it work as an iPhone locally without signing up for a 2-year plan. Again, thank you, but I’d be crazy to do that with only a 6-month tourist visa. I could get a sim card to make it a simple dumbphone, or for less than that I could get a whole new local phone on a month-to-month or prepaid plan. That I agreed to, and kept my iPhone in airplane mode but with wifi on for the rest of my time in the country. I grew fond of using it as my mini-iPad, though of course this was before the iPad had been announced.

What the iPad allows you to do is get around all the rules and regulations about cellphones and cut right to the chase with data plans. After a quick visit to a mobile provider and the equivalent of $15-25 dollars in local currency, you can get around 250MB of bandwidth in most countries, and up to 2GB for not much more. All you need is a prepaid microSim card and an iPad-supported plan. Make sure you install the card and verify that it works BEFORE paying however, as the average clerk at the checkout counter is clueless and will happily sell you the wrong thing. Rather than trying to figure it out show them how to do their job, I often resort to the “let’s figure out what fits in this sized hole!” mutual discovery approach. It’s way more fun ;) Or, if you’re feeling lucky, you can always hack your own microSim out of a full-sized Sim card. Then you’re good to go.

So the basic concept is that your mobile data device stays the same where ever you go, but the local vocal device changes based on location to avoid complications inherent in international travel. You also have some inherent redundancy in that you can get by without the cellphone for limited durations, as when traveling somewhere you won’t be long enough to justify a prepaid phone plan.

Again, more will be detailed in forthcoming posts! But keep your questions/comments coming, as they do shape what I reveal next. Thanks!

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