My favorite niche Andriod apps

Did you take my advice and pick-up a Nexus 4 for yourself, or for someone who might not be a phone geek?  So if you've spent any time with the phone, you're already using the mainstream apps (e.g. the Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, OpenTable, GasBuddy, etc.).  But what about the niche?  The ones that you didn't think to think about?  Well, here are a few of my less mainstream favorites...

• Tape-a-Talk - great little tool for taking voice notes (like for a class, or if you want to record long rambling thoughts for later dictation).  If you even begin to build up a back-log of voice notes, you'll find the paid for version is critical to keeping your thoughts organized.
• Power Note - if you use Diigo for social/cloud/portable bookmarking needs, Power Note comes in quite handy for interacting with your library while mobile.  
• Handy Scanner - Scan things like receipts, and send them to DropBox.  
• AirDriod - Enables you to wirelessly manage your phone from your computer.  If your phone and computer are on the same network (or with the latest release, even if they're not) you can connect via a web browser on your computer to get a desktop-like experience for navigating your phone (copy files, send texts, etc.).  I mostly use it to transfer files when I don't have a USB cable handy. 
• Compound Interest Calculator Basic - because who doesn't like to be able to calculate the opportunity cost of small financial decisions from their phone?
• Wallpaper Changer - such a cool little app for rotating through pictures as wallpaper... here's a link directly to the developer.

Obviously, the you can search your way through the vast Google Play store to find useful things.  But these are some of my favorites.  If you have an amazing niche app to share, or something better than the above let me know about it.

StraightTalk Overview

Imagine that your service provider just offered to cut your annual bill by about $1,000, while still giving you (mostly) unlimited data, and then throwing in unlimited text and talk just for good measure? Too good to be true? Not if you have a Nexus 4 and move from a contract, to pre-paid on Straight Talk.

How do I save $1,000 per year?

For the uninitiated, Straight Talk is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). An MVNO buys capacity on someone else's network (e.g. AT&T, T-Mobile, etc.). They negotiate wholesale rates, and then they chop up that capacity and resell it to consumers. In other word's they're a middle man... they don't own a network, or towers... they don't build infrastructure. They just repackage the capacity, and pass cost savings on to end-users. And yes... believe it or not, it's actually a thing.

And this saves me money?

You've probably seen the ads for pre-paid wireless... be it Straight Talk, or Virgin Mobile, or one of dozens of different MVNOs that offer $45-$50 per month for unlimited everything... that can't possibly be true, right? There's got to be some catch... because who in their right mind would pay double that for their AT&T contract? Well, by the numbers the vast majority do. In fact, despite trailing Verizon by 20 million wireless subscribers in Q1, 2013... AT&T is expected to add another 475,000 new customers this quarter! What's that worth? Well, it's worth more than $38 million per month in new revenue to them! Why? simply because most people won't consider a pre-paid option, like Straight Talk. (And now you also know how Verizon and AT&T can afford to pay such high dividends to their stockholders).

Yes, but is it really unlimited everything?

Good question - and there are some caveat's if you read Straight Talk's terms and conditions. The one that has the potential to impact most folks is the "unlimited" web-browsing... which is in fact, different from unlimited data. "So what's the distinction?" Well, you can check the link for the details but the short of it is that you shouldn't stream video (much), and you should pay attention to your data usage. At the risk of oversimplifying... unlimited web-browsing translates into "don't abuse your data plan"... which if you're looking for a real-world guideline actually means... keep it to 2GB per month, or not much more than 100mb on any given day. So the next question many folks ask, is "Is that alot", or"What's typical?". Most customers on either AT&T or T-Mobile don't reach a 2GB per month. And only 4% of AT&T customers use more than 3GB. The story might be a little dated, so I also conduced an unscientific survey of folks working in a technology company... all had Smart Phones, and all were in the age range of 28- 40 years of age. Guess what they used? The average range was between 700MB - 1.2GB per month.

What does this have to do with an unlocked Android phone (like, say... a Nexus 4)?

Google's Nexus 4 is a carrier unlocked GSM phone. You probably already know that. And if you don't, Brian over at Anandtech does a good job of explaining why it's a great phone. Of particular note is the zerogap LCD display. In case you weren't aware, unlike the Galaxy SIII, the Nexus 4 does not have a Super AMOLED display. Since the Nexus 4 is manufactured by the king of LCD production, LG has managed to squeeze every lost drop of LCD goodness out of the aging technology (while yields are still ramping up on the OLED manufacturing). For those unfamiliar with GSM it means that the phone will work darn near anywhere on earth that has a cell phone carrier, and all you need to do is grab a prepaid SIM card on a local carrier's network. Prepaid SIM cards are common just about everywhere in the world, expect for the US (though via MVNO's, they're becoming more common). So in the United States, why does this matter.. For starters, it's now illegal to unlock a locked phone without the carrier's permission. Crazy, right? AT&T and T-Mobile are the two major GSM-based networks in the United States. So, with a Nexus 4 -available at the Google Play store you can buy a $300 phone without a carrier subsidy, a phone nearly identical to the unlocked $750 (retail) LG Optimus G. Why the difference? Long story short... the Nexus 4 doesn't have 4G LTE coverage capability anymore ;)... it's limited to 3G (but can do HSPA+). There are rumors that Google is selling the phone at cost, or perhaps at a loss, but it may just be that the margins are higher on phones than what some folks thought. Whatever the case, it's a great phone for only $100 more than what would be the typical carrier subsidy.

What does YOUR contract cost?

I hate spending money on things that I don't need, especially things with a monthly recurring cost. Going back and looking at my cell phone bill from 2001 (because, yes... I do keep cell phone bills from a decade ago - doesn't everyone?), I was amazed... my bill was about $45 a month through Sprint. Given inflation, it must have gone up... so factoring 3% annual inflation, my bill should on the order of $61 a month. But no, my bill was about $90 per month, and when I add a second line, data, text ... I was paying $167 a month ... so about $2,000 a year for my mobile communication "needs". Now, I don't know where you live, or what you do for a living but $2k a year for a couple of cell phones is kind of a lot, right? 20 years ago the things barley existed, and in the intervening decades I've stacked up monthly-recurring cost upon cost... cable, ISPs, cell phones, text messaging, Netflix, and maybe even a plain-old phone line... when you add it all up, you're looking at the cost of a BMW 3-Series lease ($310 per month) spent solely on communication needs! So could I actually have been consuming a luxury German sports sedan worth of communication needs every month? Probably not. But make no mistake... I was certainly paying for it.

So what's the plan?

As you may have figured out by now, my plan was to buy a pair of Nexus 4 phones, and then port my numbers from AT&T to Straight Talk. My goal was to save on the order of $1,000 per year by doing so. With both of those steps having been completed, and a month or two having passed, I've started to get a sense of what it's like being on a pre-paid plan.

So how does Straight Talk work, and how's the coverage?

Remember how I said Straight Talk is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), that resells the big carrier's infrastructure? Well, that means that the coverage is just about the same on whichever parent network that you use. What I mean by that is this... if you have a Nexus 4 already, then you have an unlocked GSM phone already. And that means you just need to pick-up a Straight Talk SIM card... either an AT&T Compatible SIM Card, or a T-Mobile Compatible SIM card - either will work in your Nexus 4. For me, I know I have good AT&T coverage - because I was an AT&T customer for more than 5 years. When I went over to Straight Talk, I chose an AT&T Compatible Card. In other words, my Straight Talk coverage is the same coverage I'd get on AT&T. So when I'm on the road, I have the same great coverage in most places (and the exact same dead spots as I did before). Oh, and if you've researched this in the past, you might have read that there's no roaming. Which is true, and might be problematic if you were using a CDMA phone on Straight Talk. But you're not... you're using the Nexus 4, and you're using either AT&T or T-Mobile... and in the case of the former, the network is massive. So unless you're out of the country you really don't need to worry about roaming if AT&T has descent coverage where you live and work.

This sounds complicated.

You know what, I thought the exact same thing before I switched. In fact, I started looking into pre-paid options in 2010 before re-upping with AT&T. Do you want to know why I didn't switch to a pre-paid plan then? I thought it was too complicated... and simply not worth my time for what I thought would be a meager savings. It's not that there weren't enough cell phone network options, or that I couldn't afford an unsubsidized new phone. I just thought it wasn't worth the irritation. The reality? I'm saving at least $829 per year on Straight Talk over my prior AT&T plan, and I use my phone more than I used to.

Okay fine - maybe it's not too complicated, but isn't it only for phone geeks?

No... in fact, it's probably better for you if you're not a phone geek. Why is that? Because many phone geeks spend way too much time on their phones, and as a result they tend to use way too much data. Remember how I talked about the limits up in the above sections? Well, there are penalties for being irresponsible with your data usage, but as I mentioned... the vast majority of folks don't use even 2GB of data per month. If you don't know how much data you're using, and have a Nexus 4... click Settings>Data Usage... and check your data usage and the break-down by application. Go back a few months as well... more than 2GB per month? Probably not. If you're on AT&T or T-Mobile, you can also check the web-site and see what you've been using.

Where are the correct APN settings?

Straight Talk keeps the APN settings here. But here's a quick-reference:

Name: Straight Talk, APN: att.mvno, Proxy: Not Set, Port: 80, Username: Not set, Password: Not set, Server: Not Set, MMSC: http://mmsc.cingular.com, MMS Proxy: 66.209.11.33, MMS port: 80, MCC: 310, MNC: 410, Authentication Type: Not Set, APN Protocol: IPv4, APN roaming protocol: IPv4, Bearer: Unspecified).

What's the verdit?

I'm a couple months into the switch to Straight Talk on my Nexus 4, and am on track to save over $829 this year. It's not painful, and it's not a scam. Knowing the above helps... and knowing even more can help save you time and hassle. If you're still worried about your data usage, coverage, or are just looking for a quick-start read-

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Nexus 4 + Straight Talk: Part 3 - A month in review

If you've read part 1, and part 2, you already know the potential... start saving $1,000 a year by getting off of a big carrier contract and switching over to a prepaid StraightTalk plan.  So after a couple months, is StraightTalk living up to the hype?  Or have I been cast into scylla or charybdis - marooned on a prepaid plan and having been throttled (or worse) to my doom?  Well, don't let me keep you waiting... hurry-up and read on!

The very first thing I did after initiating service was to enroll in auto-renew.  Auto-enroll is precisely what you'd think it is... it's what makes the pre-paid service seem as though it's a contract... add your credit card information to set it and forget it.  No more worrying that you'll forget to re-up at the end of the month, and no concerns that you'll loose your phone number, etc.  It's worth the 2 minutes it takes in frustration averted.  

My first mistake... 

My StraightTalk "kit" came in a giant envelope... which contained a couple of smaller envelopes, one for each contract I had purchased.  Now, I had purchased a plan called the "AT&T Compatible SIM + Unlimited* Plan", which at $59 came with everything I needed for the first month of service.  Importantly, this first month of service includes a small green card for each plan, and on those cards is a scratch-off code. The activation kit doesn't make this need particularly clear... and I had wrongly assumed that it would all just work, as I activated.  But alas, that was not the case.  So after activating service, and paying (again) for the first month, it became obvious that something had gone wrong.  After all, I was up to a couple hundred dollars in expenses at this point for 2 lines.  So that meant a call to StraightTalk Customer service - which was fortunately quite easy to find (1-877-430-2355), both on the web-site and all over the activation kit.  

Customer Service...

So if you've read through the various forums, you probably are under the impression that StraightTalk has terrible customer service.  My experience suggests that that impression is inaccurate.  It might not be AT&T, where I get a US-based agent... but it's not terrible.  Here's why... I contacted customer service because I thought I had been double billed for the first month.  My call was the evening (8:00pm Eastern) and the automated message gave me a wait time of approximately 30 minutes, but offered to hold my spot in the queue and call me back, which I opted for.  About 15 minutes or so later, I received a call from Customer Service.  I explained what had happened (billed twice for the first month), and they... transferred me to someone else, who put me on hold, and then came back after about 15 more minutes.  After working through my explanation for the second time, they were able to determine that I should have received a pair of activation cards, but mentioned that occasionally these are missed in the shipment.  So she gave me a credit for each phone for the next-month, and said I was good to go.  By the time I hung-up, I had spent about 45 minutes, and received text messages noting the credit had been applied on each line.  Which was good.  I later found my activation cards buried at the bottom of the  large envelope.  So it turns out, I didn't need to call customer service, it was my fault that they were missed.  But  my takeaway was that customer service was at least adequate to understand the problem, and was empowered to fix it.  So the lesson for folks - look carefully in that large envelope, and customer service is descent.

Billing...

Almost everyone that I talk to about StraightTalk asks me some variation of... "how much does it really cost per month?".  I guess they ask this because they're so used to contract carriers and hidden fees which drive up the monthly cost.  For those of you with this same concern, you'll be happy to know that the advertised $45 cost was pretty close... the actual total monthly cost was $48.93 (there's also a $2.50 per month promotion right now, when you sign-up for autorenew... just FYI).  The break down is like this...

• $45 for unlimited everything
• $2.93 for taxes
• $0.23 for E911 services
• 0.68 Federal Universal Service cost
• 0.09 regulatory cost recovery
• Total: $48.93

So how does that compare with my expectation?  Well, my goal was to save about $1,000 per year.  The input number I used was $167 per month for my prior contract (when I reconciled the numbers it was slightly higher, but we'll ignore that for simplicity sake), which means I'm on track to save $829 this year after taxes and fees.

Stay tuned, in a posts I'll cover data usage and coverage.

Click here if you'd like to be notified when our Straight Talk Ebook is released!

Is Andriod OS consuming your data plan? Fix it with 3 clicks.

So if you've you've got a small data plan and are concerned about your data usage (if so, switch already!), you may have dug in and noticed under Settings>Data usage and that Andriod OS is using most of your data plan.   But you'd prefer it to only update over wifi.  No problem... from your device go to Play Store>Settings>and enable Update over Wi-Fi Only.  And cut out a chunk of your data usage today.

Save $1,000 a year by buying a Nexus 4 and moving to Straight Talk. Step 2 - porting your number.

Imagine you have the very best smartphone available... the highest quality display, with an up-to-the-second current version of Android, and the snappiest UI available! Now, imagine that AT&T has just offered to cut your annual bill by $1,000 while still giving you unlimited data, and then throwing in unlimited text and talk just for good measure?  Too good to be true?  Not if you have a Nexus 4 and have moved from post-paid AT&T to Straight Talk.

Chris over at TechCrunch called the Nexus 4 almost perfect, and after having lived with it for more than a month, I have to say that I'm agreement.  The phone is a piece of craftsmanship, and plenty of folks put it through the paces already, so I'm not going to try to convince you to get one.  It's a nice phone, that even a non phone-geek can appreciate.  But if you're like me, you're really here to save $1k by ditching your post-paid major carrier contract and moving over to an MVNO like Straight Talk.

So I'm not going to walk you though the sign-up process over at Straight Talk.  But I am going to explain the transition process.  Assuming you've already got a Nexus 4 (or other carrier unlocked phone), head on over to Straight Talk (and don't forget to grab some frequently available free shipping).  Do the obvious...

1. Click Shop>Sim Cards>Please choose the type of phone you have, and selected "Unlocked GSM phone".
2. Select an AT&T compatible Straight Talk Micro Sim if you have a Nexus 4.
3. Get the "AT&T Compatible Micro SIM + Unlimited* Plan".  As a heads-up - when you receive your shipment, check carefully through all of the envelopes that Straight Talk sends for the ugly green card that has $45 stamp, and has a bar-code and a scratch-off section on the back.
4. Finish your order and wait a few days to receive your shipment.  And yes, FedEx/UPS will require someone to sign for it.

After you receive your cards, you'll need to follow the instructions that come with the card.  With your current phone powered on and working correctly with your old AT&T post-paid service... get started... 

1. Go to Straight Talk and select Activate/Reactive">Transfer Number>Activate my Straight Talk Service with a number from another Company.  
2. Straight Talk will next ask for you AT&T login information, account number, and the last 4 digits of your security code (Remember, your AT&T account number is located at the top of your last invoice - it's NOT your phone number).  
3. If you haven't already done so, now might be a good time to print out any records or invoices you might need for taxes or reimbursement.  Because after you transition your phones, you'll no longer be able to login to the AT&T site.
4. At this point, you still have your Nexus 4 with the old AT&T SIM card installed and you're just waiting.  According to Straight Talk this can take days.  And a skim of various forums suggests that hours is common.  I was moving 2 phones (1 at a time), and slower of the two was the second one, which took a full 5 minutes at around 7:00pm Eastern time mid-week.
5. Make certain you setup Auto-Fill now backed with a credit card so you don't risk loosing your phone number.

How do you know when the number is ported?

If you left your phone on, and working... you'll notice the signal bar has dropped to zero.  And if you try to hit a 3G data network, you wont get a response.  Or if you just want to reboot the thing after waiting a few minutes, you can do that too and see if you have no service.  As soon as service is down and you can no longer make calls, you're ready to finish the process.  

Power off the phone.  Remove the old SIM card, and put the new Straight Talk SIM into the phone, and turn it on.  You should should now be able to place phone calls.  Data doesn't work yet though, on your Nexus 4 you'll need to go to Settings>Mobile Networks>Access Point Names> New APN.  I recommend you go to Straight Talk and make sure you using the latest APN settings, which I'll also post for Good Measure:

Name: Straight Talk, APN: att.mvno, Proxy: Not Set, Port: 80, Username: Not set, Password: Not set, Server: Not Set, MMSC: http://mmsc.cingular.com, MMS Proxy: 66.209.11.33, MMS port: 80, MCC: 310, MNC: 410, Authentication Type: Not Set, APN Protocol: IPv4, APN roaming protocol: IPv4, Bearer: Unspecified).

Are you ready to save $1,000 a year by switching to an MVNO?  Stay tuned, as I'll be reviewing total costs, service quality, and more in an upcoming article.

Click here if you'd like to be notified when our Straight Talk Ebook is released!

Save $1,000 a year by buying a Nexus 4 and moving to Straight Talk? Step 1.

Having been a customer of AT&T mobile services for the better part of a decade, voice and 3G service has been "good enough" for me for a while.  I know some phone geeks rave about the transfer rates on Verizon, or T-Mobile, and for some reason most just seem to hate AT&T... but despite living and breathing IT for most of my life, I just can't get juiced about mobile bandwidth.  WiFi at home, WiFi at the offices, and more bandwidth than I really need most of the time... it works.  So, what I have is really good enough.

But good enough, is also expensive.  Too expensive.

My objective is to reduce the total cost of my my plan by some noteworthy amount... say $1,000.  And to do it in such a manner that I don't have to think about my minutes, my texts, or my data - because I won't.  I also don't want to have to be ever in search of hot-spots, or anything like that... because that's irritating.  Oh, and I don't want a contract, because who in their right mind would want one?  I also don't mind paying more for a phone either, if it can be cost justified.

The history...

So flash back a couple of years to when I last renewed my contract... I was really looking for a pre-paid monthly option, and did a bit of market analysis and considered Simple Mobile, which at that point was an independent MVNO that ran on T-Mobile's network.  However, for a number of reasons... not the least of which was perceived complexity and a need to replace a phone quickly, I failed to pull the trigger and ultimately re-upped with AT&T.

What's an MVNO, you ask? 

Good question... an MVNO is a mobile virtual network operator.  To make a somewhat long, and unnecessarily convoluted story shorter... and MVNO buys capacity on someone else's network (e.g. AT&T, T-Mobile, etc.).  They negotiate to get wholesale rates, and then they chop it up and resell it to to consumers.  So they're a middle man... they don't own a network, and they don't build service.  They just repackage the capacity.  Virgin Mobile UK (1999) was the first to successfully make inroads in the UK MVNO space.  And if you know anything about Virgin, they're an interesting company that takes risk.  Helm'd by Sir Richard Branson, they tend to get involved in markets that abuse, neglect, and gouge their customers...like the mobile phone market, or the Airline business, and then they do it better/faster/cheaper... or at least cheaper (or they go out of Business, Like Virgin Brides).

Why do carriers resell to MVNOs?

An even better question.  One which I've found more difficult to answer.  There's some evidence to suggest that at one time, MVNOs let carriers service a market that they previously were unable to reach.  For example, having a cell phone contract requires some type of credit score (and a cursory skim of the Internet suggests it's south of 500).  But the reality today is that if your breathing, and you don't owe a major carrier money... you can probably get a contract.  That still leaves swaths of the market under-served.  So an MVNO steps in and can enable the carrier to reach a market that they have historically identified as too high-risk, and at the same time put phones in the hands of people that otherwise might be unable to get them.  Or, that once was the argument.  So win-win, right?  Well, I think it's a bit more complicated than that.  The reality today is that there are so many MVNOs out there on each major carrier, that the carriers are being forced by the market to enable MVNO's to compete, and what might have started out as a means to reach more subscribers could be more disruptive than the carrier's originally anticipated.  Although at the end of the day, the carriers are the carriers... they own the infrastructure and that counts for something.

Where's the market going?

 MVNOs seem to be here to stay, and while there are scores of them, Straight Talk appears to be the leader right now, reselling AT&T and T-Mobile in a one-size-fits-all $45 of month plan that includes unlimited voice, text, and data (officially throttled after 2gb).  That fact, combined with what Google is doing via their carrier unlocked Nexus branded phones, and the carrier market is under a bit of pressure in the US.  For instance, With a Nexus 4 you get the fastest, most up-to-date Android-based phone on the market, with a LG-manufactured "zerogap" LCD Display.  Put another way, the phone doesn't suck, and and is a viable competitor with the iPhone 5, and costs $299 with no contract.   In terms of network performance, on AT&T the phone can do HSPA+ in markets where it exists (HSPA+ is a 4G-ish service, based on 3G and is faster than traditional 3G, but slower than 4G LTE).

The market:

• As of 1/2013, AT&T is paying an annual dividend of over 5%, and the performance of their stock suggests that the future is bright.  Indeed, if BT is the canary in the coal mine, then the prospects for AT&T remain strong if they're able to jettison legacy costs. 
• The percentage of the US population that has cell phones is 103%.
• From 2006 - 2011, AT&T invested more than $115 billion in operations and spectrum.
• Mobile traffic grew at more than 20,000 percent in 2011
• AT&T Added 7.7 million subscribers in 2011

The Plan:

I'm currently paying $2k per year ($167 per month) for two AT&T mobile lines with a mix of voice/text/data services.  Straight Talk offer unlimited talk/text/data for $45 per month per line, or $1,080 per year. To get two Nexus phones, I'm going to pay a $200 premium relative to a comparable carrier-subsidized Samsung Galaxy S3.  So after 2.6 months, I'll recover the premium that I paid for the phones.  And moving forward, I'm saving $924 per year for more minutes, more texts, and unlimited data on both lines.

Stay tuned to this series, as I review the switch, number port, etc.  Ready for part 2?


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