hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0646.txt

Episode: 646
Title: HPR0646: Do we need a carrier plan for Android
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0646/hpr0646.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:21:03

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Hi.
Hello, this is dismal science again, coming in with episode number two entitled, do you
need a data or any other type of plan with your do you android phone?
There's so much going on in the world of mobile these days to begin with we start off with
the news quick update it just in case you haven't heard the iPhone will be coming to Verizon's
network in the United States and this is newsworthy for some reason and Apple is going to be releasing
a phone on a deprecated network CDMA which many parts of the world doesn't even exist and this
is supposed to be a big revolution for some reason oh I'm not going to talk about this that much
longer but it just goes to show that I only I think you can only get good news these days
through podcasts I think the general media is becoming virtually worthless I want to really
talk to you about my experiences though I have become a big android fan it's a good platform it's
just in case you guys don't know it is not really Linux it is a derivation of Linux and that
is relevant it's not relevant to a degree I would have preferred it be a more clean Linux
implementation but it's actually got branched code of which Google did try to submit to the
Linux foundation but they those changes were not accepted and the meantime Google has hired two
engineers to work full-time on trying to get these changes integrated but I'm not exactly sure
android ever really will be pure Linux but it's pretty close the thing that really has been
something to me is that this phone I went to do an experiment I kind of phone bill from
sprint who was my old carrier for the blackberry that I used to have and you know I was getting
these monthly bills and for those of you who don't live in the United States you know United
States cell phone bills are unusually high they're much higher than probably what you pay anywhere
in the world and I was realizing I'm not doing that much talking on this phone anymore I'm not
a little kid I don't have a bunch of friends to keep up with all day long I'm not a salesman
and I make most of my phone calls when I'm at home or when I'm at work I just have a small transit
time in the middle of the day and I'm not really trying to make a lot of phone calls
so the idea came to me and I heard somebody else somebody did a podcast on HPR talking about the
way that they do not use a phone plan on their android phone I don't know I can't remember who it
was but somebody did mention that but I wanted to go into detail about what my experience has been
like so I decided that I want to really try to live without an actual cell phone plan now
obviously this is going to work better for some of us and for others some people really do need
to be on the phone all day long talking and I understand that I'm just saying that in my case I
didn't think I needed to be and I found that I really don't need to be on the phone all the time
with a monthly set plan so I bought an unlocked phone I've never had an unlocked phone before
that's not the way that we are trained to buy phones in America the way that buying phones in
America works that you go to a store generally like a T-Mobile Verizon or Sprint Store
and you buy a phone packaged with a plan and the economics works out as such if you buy this
phone the carrier subsidizes the cost of your phone so that you'll buy it in return you pay a
high monthly fee which they eventually recoup all of their money and more and you can't leave
them without a large termination fee cell phones are sold very differently in other parts of the
world some places you go and I'm not going to go into this too long because many people already
know this but in other countries you go into a store that sells cell phones and then they offer
you a number of SIM cards for a carrier of your choice but that's not the way it works in the
United States so I bought this unlocked phone actually I bought two phones but I'll just focus
on one I bought the latest Nexus S phone at Best Buy and they were of course shocked when I
told them I wanted to buy the phone outright without the discount for the T-Mobile plan and so
yes I bought it outright it cost 500 something dollars switch on the surface doesn't seem like a
small amount but I'm guessing over time if the phone lasts a few years I'll actually recoup all
of my money I also bought a hundred dollars worth of T-Mobile anytime minutes so I do have a T-Mobile
SIM card with one hundred dollars worth of minutes which is like a thousand minutes at last about a
year for those emergency situations if you're stuck somewhere if the tires go out in your car you
can get an emergency call in but other than that I'm gonna go through the way that I've been using
this phone and I've been extremely satisfied I've been to begin with you're probably asking what
if you actually want to make a phone call on this phone well of course you can do almost everything
through Wi-Fi right and I have Wi-Fi almost everywhere I go I have Wi-Fi at home I have Wi-Fi at work
in the coffee shop at my son's piano school in Best Buy at the mall there is Wi-Fi all around us
all the time so I actually downloaded an app called SIPDroid and I can't speak
high more highly of this app SIPDroid is a SIP client that has Google Voice and Google Talk
integration features built into it and it can allow you to make phone calls over Wi-Fi
the mechanics of it are a little bit strange but effectively what I would recommend you do if
you want to try it out is for you create another Google account don't use your real Google account
create another Google account and go to voice.google.com and create a Google telephone number
Google gives out free telephone numbers for the United States and Canada for now
for 2011 they will be free no telling what happens in 2012 but effectively you can download
this SIPDroid app and you can integrate it into the Google Voice feature and assign it to work
only under Wi-Fi and what will this will do is that when the SIPDroid application is running
you will have a green circle at the upper left hand corner of your Android phone letting you know
that you're ready to go phone calls can come in or they can go out so effectively people can
call you and you can call them as long as you have a Wi-Fi connection and it works I actually
spoke to the developer of SIPDroid there in Germany the developer's name is Pascal and he's
quite proud of the product and he should be I spoke to him because I paid his company some amount
of money just for some consulting time it was like $15 or something of which they'll talk to you
for 10 minutes and help you set up your VOIP settings of course I don't want to be
depending on Google forever to execute my phone calls but that is a leads into another situation
the Nexus S runs the latest version of Android or one of the later latest versions of Android
I hear there's other things like honeycomb and other products but
Nexus S runs gingerbread and you know this is where you know we really start to separate things out
I'm a fairly frustrated person at times because there's so much good technology out here and
we did not embrace it for some reason what I'm talking about is SIP the SIP protocol think of it
as something similar to HTTP except for it's for voice I'm actually looking up what it actually
stands for right now I can't ever remember something like structured internet protocol
and it is a way to make phone calls completely over the internet it
it instead of calling an actual phone number like a seven digit phone number you can call a
address something similar to an email address this is these these systems are
PBX systems they run similar I'll give you an example asterix is one of the better known ones and by
the way SIP stands for session initiation protocol but effectively asterix is a well-known voice
and it runs similar to an Apache web server it runs mostly on Linux and it transfers phone
call to phone call based on the similar type of addressing that you would find with email addresses
and the point of this is that the Nexus S this version of Android comes with a SIP client built
into the phone now for any of you who use Linux or have used earlier versions of a Ubuntu you
remember there was a SIP client and Ubuntu called it a Keja it is a gnome project and it was a
very advanced SIP client of course it didn't catch on because most people won't think out of the box
but ultimately this SIP protocol can contact any device over data networks
and I've tested it it it works fantastically you can get SIP addresses for free almost everywhere on
the internet one good place is sip2sip.info I think they're from Germany or the Netherlands but
you can get a free SIP address there and of course you can run your own asterix server in your
home and configure it to run off of your own IP address or domain name but really what all
this leads up to is that the idea of us all paying for these phone services in the fashion that
we have been paying seems not to make a lot of sense I can go into further detail if you guys
want me to at another point but what I'm saying is that Android right now has full VIO IP over
Wi-Fi capacity and it's pretty good the next session is going to be talking about reward cards
I have begun managing with my reward cards for supermarkets that I go to
because there's a lot of incentive now if you don't use a reward card in many cases you're just
leaving money behind in the case of the supermarkets in my area the supermarket gives a portion of
the grocery cost to a local school if you indicate it I'm also you can get discounts and things
the times and also you can get other rewards like lower gasoline prices and one nice way to
manage reward cards is over your phone they look tacky on your key chain to get beaten up and
they get lost there is another app called key ring app key ring app is a barcode application which
allows you to bring up reward cards depending on where you are you can ref you you can download
this application onto your phone and it only refreshes when you ask it to so you don't need a
continuous data connection I use another one called card mobility but actually every time that
application starts it tries to go and find the card information on the internet the reward card
information key ring app doesn't key ring app only refreshes when you ask it to refresh and so
that allows you to use it in a mobile fashion without a data plan the next I'll leave the reward
cards issue alone for now and go on to the next topic which is GPS for some reason and you know
I'm going to put a disclaimer out here is that I believe that Google's working in collusion with
a lot of the phone carriers because some of the things they did they didn't really have to do
they they they did things that made things more difficult in benefit of the carriers to make them
more excited to do to market this product one of the things they did is that the built-in
Google GPS system on the phone does not work with the Google navigon or navigation application
so if you don't have a data plan it's just not gonna work which absolutely makes no sense whatsoever
and you know there was some talk on the internet about Google saying that you know they can make
the application work in the in the case that you're not in a data area for a moment they can
make it switch to not use the data but I'm asking myself why did you make the GPS system need data
period I mean before these phones we had GPS devices that we would buy and they never needed
data like the Tom Tom devices they just needed a battery and they always knew where you were
and they could give directions well there's a really straightforward answer to this and it is
another application called co-pilot co-pilot is an excellent GPS I mean really really good
I have been using it for a while and for some reason it does not need a data plan even though
Google's default GPS does need a data plan this is such a good application co-pilot I was in
New Jersey recently and I wanted to take my son to the Statue of Liberty and I don't know the
address of the Statue of Liberty I just have in the slightest clue what the address is to put
into co-pilot so in co-pilot it has a whole slew of features and one of them is you know find
historical landmarks find supermarkets gas stations it has a huge database of all these places
you can go so I can I said take me from where I am right now to a historical location a historic
monument and then it gave me a list of all historical monuments in the New Jersey area one of
which was a Statue of Liberty you just press Statue Liberty and bam direction start turn my turn
till you get to Liberty State Park and not only that it also has another feature where you can bring
up a map in case you don't know where exactly you want to go but you know roughly where you want to
go you can press on the map the location of roughly where you want to go and it will take you to
whatever you pressed so that you'll be in the general area so I found co-pilot to be an
excellent replacement for the native Google GPS system another application that is pretty good
is beyond pod I found that beyond pod is a nice podcast catcher before Android I was using a
blackberry of which I had to download or in the case I was not using a data plan in the blackberry
as using a voice plan yes but I actually had a blackberry without a data plan I had to download
these MP3 files from the internet onto my computer and then connect usb to the cable to the
blackberry and then transfer these files over pretty much every morning well with beyond pod
and Wi-Fi on the Android you can just go through your list of podcasts you listen to and just see
them all in latest order and just click each one of them down the line after you're done turn off
the Wi-Fi and head to work and you've got a full days worth of podcasts on your phone works like a charm
these are some of the main applications that I've been using but what I really wanted to get
at is that I don't really think that for most of us having any cell phone plan whatsoever with
these carriers makes any sense because they're not fear they don't treat us like we're intelligent
and I'm not sure that most of us are getting our money's worth out of it especially with the
nature of Wi-Fi and universal accessibility if you live in a major city in the United States you're
going to have a lot of Wi-Fi around you all the time this is um yeah and of course they don't
want you to know any of this I spoke to the sprint salesman and I I explained to him my plan
and he just looked baffled when I told him that I was playing to buy an Android phone without any
plan he told me he couldn't sell me one he says that sprint we just cannot sell you an Android even
with a normal voice playing just as a specific Android plan with all the data and the bells and whistles
I explained to him that I was going to actually buy a phone and I'm not going to put any
plan on it and he's just baffled the same thing happened at Best Buy um they were telling me that
you know it just doesn't make any sense to have a phone without a data plan and I kept saying why
there's no particular reason it just doesn't make sense you wouldn't want this phone without a
data plan um I was going to include an external audio into this podcast because they mentioned it
this morning again on the economist the economist releases podcasts as well and they've been going
to technology podcasts which I don't think is very good um but they were talking about you know
the nature of cell phones and you're you just have to have a plan with them it just doesn't make any
sense I play Angry Birds on the bus to work in the morning and it doesn't need a data plan
almost nothing on my phone actually really needs of data or voice plan in any fashion so just in
case you were thinking about it I just wanted to co-sign on what other people have said before me
is that it is possible to get a full featured experience out of your android phone without
a data plan um this is dismal science um checking out once again um if you want to
again touch with me I can be found at dismal.science.hpr at gmail.com I've received a few emails
some of which made recommendations for some topics that I could speak about in the future
and I'm going to take them up I think my next podcast will be called operating system
game theory I'm looking forward to that one um I'm going to leave you with a song
uh this is less than Jake this song is called the St James Hotel and thanks for listening
oh
hey
hey
He had to make the air
Why did he do this, why don't we?
Why did he do this, why don't he?
He had to get back to normal
To lose our game time
To lose our game time
To lose our game time
To lose our game time
To lose our game time
Every place
Yet I'm back with the city
Where they go to die
But the fuck up they've died
But the fuck up they've died
But the fuck up they've died
They got your neck and yeah
Why did he do this, why don't we?
Why did he do this, why don't we?
But I don't give a fuck about you though
So things I can't tell
So things I can't tell
So things I can't tell
So things I can't tell
So things I can't tell
So things I can't tell
So things I can't tell
So things I can't tell
So things I can't tell
So things I can't tell
So things I can't tell
So things I can't tell
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