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222 lines
17 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 646
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Title: HPR0646: Do we need a carrier plan for Android
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0646/hpr0646.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:21:03
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---
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Hi.
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Hello, this is dismal science again, coming in with episode number two entitled, do you
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need a data or any other type of plan with your do you android phone?
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There's so much going on in the world of mobile these days to begin with we start off with
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the news quick update it just in case you haven't heard the iPhone will be coming to Verizon's
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network in the United States and this is newsworthy for some reason and Apple is going to be releasing
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a phone on a deprecated network CDMA which many parts of the world doesn't even exist and this
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is supposed to be a big revolution for some reason oh I'm not going to talk about this that much
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longer but it just goes to show that I only I think you can only get good news these days
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through podcasts I think the general media is becoming virtually worthless I want to really
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talk to you about my experiences though I have become a big android fan it's a good platform it's
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just in case you guys don't know it is not really Linux it is a derivation of Linux and that
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is relevant it's not relevant to a degree I would have preferred it be a more clean Linux
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implementation but it's actually got branched code of which Google did try to submit to the
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Linux foundation but they those changes were not accepted and the meantime Google has hired two
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engineers to work full-time on trying to get these changes integrated but I'm not exactly sure
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android ever really will be pure Linux but it's pretty close the thing that really has been
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something to me is that this phone I went to do an experiment I kind of phone bill from
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sprint who was my old carrier for the blackberry that I used to have and you know I was getting
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these monthly bills and for those of you who don't live in the United States you know United
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States cell phone bills are unusually high they're much higher than probably what you pay anywhere
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in the world and I was realizing I'm not doing that much talking on this phone anymore I'm not
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a little kid I don't have a bunch of friends to keep up with all day long I'm not a salesman
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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
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time in the middle of the day and I'm not really trying to make a lot of phone calls
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so the idea came to me and I heard somebody else somebody did a podcast on HPR talking about the
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way that they do not use a phone plan on their android phone I don't know I can't remember who it
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was but somebody did mention that but I wanted to go into detail about what my experience has been
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like so I decided that I want to really try to live without an actual cell phone plan now
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obviously this is going to work better for some of us and for others some people really do need
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to be on the phone all day long talking and I understand that I'm just saying that in my case I
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didn't think I needed to be and I found that I really don't need to be on the phone all the time
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with a monthly set plan so I bought an unlocked phone I've never had an unlocked phone before
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that's not the way that we are trained to buy phones in America the way that buying phones in
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America works that you go to a store generally like a T-Mobile Verizon or Sprint Store
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and you buy a phone packaged with a plan and the economics works out as such if you buy this
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phone the carrier subsidizes the cost of your phone so that you'll buy it in return you pay a
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high monthly fee which they eventually recoup all of their money and more and you can't leave
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them without a large termination fee cell phones are sold very differently in other parts of the
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world some places you go and I'm not going to go into this too long because many people already
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know this but in other countries you go into a store that sells cell phones and then they offer
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you a number of SIM cards for a carrier of your choice but that's not the way it works in the
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United States so I bought this unlocked phone actually I bought two phones but I'll just focus
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on one I bought the latest Nexus S phone at Best Buy and they were of course shocked when I
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told them I wanted to buy the phone outright without the discount for the T-Mobile plan and so
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yes I bought it outright it cost 500 something dollars switch on the surface doesn't seem like a
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small amount but I'm guessing over time if the phone lasts a few years I'll actually recoup all
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of my money I also bought a hundred dollars worth of T-Mobile anytime minutes so I do have a T-Mobile
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SIM card with one hundred dollars worth of minutes which is like a thousand minutes at last about a
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year for those emergency situations if you're stuck somewhere if the tires go out in your car you
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can get an emergency call in but other than that I'm gonna go through the way that I've been using
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this phone and I've been extremely satisfied I've been to begin with you're probably asking what
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if you actually want to make a phone call on this phone well of course you can do almost everything
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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
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in the coffee shop at my son's piano school in Best Buy at the mall there is Wi-Fi all around us
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all the time so I actually downloaded an app called SIPDroid and I can't speak
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high more highly of this app SIPDroid is a SIP client that has Google Voice and Google Talk
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integration features built into it and it can allow you to make phone calls over Wi-Fi
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the mechanics of it are a little bit strange but effectively what I would recommend you do if
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you want to try it out is for you create another Google account don't use your real Google account
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create another Google account and go to voice.google.com and create a Google telephone number
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Google gives out free telephone numbers for the United States and Canada for now
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for 2011 they will be free no telling what happens in 2012 but effectively you can download
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this SIPDroid app and you can integrate it into the Google Voice feature and assign it to work
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only under Wi-Fi and what will this will do is that when the SIPDroid application is running
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you will have a green circle at the upper left hand corner of your Android phone letting you know
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that you're ready to go phone calls can come in or they can go out so effectively people can
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call you and you can call them as long as you have a Wi-Fi connection and it works I actually
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spoke to the developer of SIPDroid there in Germany the developer's name is Pascal and he's
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quite proud of the product and he should be I spoke to him because I paid his company some amount
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of money just for some consulting time it was like $15 or something of which they'll talk to you
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for 10 minutes and help you set up your VOIP settings of course I don't want to be
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depending on Google forever to execute my phone calls but that is a leads into another situation
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the Nexus S runs the latest version of Android or one of the later latest versions of Android
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I hear there's other things like honeycomb and other products but
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Nexus S runs gingerbread and you know this is where you know we really start to separate things out
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I'm a fairly frustrated person at times because there's so much good technology out here and
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we did not embrace it for some reason what I'm talking about is SIP the SIP protocol think of it
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as something similar to HTTP except for it's for voice I'm actually looking up what it actually
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stands for right now I can't ever remember something like structured internet protocol
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and it is a way to make phone calls completely over the internet it
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it instead of calling an actual phone number like a seven digit phone number you can call a
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address something similar to an email address this is these these systems are
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PBX systems they run similar I'll give you an example asterix is one of the better known ones and by
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the way SIP stands for session initiation protocol but effectively asterix is a well-known voice
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and it runs similar to an Apache web server it runs mostly on Linux and it transfers phone
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call to phone call based on the similar type of addressing that you would find with email addresses
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and the point of this is that the Nexus S this version of Android comes with a SIP client built
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into the phone now for any of you who use Linux or have used earlier versions of a Ubuntu you
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remember there was a SIP client and Ubuntu called it a Keja it is a gnome project and it was a
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very advanced SIP client of course it didn't catch on because most people won't think out of the box
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but ultimately this SIP protocol can contact any device over data networks
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and I've tested it it it works fantastically you can get SIP addresses for free almost everywhere on
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the internet one good place is sip2sip.info I think they're from Germany or the Netherlands but
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you can get a free SIP address there and of course you can run your own asterix server in your
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home and configure it to run off of your own IP address or domain name but really what all
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this leads up to is that the idea of us all paying for these phone services in the fashion that
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we have been paying seems not to make a lot of sense I can go into further detail if you guys
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want me to at another point but what I'm saying is that Android right now has full VIO IP over
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Wi-Fi capacity and it's pretty good the next session is going to be talking about reward cards
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I have begun managing with my reward cards for supermarkets that I go to
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because there's a lot of incentive now if you don't use a reward card in many cases you're just
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leaving money behind in the case of the supermarkets in my area the supermarket gives a portion of
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the grocery cost to a local school if you indicate it I'm also you can get discounts and things
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the times and also you can get other rewards like lower gasoline prices and one nice way to
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manage reward cards is over your phone they look tacky on your key chain to get beaten up and
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they get lost there is another app called key ring app key ring app is a barcode application which
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allows you to bring up reward cards depending on where you are you can ref you you can download
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this application onto your phone and it only refreshes when you ask it to so you don't need a
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continuous data connection I use another one called card mobility but actually every time that
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application starts it tries to go and find the card information on the internet the reward card
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information key ring app doesn't key ring app only refreshes when you ask it to refresh and so
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that allows you to use it in a mobile fashion without a data plan the next I'll leave the reward
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cards issue alone for now and go on to the next topic which is GPS for some reason and you know
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I'm going to put a disclaimer out here is that I believe that Google's working in collusion with
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a lot of the phone carriers because some of the things they did they didn't really have to do
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they they they did things that made things more difficult in benefit of the carriers to make them
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more excited to do to market this product one of the things they did is that the built-in
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Google GPS system on the phone does not work with the Google navigon or navigation application
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so if you don't have a data plan it's just not gonna work which absolutely makes no sense whatsoever
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and you know there was some talk on the internet about Google saying that you know they can make
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the application work in the in the case that you're not in a data area for a moment they can
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make it switch to not use the data but I'm asking myself why did you make the GPS system need data
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period I mean before these phones we had GPS devices that we would buy and they never needed
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data like the Tom Tom devices they just needed a battery and they always knew where you were
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and they could give directions well there's a really straightforward answer to this and it is
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another application called co-pilot co-pilot is an excellent GPS I mean really really good
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I have been using it for a while and for some reason it does not need a data plan even though
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Google's default GPS does need a data plan this is such a good application co-pilot I was in
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New Jersey recently and I wanted to take my son to the Statue of Liberty and I don't know the
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address of the Statue of Liberty I just have in the slightest clue what the address is to put
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into co-pilot so in co-pilot it has a whole slew of features and one of them is you know find
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historical landmarks find supermarkets gas stations it has a huge database of all these places
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you can go so I can I said take me from where I am right now to a historical location a historic
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monument and then it gave me a list of all historical monuments in the New Jersey area one of
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which was a Statue of Liberty you just press Statue Liberty and bam direction start turn my turn
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till you get to Liberty State Park and not only that it also has another feature where you can bring
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up a map in case you don't know where exactly you want to go but you know roughly where you want to
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go you can press on the map the location of roughly where you want to go and it will take you to
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whatever you pressed so that you'll be in the general area so I found co-pilot to be an
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excellent replacement for the native Google GPS system another application that is pretty good
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is beyond pod I found that beyond pod is a nice podcast catcher before Android I was using a
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blackberry of which I had to download or in the case I was not using a data plan in the blackberry
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as using a voice plan yes but I actually had a blackberry without a data plan I had to download
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these MP3 files from the internet onto my computer and then connect usb to the cable to the
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blackberry and then transfer these files over pretty much every morning well with beyond pod
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and Wi-Fi on the Android you can just go through your list of podcasts you listen to and just see
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them all in latest order and just click each one of them down the line after you're done turn off
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the Wi-Fi and head to work and you've got a full days worth of podcasts on your phone works like a charm
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these are some of the main applications that I've been using but what I really wanted to get
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at is that I don't really think that for most of us having any cell phone plan whatsoever with
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these carriers makes any sense because they're not fear they don't treat us like we're intelligent
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and I'm not sure that most of us are getting our money's worth out of it especially with the
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nature of Wi-Fi and universal accessibility if you live in a major city in the United States you're
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going to have a lot of Wi-Fi around you all the time this is um yeah and of course they don't
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want you to know any of this I spoke to the sprint salesman and I I explained to him my plan
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and he just looked baffled when I told him that I was playing to buy an Android phone without any
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plan he told me he couldn't sell me one he says that sprint we just cannot sell you an Android even
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with a normal voice playing just as a specific Android plan with all the data and the bells and whistles
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I explained to him that I was going to actually buy a phone and I'm not going to put any
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plan on it and he's just baffled the same thing happened at Best Buy um they were telling me that
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you know it just doesn't make any sense to have a phone without a data plan and I kept saying why
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there's no particular reason it just doesn't make sense you wouldn't want this phone without a
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data plan um I was going to include an external audio into this podcast because they mentioned it
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this morning again on the economist the economist releases podcasts as well and they've been going
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to technology podcasts which I don't think is very good um but they were talking about you know
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the nature of cell phones and you're you just have to have a plan with them it just doesn't make any
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sense I play Angry Birds on the bus to work in the morning and it doesn't need a data plan
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almost nothing on my phone actually really needs of data or voice plan in any fashion so just in
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case you were thinking about it I just wanted to co-sign on what other people have said before me
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is that it is possible to get a full featured experience out of your android phone without
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a data plan um this is dismal science um checking out once again um if you want to
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again touch with me I can be found at dismal.science.hpr at gmail.com I've received a few emails
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some of which made recommendations for some topics that I could speak about in the future
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and I'm going to take them up I think my next podcast will be called operating system
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game theory I'm looking forward to that one um I'm going to leave you with a song
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uh this is less than Jake this song is called the St James Hotel and thanks for listening
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oh
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hey
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hey
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He had to make the air
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Why did he do this, why don't we?
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Why did he do this, why don't he?
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He had to get back to normal
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To lose our game time
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To lose our game time
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To lose our game time
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To lose our game time
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To lose our game time
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Every place
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Yet I'm back with the city
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Where they go to die
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But the fuck up they've died
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But the fuck up they've died
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But the fuck up they've died
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They got your neck and yeah
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Why did he do this, why don't we?
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Why did he do this, why don't we?
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But I don't give a fuck about you though
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So things I can't tell
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So things I can't tell
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So things I can't tell
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So things I can't tell
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So things I can't tell
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So things I can't tell
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So things I can't tell
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So things I can't tell
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So things I can't tell
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So things I can't tell
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So things I can't tell
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So things I can't tell
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HPR is sponsored by Carol.net
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So head on over to C-A-R-O dot-N-C for all of those things
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Thank you for watching
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