Ballenxj said:
MK7, I just now looked at those videos you posted links to, and think the ZTE Valet by trackphone looked pretty tempting.
I've had this ZTE Valet and TracFone for about 5 months now. It runs Android programs fine. Email, texting, web browsing, etc. TracFone uses the SPRINT NETWORK in my area. No problems with voice calls yet but I usually text and email only. I watch a lot of movies and downloaded TV on it. Runs .AVI no problem. Most .MKV, it runs good but the high compression .MKV (so smaller file size), it's choppy and unwatchable. .MP4 are fine also. If you don't know what these are, a 700mb MKV 2hour movie is clearer than the same movie at 1500mb AVI or 1200mb MP4. So MKV is less than 1/2 the filesize yet clearer = taxing on the processing capabilities of CPU. I would imagine high graphics games to be unbearable too.
This ZTE is certainly not state of the art, but it's fine for me. Screen is not that bad for texting. Samsung S4, iPhone 5, etc... certainly much better. The worse about this though is the weak WiFi, I can hardly get WiFi in my own house, and the router is just in the basement. This is a big deal if you're vandwelling. But then again, you should also have a laptop, as tooling around all day on a phone only, even an iPhone, will kill your eyes. And you would want to have a WiFi signal booster as a vandweller also.
I bought a 2nd one of these ZTE Valet off of ebay when they had a sale. I needed to buy more service after the 1st 90 day card expired but still had lots of minutes/txt/data left. Best Buy had the card for 1 year service, 1200 min, 1200 txt, 1200mb data for $100 + tax. eBay had a sale for this exact card + a new ZTE Valet phone for $99, no tax and free shipping. Then I got an extra 250 of min/txt/data coupon code for buying this card.
The value of this phone new = $50-70. So it's possible that my smartphone service can be as low as $3.50 to $4.10 per month if I don't need to add more for the year. And now I have a 2nd smartphone that's NOT activated, as I used the card on my 1st phone. The 2nd phone has no phone# but does everything that an Android device does like email, etc.
Another trick is when you buy this phone, do not activate using the minutes card. Activate the phone on it's own first as it comes with 20 minutes and 60 days service. Once you get your number and everything is working, you ADD the minutes card afterward....otherwise you lose out on this 60 days + 20 minutes.
bindi&us said:
For a $40 savings I can wait. The cheapo Tracfone I'm using now does the basics.
Look on eBay. Sometimes this same company have sales (shopcelldeals).
Shipping is free and fast, like 3-4 days I got it, both times.
I bought a 2nd, new, ZTE Valet for $99 w/with 1200 minutes, 1200 text and 1200 mb data (cards says 400, but the phone 3x it) and 1 year service. Then some eBay deal gave me $10 discount, so this whole thing was $89.
1. Activate the phone w/o using the Reload Card. It comes with 60 days service and 20 minutes/txt/data. Can't remember if it tripled it to 60/60/60. But if you activate with the Reload Card, you lose this 20/20/20 + 60 days service, which was what happened to me.
2. After activated. Search for "TracFone Coupon Codes". They usually always have it floating around, often on TracFone.com itself. The bigger the Reload Card you buy, the higher the freebies air-time. For the $100 card, my freebie was 250/250/250 at that time. I just missed out on the Valentine Day's deal, which would have been 350/350/350.
3. You call up TracFone and request to speak to a live operator to ADD your Reload Card but first tell them that you also have a Coupon Code. I'm sure you can collect this freebie by going through the internet or physical phone, but I didn't want to risk losing out.
