MVNO cellphone service journal–A look back at PTel, H2O, Ringplus, Cricket, Project Fi, Tello, Freedompop

 

So here is a look back at various MVNO cellphone services I’ve tried so far. Since I don’t use my phone for calls or texts a lot, I’m mostly looking at cheapest option possible. And I live in big city, so any of the big 4 network all work for me, I have no preference of one carrier over another. I don’t travel in US domestic most of the time. As far as MVNO are concerned, roaming are usually not supported. Also my main number is a google voice number, it made switching carriers super easy. Text messages including MMS on google voice is also free.

1. PTel (PlatinumTel, T-Mobile MVNO) 2013-2015, company went under in January 2016

Various unlocked GSM devices used with this service, including LG Optimus L9 that broke after only 6 month. SONY Xperia ION L28at lasted for a bit longer than a year. LG G Flex for more than a year.

This is the first major service I have after moving my phone service from expensive T-Mobile monthly bill. I usually used a $40 for 150 days pay as you go service. There were usually coupons available to make it even cheaper. Costs were 5 cents per minute for calls, 2 cents for texts, and 10 cents per megabyte of data. The best thing about this service was that any remaining balance roll after refilling. The only downside about this service was that data was very expensive at 10 cents per MB, but otherwise it’s almost the perfect plan. For customer service, I only used emails for communication for 2 to 3 times, they were helpful at porting in numbers and billing processing.

2. H2O (AT&T MVNO) 2016

Verizon LG G4 (GSM is unlocked by default) and Oneplus 3

 

After PTel went under in January 2016, I have to move the service to H2O. They offer similar pay as you go rate as PTel. I usually used a $10 for 90 days rate. Costs were 5 cents per minute for calls, 5 cents for texts, and 10 cents per megabyte of data. The downside is that the remaining balance did not roll. If you didn’t use up all the balance, they were gone after refilling. It wasn’t a super good alternative to PTel. For customer service, I have to call them for port in, they were helpful and the operators are US based. The website is very unintuitive, I never got it work under Chrome. The good side is that the SIM cards are cheap. It’s good for those port-in promotions if you ever want to try some new service.

3. Ringplus (Sprint MVNO) Nov 2015-Jan 2017, company went under in February 2017

Sprint locked LG Volt

  

This service was fun while it lasted. It certainly has changed my way of using cellphone service. The plan I had was Leonardo 4. (they must at least have over 100 different plans over the one year span) Free: $0 for Unlimited RingPlus-to-RingPlus Voice & Text + 1400 Voice, 1400 Text and 1200 MB + tethering per month. My cost for the entire 1 year and 2 months was only the phone and the $20 top up ($65 total including tax). The LG Volt is a very basic android phone, but since tethering is included, I just use the hotspot feature, the connection was mostly stable. The service changed two ways of how I use cellphone: 1. Now I carry two cellphones all the time, it doesn’t feel too much of a burden since the LG Volt was small enough. (Now upgraded to Samsung Galaxy S7) 2. Data, now I can’t live without data. On average, I would consume 600MB-800MB data per month for light browsing, social media, and Google Maps. Ringplus also had the most intuitive user interface for all the carriers I’ve tried. Although towards the end, the optional add-on seems quite confusing. No, I’m not bothered with the ringplus radio every time I make a phone call. A perk that I see no others have offered is the Fluidcall, which is VOIP based phone number. You can use your number anywhere WIFI is available. This also gets around the restriction that you account gets deactivated if no activity for 30 days (or 60 days?). This is useful when I travel out of the country. Although it seems blocked in China, using a VPN resolves the problem. Too bad they couldn’t figure out a working business model before it’s too late. Those ridiculous offerings towards the end is a pretty clear sign that they can’t last…

4. Cricket (AT&T MVNO), Dec 2016

Oneplus 3

I only signed up for this service to terminate the H2O service by porting in the number, also got a pretty decent sign up bonus. I had the $30 plan for only one month. Unlimited talk, text and 1GB data. Customer service is helpful in port-in my number. Other than that, I can’t say much about this service. The advantage of this service is the group plans, the best value got be the $100/mo for 5 lines, each line has Unlimited Talk, Text, and Data access - with 4 GB of high-speed data. But unfortunately I don’t need 5 lines. There are also perks like rewards points and referral bonus.

5. Project Fi (Automatically switches between T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular)

Nexus 5X and Oneplus 3

To get started with project Fi, the cost would be a bit steep as they only support very few devices. I got a Nexus 5X to just try out this service. It is particularly convenient for travelers as it supports over 135 countries so that you don’t have to buy a local sim card. Depending on where you travel, the cost may not be that attractive though. The plan is $20 for unlimited talk and text plus $10/1 GB of data. You get refunded for any unused data. They also offer free data only sim cards that you can put into any unlocked GSM device.

One particular good usage for this service is to get around the GFW in China as all data are routed back to US before sending back to your device even though you are roaming on Chinese local network. This means you can access Google, Facebook, Instagram etc which typically are blocked in China without using a VPN service. Google map is subject to geoshifting in big cities such as Shanghai.

Project Fi uses China Mobile (default) and China Unicom as partners when you roam. If you manually forces to use China Unicom, you’ll get at least 3G HSPA+ speed in rural area and 4G LTE in big cities. Although the latency could be very high (400-500ms), I have no trouble using VOIP such as Hangouts to call any US number. I end up cancelling the service since the cost is too much for what I need in US domestic. It takes 3 months for Google to refund any remaining credits or deactivate your phone from their network. Maybe later whenever I travel to China, I will restart the service and then pause the service when I don’t need it.

Project Fi also offers perks such as referral and FlyWithFi travel trolleys in certain US airports. Also when the service is paused, you get refunded. So it might be possible pause it before you sleep and resume the next day when you awake to save 1/3 bill. This is a stretch though.

6. Tello (Sprint MVNO)

Sprint locked Samsung Galaxy S7

This is a newcomer in US market, it just celebrated its first anniversary. It’s introduced as one of the options when Ringplus went under. It’s basically Ting without the mandatory $6 monthly fee. The lowest monthly plan with data (must be greater than $5) you could get is 100 min+200MB data which will cost $7 plus taxes. The data is 200MB LTE then throttled to 64KB afterwards. I also find that if you manually switch plan each month, you could keep your unused minutes rolling. This is now my daily driver since it’s about the cheapest plan I could find. Hope this company will be there with the same rate for at least the next 3 years to justify my impulse purchase of the locked Galaxy S7.

7. FreedomPop (AT&T MVNO)

Oneplus 3

This is the type of company that lures people in by offering free data plan (voice and texts are strictly VOIP based), then charging people base on their ignorance. This is much like ringplus but they have a sustainable business model. I have been using it for almost 5 months as an alternative to ringplus free data. It works fine so far as I have followed the instruction to disable any charges. They uses three different carriers, CDMA with Sprint which gives free 500MB base data; GSM with Three UK roaming on AT&T, aka 3G Global which gives free 200MB base data; GSM with AT&T, aka 4G LTE which gives free 200MB base data. All plans you can add 10 friends to get additional 500MB bonus data which is pretty easy to do. It’s also possible to give upto 100MB data each month if you have multiple accounts or actual friends who have no use of their data. The 3G Global sim data are routed back to UK which gives huge latency, and the connection is persistently slow, I would highly suggest get the 4G LTE sim. The user interface is pretty terrible as it’s designed to get you confused with hidden charges, the plan, the service, and the credit are all in different sections. To cancel plan or service, you have to click those tiny texts that you will need magnifiers to see. The credits to stop the auto charge are disabled randomly even though I have used at least 5MB data each month. People are also experiencing downgrading bugs.

The plan is strictly data based. In order to use VOIP for calls and texts, you have to use their app. I tested it briefly and it seems to work fine. But I prefer simpler ways to just use google voice app or hangout dialer. There are ways to extract user name and password from the app to use in any VOIP app, but I haven’t bothered to try it out. The service itself seems pretty good despite all the quirks.

Summary:

So far, I’m pretty happy with Tello with the $7 monthly plan. But if you don’t want to be locked into Sprint which has only limited support to very specific phone models and Sim cards.

The next cheap and reliable service seems to be MintSim’s 3 month for $35 promo plan with unlimited talk, text, 2GB LTE data which is on T-Mobile. Just use google voice and change service every 3 month. This would be my backup plan if Tello ever increases price or going under.

Dell XPS 13 9350 wifi card replacement / New OS Installation Guide / General 6 month Review

 

So I bought the XPS 13 9350 ultrabook in December 2015. Basic configuration is 1080p non-touch screen, I5 6200 CPU, 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM. I’ve been mostly happy with the laptop so far. But there is one problem with laptop, the wifi card it’s included has very poor signal under certain environment, especially with the Synology RT1900ac router under 5G connection.

 

 

So I replaced it with Intel 8260 wifi card recently, and the connection has been stable so far.

 

 

Opening up the laptop wasn’t as hard as I thought after following the ifixit guide and youtube video.

 

 

   

Left is the crappy Dell DW 1820A wifi card that came with the machine. Right is the replaced Intel 8260 wifi card, the third gen wifi card that’s capable of connection speed upto 867Mbps under 5G. (2nd gen 7265 works with it as well, and it’s about $10 cheaper)

 

 

The next part I would like to replace is the m2. SSD. I’ll wait for the Samsung 950 Pro 512GB to come down to around $200 price point. But the current 256GB+128GB microSD card has been serving me pretty well. (I got the microSD adapter that can insert flush with the machine) I don’t really need any more space so far.

 

After replacing the wifi card, I got some trouble with the Bluetooth driver. So I just completely reinstalled windows. It’s the first time I reinstall on a m2 NVME drive. I did plenty research on it and ran into some issues, but was able to solve the problems. So here are the procedures I did (I used the RAID approach by loading Intel RAID drivers manually during windows 10 installation):

 

 

1. Prepare USB stick. I’m using Rufus. Change the partition to GPT for UEFI, and File system to FAT32. I have a 64GB USB drive, didn’t bother to try NTFS.

 

 

After Rufus is done, it should have bootx64.efi under efi>boot folder. This is the boot file that you need to boot from USB. I ran into a problem where Dell’s UEFI wouldn’t boot from the USB drive. But it worked after I manually pointed this file in bios. The step will be shown later.

 

  

 

Now download the intel RAID driver, and put it on the USB drive. You’ll have to manually point to the driver during windows installation, otherwise windows cannot see your drive.

 

 

2. UEFI Settings:

 

 

My approach is to keep the RAID setting intact. Insert USB drive before booting into UEFI.

   

(1). Disable Secure Boot

 

 

(2). Check “Enable Legacy Option ROMs” in Advanced Boot Options.

 

 

(3). Manually add the bootx64.efi in the “Boot Sequence” menu. I have a hard time with the USB will not boot. I finally resolved the problem by doing this.

 

Windows 10 installation is easy afterwards, you just need to point it to the intel RAID driver. I deleted the 10GB Dell recovery partition as I don’t feel I ever need it. The only problem I have so far is that some drivers and setting software downloaded from Dell will not install now as the system is not Dell specific. But the manufacture drivers from Intel, Microsoft etc works just fine.

 

A quick review about the laptop is that it improves upon Dell’s software updates, especially the BIOS updates. The first months I got the laptop has a lot of issues including random reboots, BSOD, etc. But they seem to disappear since January. The biggest appeal for this laptop is of course the thin bezel. I’m surprised that to this day, there is still no competitors coming up with bezels this thin (well, there is LG gram 13 and 15, and Samsung Notebook 9 NP900X5L-K02US). The speed of the laptop is reasonably fast, it runs with SONY Vegas video editing software and Adobe Lightroom just fine. The battery lasts me a good 5-6 hours (I’ve never been able to reach the claimed 10 hours). Another appealing factor is that Dell has some good accessories going along with it. The one I like so much is the power companion. A portable charger that can provide 35w power to the laptop and two additional USB ports for smartphones and tablets. The one I got is the smaller and lighter four cell PW7015M 12000mah. It can charge XPS 13 9350 upto 50% full through a single charge very quickly. And the recharge time is phenomenal in under 2 to 3 hours.

Lenovo Iomega ix2-DL Network Storage 2-Bay Quick Review

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So I got the Lenovo Iomega ix2-DL NAS in September. It was an impulse buy at $40. I’ve been waiting patiently for the HDD sales ever since while have this NAS collecting dust. The online reviews don’t seem to favor it, but I still gave it a shot due to the price… It is the first Lenovo product EVER.

 

 

 

 

I finally bought a pair of WD RED 4TB drives, cost me $300… It was definitely not cheap to have a dedicated NAS. But I can free my PC to do other things or shut down when I’m done with it now.

 

 

I’m using RAID 1 - Mirror for the moment. When I first put the drives in, it took over a day to finish the raid setup. Configuring it was pretty easy. I didn’t try the LenovoEMC management software. I just log into the IP address, and manage it from the web interface. This video gives a pretty good demonstration to have you started:

The NAS gives tons of features, but performance seems to be under par probably due to outdated hardware (This product has been on the market for over two years now). Good job for Lenovo still updating the firmware though. I’ve been receiving two updates since I powered it up. It’s only been running for about two weeks so far. File transferring speed ranks the bottom of all the NAS products out there. My speed is about the same as the tested speed, got about 28mbps writing and 50mbps reading. So it’s definitely not for video editing of anything like that. But it suffices for storage for media consumption.

 

 

The 4.0.x firmware brings a flat interface, which makes the interface a bit neat. But the web interface is still very slow to load, took about 5 seconds to load.

 

 

While it gives you loads of features, I only use a few of them, namely Media Server, Transmission Torrent, and UPS. This video gives a quick tour of what these features are about:

 

 

     

 

The ix2 comes with one USB2.0 port. That’s where you connect the UPS. Not every UPS works with ix2 though. You need to find one with the USBHID-UPS support. I happen to have an APC bought last year that support this protocol. Coupled with the Event Log features, I think I had a better chance to survive catastrophe failure. Hopefully that would never happen… Since it’s only got one USB2.0 port, if you need to hook up another drive, you can use a powered USB hub without any problem.

The transmission torrent server works better than I would have hoped. It pretty much support every feature that’s available to the full blown utorrent. And private trackers do NOT have problem with this version of transmission so that I can use it. Torrent files, magnetic links, speed limits all work well. The only thing that doesn’t work quite well is if you want to download only some files from a torrent or magnetic link, you can’t easily pick the files.

To summarize, this is a low end NAS, probably the cheapest one out there that you can buy. The performance at 28mbps writing 50mbps reading is about the fastest USB2.0 speed or maybe some slow USB3.0 drives. This NAS is good for media server where once you dump the files there, you would only access it with good enough speed. It’s not good for constant transfer of files, especially large files, or any video or picture editing. I’m quite happy with my purchase since media server is my intended use. And I already have a compatible UPS to back it up.

SONY Walkman NW-M505 Review – aptX demystified

 

 

So I’ve been stop updating this blog for the past two years now… I had to take a break and eventually got into photography for a bit. I’m trying to revive it by posting a new review here. But I don’t think I’ll update it that frequently afterwards. So this review is about the SONY Walkman M Series, NW-M505. It’s sold in Japan only, released about 11 months ago.

 

 

 

It’s a unique entry into SONY’s Walkman line-up since it blends the smartphone function - Bluetooth adapter into the product. The key features are S-Master MX digital amp, active noise cancelling, and Bluetooth with aptX codec within a tiny body. You can view it as an upgrade to the MW1 I reviewed, but it’s designed by SONY Walkman department instead of their mobile department. Sine it’s a Walkman in nature, it lacks the fancy notification that’s available in MW1, it doesn’t require SONY connect app. It does show phone number when Bluetooth is connected though, not caller ID, just phone number. It comes with a built-in 16GB internal memory, but doesn’t support microSD cards. Being equipped with S-Master MX digital amp with a bumped up 10mw+10mw stereo output, it’s a solid entry into the Walkman series. The small size does mean SONY has to compromise a bit here, particularly on the battery life. For pure MP3 playback, it can last as long as 15 hours with active noise cancelling off. But with all the fancy bells and whistles (wav playback, Bluetooth), it only lasts 9 hours max. It doesn’t support FLAC playback either. It has no high-RES playback either, all formats including wave, atrac, aac, wma, mp3 support upto 48Khz ONLY.

 

 

 

 

The sides: the design goes back to their classic E400/500/A600 series where changing songs require the twisting of the “shuttle switch” instead of physical button. Pull out the “shuttle switch” allows quick changing folders. Under FM, it manually searches for radio station. But instead of pushing in to lock the device, it gives a dedicated HOLD button. The volume rocker has a indentation for blind operation. Long twisting the shuttle switch also jump the song in 10sec interval, works both in music and bluetooth mode.

 

 

Long pressing the “HOME-Back” button will take you back to the top function, highlight “MUSIC” function. The device’s interface is nicely layed out with three basic functions: MUSIC, Bluetooth, FM, and lastly settings.

 

 

On the front is a SONY logo, underneath is the MIC, standard for Bluetooth communication. A tiny screen with upto three lines, and a call/play/pause button. The screen is very DIM, even with the highest setting, it’s pretty much invisible under direct sunlight.

 

 

On the back is the hole for clip mounting or neck strap, and NFC. The included clip is poorly made of cheap plastic, it has very weak clipping force, attaching it to the device just destroys the aesthetic. So I opted to use a neck strap. But this device only weighs 40g, it bumps everywhere when you start walking/run fast… The NFC is a gimmicky at best, it requires you to install easy connect app. But how hard is to connect Bluetooth manually…

 

 

Overall it’s a very nice looking device, other colors black, white, pink are available aside from the violet I chose here. I just wish it has a dedicated repeat/shuffle button. The mounting could really improve here, at least provide BOTH options for mounting AND neck strap at the same time. Maybe they are just trying to sell the soft case…

 

 

The audio quality is pretty good, both the mp3 mode and the Bluetooth mode. This is actually my first serious mp3 player. I use the mp3 mode for about 80% of the time now, and loaded the device with mostly 320K mp3 and wav files. The audio has very clean background. It has good dynamic range. It provides software enhancements such as clear bass and clear phase to further process the sound.

 

 

For the equalizer, it included a few, plus two customizable slots. The EQ includes clear bass plus five bands, total of six possible adjustments. For the clear phase, I believe you have to enable the noise cancelling function to use it.

 

 

Now onto the active noise cancelling function. The device includes MDR-NC31 noise cancelling earphone. It’s a short one with an extension cable. The biggest difference is the four pin, as seen on the above pictures. Left is the regular plug with two pins, middle is the one with remote control/MIC with three pins. but the NC31 has four pins. The same earphone is included with SONY’s Z2 smartphone for the same noise cancelling purpose.

 

 

The noise cancelling can filter noises from bus, airplane, and indoor. I’ve only used the bus setting, and it’s extremely effective in blocking the noises. I even missed a bus stop once… SONY claims the noise cancelling can filter out 98% of the background noise.

 

 

 

The device also supports other SONY noise cancelling earphone/headphones. If you select other headphone, you lose the noise cancelling function. And the sound stage is not as wide as the ones with noise cancelling for some reason. So I always default to the included earphone even if it has no noise cancelling ability…

 

 

The device uses the standard microUSB port for charging and transferring music. The charger is not included, only a microUSB cable is included. It is NOT possible to operate the device while charging. It takes about three hours for it to fully charge. If you connect it to a PC for transferring music, it starts charging automatically. The battery display on the device is extremely inaccurate. Four bars are shown. But the first bar took forever to drain. If your first bar is gone, it means that you have less than 50% of battery left!

 

 

I spent very little time with the FM. The S Master MX digital amp does NOT work in this mode. It has bands from 76Mhz to 108Mhz, so should be good for most of the world. You can auto search and store the radio stations.

 

 

Now onto the second part of the review, the Bluetooth performance and how to utilize the aptX codec. First thing is that there’s no annoying blue LED that’s found on every single Bluetooth device, I’m not sure how SONY got away with that, but I’m extremely happy with this!

 

 

The M505 is SONY’s first aptX enabled adapter. Although currently SONY has the SBH20, SBH52, MW1 pro, MW1 Lite, all made by the mobile department, none of these adapters are aptX capable. To enable the aptX codec, both your source (smartphone, tablet, PC) needs to have aptX support, and the receiver must the support as well. Unfortunately I don’t have a smartphone with aptX enabled. So I bought a USB Bluetooth 4.0 dongle and tested it on PC.

 

 

Left is the Samsung HS3000, and I’ve been using this adapter for the past two years. It works fine, but the sound quality isn’t that great. My normal usage scenario is that I would hook up these adapters to my car stereo, and play music, answer phones handsfree in the car. Even under the SBC transmission, M505 blows the HS3000 away. It has way more sound separation. The sound is much clear.

 

 

I paired the M505 with a couple devices, but the main device is my cellphone – sony Xperia ION. I’m using poweramp as the main player. I was able to sync the song title, artist to the M505 by change a setting in poweramp. The only thing it doesn’t sync is the timeline, but by long twisting the shuttle switch, you can still fastforward or back 10 sec interval.

 

 

To test it on PC, you would need a dongle that has CSR 8510 chip inside. CSR is the company that develops and licenses this aptX technology. I got a generic one just to try the aptX out. To be honest, there is very little incentive to use Bluetooth on PC since portability most of the time is no concern.

 

 

There are different Bluetooth software called stack you can install. Among them are Microsoft, Toshiba, Widcomm etc. Different stacks have different implementations on Bluetooth, support for profiles could also be vastly different. What you need for the CSR 8510 chip is the one straight from CSR. You can download it HERE.

 

 

 

This is what looks like after installing the CSR driver. I disabled my original Bluetooth 3.0 dongle with the Microsoft stack. Make sure you reboot PC after installing the driver!

 

 

 

 

To enable aptX, both the transmitter and the PC has to put into the “Priority on sound quality”. This increases the power for transmission, also shortens the transmission distance vastly. Under aptX mode, you are limited in a 5-10m range instead of the normal upto 30m range. Behind wall is also a big NO NO.

 

 

After successfully pairing the device, you’ll see a very brief prompt for confirming aptX connection is established. The prompt is so brief, less than one second, that I don’t think you will even notice… This is ALWAYS a confusing part that users don’t have idea whether they got the aptX connection or not. As for the actual audio quality, I don’t hear much difference between aptX and SBC… When I got a new smartphone with aptX support, maybe I’ll be more willing to do the test again. But right now, I’m not so impressed with it.

 

 

I think the SONY Gold wireless headset is a way better choice for wireless listening. The dongle paired with the headset offers very intuitive operation, the sound quality is decent, the headset is comfort for wearing for one hour or two. Most important is that the USB dongle is plug and play, you can forget about the Bluetooth driver nonsense.

 

 

  

 

The USB Bluetooth 4.0 dongle has the annoying blue LED. If you put the laptop into sleep mode, the LED by default will still shining, which means the dongle is consuming energy. To put the dongle into sleep mode as well, you can change the power management option from the device manager.

 

 

Above is a disassembled picture showing the internals of the M505.

 

So to summarize the review, here are some pros and cons of the device:

 

Pros:

1. Small size, portable, attractive design

2. Good audio quality on both local and Bluetooth playback

3. Noise cancelling very effective

4. aptX support (need a smartphone to fully test it)

5. MicroUSB for data and charging

6. Bluetooth connection is stable

 

Cons:

1. Small LED screen, poor outdoor visibility

2. Poor battery life (10hr on mixed use), inaccurate battery status

3. Not operational when charging, took 3 hours to fully recharge

4. Shuffle, repeat has no dedicated button, buries under the menu

5. Poorly made mounting clip, weak clipping force