Ironically just 5 days after writing about how I choose Android devices for a long service life [1] my wife’s Nexus 5 (with 32G of RAM (sorry Flash storage) to give it a long useful life) totally died. It reported itself as being fully charged and then 15 minutes later it was off and could not be revived. No combination of pushing the power button and connecting the power cable caused the screen to light up or any sound to be emitted.

Google has a nice interactive support site for nexus devices that describes more ways of turning a phone on than any reasonable person could imagine. After trying to turn the phone on in various ways (plugged and unplugged etc) it gave me a link to get phone support. Clicking on that put me in the queue to RECEIVE a phone call and a minute later a lady who spoke English really well (which is unusual for telephone support) called me to talk me through the various options.

Receiving a phone call is a much better experience than making a call. It meant that if the queue for phone support was long then I could do other things until the phone rings. It’s impossible to be productive at other tasks while listening for hold music to stop and a person to start talking. The cost of doing this would be very tiny, while there would be some cost in hardware and software to have a web site that tells me how long I can expect to wait for a call a more basic implementation where I just submit my number and wait for a call would be very cheap to implement. The costs of calls from the US to Australia (and most places where people can afford a high end Android phone) are quite cheap for home users and are probably cheaper if you run a call center. If the average support call cost Google $1 and 3% of phones have support calls then that would be an extra cost of $0.03 per phone. I expect that almost everyone who buys a $450 phone would be happy to pay a lot more than $0.03 to avoid the possibility of listening to hold music!

I received the phone call about a minute after requesting it, this was nice but I wonder how long I would have waited if I hadn’t requested a call at 1AM Australian time (presumably during the day in a US call center). In any case getting a 1 minute response is great for any time of the day or night, lots of call centers can’t do that.

While the phone support is much better than most phone support, it would be nice if they added some extra options. I think it would be good to have webchat and SMS as options for support for the benefit of people who don’t want to speak to strangers. This would be useful to a lot of people on the Autism Spectrum and probably others too.

The phone call wasn’t particularly productive, it merely confirmed that I had followed all the steps on the support website. Then I received an email telling me about the web site which was a waste of time as I’d covered that in the phone call.

I have just replied to their second email which asked for the IMEI of the phone to start the warranty return process. We could have saved more than 24 hours delay if this had been requested in the first email or the phone call. Google could have even requested the IMEI through the web site before starting the phone call. It would have been even easier if Google had included the device IMEI in the email they sent me to confirm the purchase as searching for old email is a lot easier than searching through my house for an old box. Another option for Google would be to just ask me for the Gmail account used for the purchase, as I only bought one Nexus 5 on that account they then have all the purchase details needed for a warranty claim.

While the first call was a great experience the email support following that has been a waste of time. I’m now wondering if they aim to delay the warranty process for a few days in the hope that the phone will just start working again.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/06/04/android-device-service-life/

In recent years Android devices have been the most expensive things I’ve purchased apart from airline tickets and other travel/holiday expenses. As they are expensive I’d like to use them for as long as possible to get the most value for money. Also as I give my devices to relatives when they no longer work for me I’d like to avoid having relatives hassling me about their phone not working as desired. So I’ve been thinking about the features that I need to make it possible to use a phone or tablet for a long time.

RAM

The way Android works is that when an application in the foreground requests more memory background applications may be closed to free some memory. Android doesn’t use swap by default, there is some documentation on how to enable it (and it’s not difficult to figure out for anyone who has used Linux before) but generally it’s not done.

If you run a larger application the chances of apps closing in the background (causing delays when you switch back to them and possibly a loss of context if the app is buggy and doesn’t preserve all state) are increased. As a general trend apps tend to get bigger to provide more features and also because users who own newer bigger devices don’t complain as much about memory use.

Also to make things worse new versions of Android tend to use more RAM. So a phone that runs well can suddenly start performing badly when you upgrade to a new version of Android (which incidentally usually can’t be reversed) and upgrade to new versions of apps (which can’t be reversed through the Google Play Store).

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 was a very nice phone when it was released, it ran Android 2.1 very quickly. When I upgraded the Xperia X10s that my wife and I used to Android 2.3 (which was necessary to have the phone run as a Wifi access point) performance dropped considerably. The Android upgrade combined with newer larger apps means that those phones are barely usable now. 384M of RAM was plenty in early 2011 when I first used the Xperia X10 but it’s not nearly enough now.

Recently 2G of RAM has been the minimum for a mid-range or high-end phone. It seems difficult to imagine a new Android feature as compelling as the addition of Wifi access point support in Android 2.3 that would drive an upgrade to a future memory hogging version of the OS. It also seems difficult to imagine Android apps needing enough memory to destroy the performance of a phone with 2G of RAM. But then I couldn’t imagine the 384M in an Xperia X10 becoming inadequate or the 512M in a Samsung Galaxy S becoming barely usable either.

Storage

Until fairly recently storage in an Android device was divided into USB attached storage (a VFAT filesystem that could be directly mounted on a PC) and a Linux filesystem that was used for all internal operations of the phone. On such devices it typically wasn’t possible to change partition sizes without a lot more skill than most users possess and most of the storage space was reserved for USB attachment. If you only had a few Android apps and lots of photos, movies, etc then this worked well. But if you wanted to install larger Android apps then you would have big problems. Even with Android 4.x devices (which all seem to have a single filesystem) you can easily run out of space.

Modern games often take several hundred megs of storage. Games that take 500M+ for the Android package install (which also requires the same amount of temporary space for installation and upgrade) are common. Sometimes games download data files after they have been installed for a total size approaching 2G (such as The Sims Freeplay).

When I bought a Nexus 4 for my wife I got the version with 8G of storage because paying an extra $50 for the 16G version seemed unreasonable. 8G was fine for my wife, but when she got a new phone I gave the Nexus 4 to a relative who wanted to play The Sims and other big games. That relative isn’t so happy about having a limited number of games on their phone and I have to fix it when storage space runs out and things start aborting (when storage runs out the Google App Store program aborts and uses lots of space for temporary files).

I recently bought a tablet with 32G of storage and filled 16G on the first day (tablets are good for watching
TV and TV shows are big). Fortunately the tablet in question has a SD socket so that when space becomes a problem in a year or two I can buy an SD card and keep using it.

An unfortunate recent decision by Google was to prevent apps from being run from a SD card. So even if you have a device with a SD socket you still need to have enough internal storage for all apps and their private data. At 500M+ for a modern game that means a device with 8G of storage (which includes space for the OS) will be lucky to get 8 games installed.

If you want to use a phone to it’s full capacity (playing various media files, games, etc) then it seems that the minimum storage capacity would be 8G of internal storage and a SD socket. For a device without an SD socket (such as the Nexus 5 with 16G or 32G of storage) your future use will be limited. 32G is probably enough for a phone given that you can recode movies to use less space (the FullHD screen on the Nexus 5 is nice but 720p movies will probably look good enough). But the larger screens of tablets demand better video quality so the Nexus tablets are probably a bad choice due to lack of storage space.

Screen Size and Resolution

I have previously written about the sizes of devices and how they may be used by people of various ages [1]. That should be of use for anyone who plans to use their old phone as an educational device for their children (which appears to be very common). But apart from that I can’t think of any reason why size would suddenly make an old phone obsolete. Only young children will have their hands change size in any significant way.

Resolution also shouldn’t be a huge problem, the 480*854 screen on the Xperia X10 is fairly good for a 4″ screen. While a higher resolution makes text more readable at a small size for most users the availability of a higher resolution screen isn’t going to make their old phone obsolete.

CPU

The only Android devices I owned that appeared to develop CPU speed issues late in life were the Xperia X10 phones, and that might be more due to RAM limits and the OS upgrade. All the other devices were either obviously slow at purchase time or are still performing well now.

CPU speed may make it difficult or impossible to play new games, but shouldn’t affect other uses of a phone or tablet.

Conclusion

It seems to me that if you want to use an Android device for more than 2 years then storage capacity should be a major factor in choosing which device to purchase. It seems that lack of storage space is in many cases the main factor that makes older devices annoying or impossible to use.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/02/11/phone-tablet-sizes/

Ingress is an Android phone game developed by Google where you have to go to various places to capture “portals” which are based on landmarks or places of note. There’s a sci-fi back story which I haven’t cared much about (my local library has a heap of good sci-fi books I don’t have time to read). But if you are interested in low quality sci-fi you can start with the Youtube channel for Ingress [1]. But the best thing to do is to download the Ingress client program from the Google play store if you have an Android phone [2].

Periodically they have special events in the game called “Anomalies”, which usually involve many people competing to capture a small number of special portals. Usually a portal is fairly easy to capture so a high level player can easily capture a portal in at most a few minutes, but when there is a large group of players defending a portal by replacing the “resonators” as quickly as they are destroyed it becomes more challenging. I’m not going to try to explain this properly as I presume that readers either already know or don’t care. The Wikipedia page about Ingress has more information.

On Saturday there was an Anomaly where the main city was Melbourne. My team (Enlightened) won the event in Australia but apparently the event in the US at the same time was won by the other team (Resistance).

I had hoped that our event would be similar to some of the ones I’ve seen on the “Ingress Report” (a fictional news service on youtube) in which actors from the sci-fi videos about Ingress attended. But unfortunately it seems that the actors stay in the US.

Every player who was registered for the anomaly received a gift pack that contained three cards and a badge. The picture above shows the cards that my wife and I received along with one of our badges. The badges are green for Enlightened and blue for Resistance (the in-game colors) and have three flashing LEDs – the photo has one of the LEDs lit up. The three cards have “passcodes” which can be redeemed for in-game items, the XMP, Power Cubes, and Resonators weren’t that useful (10 not particularly rare items that I could get through 10 minutes of game playing). The “Medal” cards are for in-game badges showing the anomalies that we have played at, but they are “bronze” badges which again aren’t much use as nothing less than silver will help in leveling up.

Overall it was a good experience, we won, had a good after-party (with free snacks and one free drink per person), and the badges are nice. I recommend attending if there’s an event in your area, and note that you don’t need to be a high level player to attend, even L6 players were able to contribute.

• [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/ingress
• [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nianticproject.ingress

Aldi Mobile has made a significant change to their offerings. They previously had an offer of $35 for “unlimited” calls and 2.5G of data in a month for which they had to publicly apologise for misleading customers as 2500 minutes of calls a month (83 minutes per day) is no-where near unlimited [1]. They also had an offer of $15 for 2G of data.

In an email about this Aldi said “Many of our customers are using a lot less than what is included in our current $35 plan. So we will soon be introducing new Value Packs with more flexible options; meaning you only pay for what you really need and they start from just $10.“. That is grossly misleading, if they offered new plans in addition to the old ones and allowed customers to choose the plan that is the best match then it would be useful to some customers. But removing the supposedly “unlimited” plan and the $15 for 2G of data option is removing affordable options for people who want to use their phones for lots of calls or very few calls but moderate amounts of data use.

New Plans

The base rate for calls on Aldi pre-paid is $0.12 per minute and $0.12 per SMS, consider every mention of “minute” in this section to be “minute or SMS”. The Aldi Newplans page [2] starts with a $10 per month plan which offers 100 minutes of calls which would be $12 at the previous rate of $0.12 per minute. That is OK value when compared to just using the pre-paid calls if you consistently use more than 83 minutes of calls per month. However if you don’t use 84 minutes of calls (EG you don’t speak much on the phone and use Google Hangouts instead of SMS) then it’s not good value. Also the advertised data use is $5 per 100MB, which is way below what is needed for a typical user with an Android phone. My mother in law was barely able to stick within a limit of 300MB/month when that was her limit, but while using the Aldo 2G/month bolt-on she’s increased her data usage.

The smallest of the new plans costs $20 per month, it provides 300 minutes of calls and includes 300MB of data. For an extra $7 you can get another 300MB of data. For my mother in law it seems that the cheapest option on the new plans would be $27 per month, that would cover the 60 minutes of calls she might make and the 450MB of data she’s probably using. That’s significantly more expensive than her previous cost of $15 for 2G of data and $7.20 for calls and has the additional difficulty that I would have to be more involved in helping her avoid excessive data use.

The 2G data bolt-on was really good for some of my relatives, when they use that and configure their phones not to update software over 3G they never had to ask me about any problems related to excess data use. So my mother in law is facing an extra $5 per month (or maybe more depending on data use) and more time spent calling me for tech support.

The data bolt on that Aldi is going to offer in future is $30 for 3G of data to replace the previous offer of $15 for 2G of data. The cost will be unchanged for anyone who uses between 2G and 3G a month, for everyone who uses less than 2G or more than 3G the data bolt-on will cost more. There is simply no possibility for any Aldi data-only customer to save on data use. The only way someone who uses a moderate amount of data could save money is if they use more than 160 minutes of calls and less than 1G of data.

Disclaimer

My analysis above is based on interpreting the Aldi web site. As with most telcos they aren’t trying to make things easy in this regard, it seems that the consensus of opinion among telcos is to use complex pricing to make it difficult to compare and reduce competitive pressure. I blame any inaccuracies in my analysis on the Aldi web site.

Why Aldi Shouldn’t Mislead Customers

Aldi isn’t primarily a mobile phone company, their main business is running a supermarket. The trust of customers is important to them, raising prices when competition goes away is one thing, but misleading customers about it is another. If Aldi were to honestly say “now that Kogan Mobile no longer exists there is nothing forcing us to have low prices” then I’d have a lot more respect for their company and be more inclined to shop at their supermarket.

It’s a sad indictment of our society that I need to include a “why lying is wrong” section in such a blog post.

• [1] https://www.aldimobile.com.au/corrective-notice
• [2] https://www.aldimobile.com.au/newplans

I’ve been using Aldi as my mobile phone provider for two months now since Kogan was shut down [1]. Now Aldi have cut the transfer quota on their “Unlimited” plan from 5G per month to 2.5G per month. The most charitable interpretation of this would be that Aldi got a lot of former Kogan customers who needed the 6G per month that Kogan offered and that forced them to make changes to remain profitable. But the most likely possibility is that with less competition Aldi can just offer less for the same price.

This isn’t a huge problem for me, in two months on Aldi my biggest month involved almost exactly 2.5G of data transfer. But it’s annoying to lose something and it’s enough to make me consider other options. Also some of my relatives are looking for new plans so now is a good time to research the options.

Other Pre-paid Options

Lebara offers “Unlimited” plans that start at $30 per month and offer 1.5G of data [2], this compares well to the “Unlimited” plan of $35 per month from Aldi which has 2.5G of data (depending on whether 1.5G is enough).

Amaysim has an “Unlimited” plan that includes 4G of data for $40 per month [3]. If you make lots of phone calls and transfer more than 2.5G of data per month then that would be a really good deal.

Lebara uses the Vodafone network and Amaysim uses Optus. Neither of them compare to the Telstra 3G network if you want access outside major urban areas. I had Virgin (Optus network) work well for me for years and Three (their own network now part of Vodafone) work well for many years before that. But data transfer is becoming more important to me and the Telstra network is a major feature of Aldi.

Lebara has one of the wost web sites I’ve ever seen and Amaysim isn’t much better. Aldi is great, they just provide all the key data in one page. Aldi and Amaysim have Android apps that can be used for recharging and viewing the balance, Aldi’s app works well but I haven’t been able to test the Amaysim app. Lebara doesn’t even have an app.

Generally Lebara doesn’t seem to have anything going for it unless you want to make lots of calls to other Lebara customers, you want to make calls to certain other countries where Lebara has very low international rates, or unless you need a plan with “unlimited” calls but don’t need more than 1.5G of data.

The following table summarises the costs of the three pre-paid telcos.

Post-paid Options

Virgin’s cheapest offer is $20 per month for $200 of calls (at $0.98/min + $0.40 flagfall) and 200M of data [4], they currently have a special offer of an extra 1G if you sign up before the 18th of November. Virgin have a long history of periodically offering special deals so if you want to sign up with them some time in the next few months it’s best to poll their web site and wait for a deal.

The TeleChoice Global Liberty plan is a slightly better deal of $20 per month for $500 of calls (at $0.97/min + $0.40 flagfall) and 1G of data which also has free SMS [5].

TeleChoice Global Rebel Texter is a plan for $15 per month that includes $200 of calls and 200M of data and free SMS [6]. They also have a $10 per month plan which charges $0.22 per SMS, which would be bad value for anyone who sends 1 SMS per day.

At Aldi rates if you spend $15 per month on 2G of data and $5 on calls then you will get 41 * one minute calls as opposed to $200/($0.98+$0.40)==145 * one minute calls with the cheapest Virgin plan. It seems to me that there is little possibility for those two $20 post-paid plans (which seem to be two of the best value plans currently available) to compete well with the pre-paid options from Aldi and Lebara. Even if you have the same usage pattern every month there are only particular patterns which make the Virgin or TeleChoice deals most appealing options, for example if you need to make more than 40 minutes of calls but less than 145 minutes of calls then Virgin will look good. TeleChoice Global Liberty looks good if you make between 40 and $500/($0.97+$0.40)==365 * one minute calls.

If you only need a small amount of data transfer (less than 200M billed in 10K increments) then the TeleChoice Rebel Texter plan would look good as the Aldi 1M increments matter for small amounts of data transfer. But I don’t think that many people are in that situation, even my mother in law can’t easily stick within 200M of data transfer.

Measuring Phone Use

The first program I used for measuring phone calls is the Call & SMS Stats app from the Android Market [7]. I wouldn’t recommend this to technical users as it demands a lot of access to the phone (including reading SMS, accessing the phone storage, and sending data to the Internet), but it’s good for less technical users. For my use I prefer Call Meter 3G from the F-Droid repository [8]. I trust the Call Meter 3G program more because it’s source is available under the GPL and it also has the convenient feature of adding up the costs of the calls, SMS, and data used.

According to Call Meter 3G I’m using less than $20 of calls and SMS per month, so if I continue my current use with a 2G data pack every month from Aldi instead of buying a $35 “Unlimited” pack and don’t use more than 2G of data then I’ll save at least a few dollars every month. My wife makes fewer calls so I’ve already moved her phone away from the “Unlimited” plan and I’ll move my phone later if it looks like it will save money – she will now use my phone for making calls when we are together so the “Unlimited” plan may become good value when we share it.

The Case for Aldi

Aldi offers competitive options for phones for most levels of usage. While there are some post-paid plans which are better in some areas such as the ones from TeleChoice Aldi has the benefit of flexibility. A phone with Aldi can have it’s plan scaled up or down easily with no penalty fees.

For a phone to be usable for an entire year the cheapest option at the moment is Aldi which has a $15 recharge that lasts for a year. The next best option seems to be Amaysim with a $5 recharge that lasts for 90 days.

Saving Money

In the past I’ve been used to SMS being significantly cheaper than phone calls. When I was on Virgin and calls just over $1 per minute ($0.98 per minute plus the flag-fall) and SMS were $0.28 which made a simple question and answer cheaper by SMS than calling. But with Aldi charging the same for a 1 minute call and sending an SMS a simple question and answer will cost half as much if it’s done with a call so SMS isn’t a good deal. Also I’ve started using Google Hangouts to communicate with my wife instead of SMS as extra use of Hangouts is essentially free (we both have it running all the time for Ingress related communication anyway). The financial incentive now is to use Google Hangouts to replace some calls.

One down-side to saving money in such ways is that it restricts usage of the phone. While moving from SMS to Google Hangouts (or any other instant-messaging system) isn’t any great cost having to reduce the number of calls does. The ability to talk for as long as you want without bothering about cost is something that’s worth paying for.

I Hate Telcos

For most things that I spend money on I wouldn’t invest much effort to try and save $10 or $15 per month. Even when doing research that will help my friends and relatives and random people on the Internet I probably wouldn’t take so much time for a small saving. But the Telcos seems to avoid competing as much as possible which is obvious from the way that they increase prices and decrease services at the same time. Also most Telcos seem to have a business model that is based around exploiting customers, they have confusing terms in the contracts that make it very likely for customers to go over the included usage and hit penalty rates and charge unreasonable prices for the phones that are bundled with a telephony contract. I want to reduce the amount of money I pay to Telcos as a matter of principle.

Aldi is better than most Telcos, they have clear terms that are explained on a single web page [9], and they have an Android app to show the remaining credit that can reduce the risk of excessive fees if a 2G data block is used. Aldi sells phones in their stores at low prices, the phones that they sell aren’t the highest quality but the customer gets what they pay for and the warranty return policy is good. But we still need to find the best options so that market forces will encourage Telcos to make more reasonable offers.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/08/21/end-kogan-mobile/
• [2] http://www.lebara.com.au/
• [3] http://www.amaysim.com.au/
• [4] http://www.virginmobile.com.au/sim-card
• [5] http://tinyurl.com/ny72p46
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/nywb5cg
• [7] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wangsong.costwatcher
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/pjmv7df
• [9] https://www.aldimobile.com.au/plans

Kogan Mobile has just announced that Telstra succeeded in it’s attempt to break it’s contract with ISPone and thus end the Kogan Mobile business [1]. Over the last few years there has been a trend for all Australian telcos to increase mobile phone costs. There are some pre-paid companies that offer reasonable deals for people who don’t make many calls, but for people who make any significant amount of calls or use any significant amount of data transfer the prices have mostly been going up.

The big exceptions to the trend of increased prices were Kogan Mobile and Aldi who offered “unlimited” contracts at affordable rates. Kogan’s deal was initially $299 per annum (it was later increased a bit) for “unlimited” calls and SMS and 6G of data transfer per month (but not more than 1G in one day and not more than 3 days of more than 400M in a month). 6G per month is much more than most people could use in a month and 400M is enough data transfer that most people won’t be at risk of doing that 3 times in a month. While Kogan did impose some limits on calls and SMS they weren’t going to affect most people. So when I switched to Kogan I removed the apps that tracked bandwidth use and talked for as long as I wanted without bothering about cost. I don’t think I used much more data transfer or spoke for much longer, but it was good not to bother about such things.

Now it seems that Aldi Mobile [2] is the best remaining option for affordable mobile access in Australia for anyone who wants more than the basic use. Aldi’s option is $35 for 30 days of “unlimited” phone calls and SMS within Australia with 5G of data transfer, $420 for 360 days of “unlimited” calls and 5G of data per almost-month isn’t as good as $299 per 365/366 days and 6G of data per month. Only having 5G of data per almost-month isn’t a problem for me, but the significant increase in price is.

A big problem with Aldi is the limitations on “acceptable use” which aren’t as clear as for Kogan, Aldi gives “downloading gigabytes of data in a short period” as an example of unacceptable use, this isn’t nearly as good as Kogan’s daily limits of 3*400M or 1*1G in a month which can be tracked by software to avoid accidental breaches.

But I’ll use Aldi in spite of this risk. All the other telcos charge too much for plans which involve 2G of data per month. The 1.5G quota I had before Kogan was a real problem for me, I need a quota of at least 2G with no serious penalties for accidentally exceeding it or a quota that’s at least 3G.

Australia needs proper competition in the mobile phone market or significant government action. Forcing the current telcos to stop colluding would be one good option for the government but another option would be to create a government owned telco with a mandate to serve the public – much like Telstra was before John Howard sold it off.

• [1] http://www.kogan.com/au/km/
• [2] https://www.aldimobile.com.au/

I’ve been part of many conference calls for work and found them seriously lacking. Firstly there’s a lack of control over the call, so when someone does something stupid like putting an unmuted phone handset near a noise source there’s no way to discover who did it and disconnect them.

Another problem is that of noise on the line when some people don’t mute their phones, which is related to the lack of control as it’s impossible to determine who isn’t muting their phone.

Possibly the biggest problem is how to determine who gets to speak next. When group discussions take place in person non-verbal methods are used to determine who gets to speak next. With a regular phone call (two people) something like the CSMACD algorithm for network packets works well. But when there are 8+ people involved it becomes time consuming to resolve issues of who speaks next even when there are no debates. This is more difficult for multinational calls which can have a signal round trip time of 700ms or more.

I think that we need a VOIP based conference call system for smart phones to manage this. I think that an ideal system would be based on the push to talk concept with software control that only allows one phone to transmit at a time. If someone else is speaking and you want to say something then you would push a button to indicate your desire but your microphone wouldn’t go live while the other person was speaking. The person speaking would be notified of your request and one of the following things would happen:

• You are added to the queue of people wishing to speak. When the other person finished speaking the next person in the queue gets a turn.
• You are added to the queue and the moderator of the call chooses who gets to speak next. This isn’t what I’d prefer but would probably be desired by managers for corporate calls.
• You get to interrupt the person who’s speaking. This may not be ideal but is similar to what currently happens.

Did I miss any obvious ways for the system to react to a talk request?

Is there any free software to do something like this? A quick search of the Google Play store didn’t find anything that seems to match.

Kogan Mobile is the newest virtual telco in Australia [1]. They resell Telstra 3G (not NextG or LTE) and while their coverage isn’t as good as the full Telstra service it’s more than adequate for my needs as they provide 3G coverage to 97% of the population and 2G+3G coverage to 98.5%. Their coverage is probably a lot better than Three who had the worst record of network coverage in Australia yet managed to always provide coverage where I wanted it – I was a happy Three customer for more than 6 years.

Kogan’s main selling point is that they offer unlimited calls to Australian mobile phones and land-lines and unlimited SMS for a pre-paid fee of only $300 per annum ($25 per month on average). My parents have been getting unpleasantly large phone bills which have considerably more than $25 of calls to mobile phones every month so an obvious solution for them is to sign up for a Kogan mobile phone and use it for all such calls. There are other ways my parents could save money on calls (such as VOIP) but a mobile phone is easiest and offers other benefits such as running Android apps (when compared to using a non-smart phone).

6G of Data!

Kogan also offers 6G of data per month, the down-side to this is that they bill in 1MB increments per “session”. I was worried that this might be per TCP connection or something else silly but I decided to sign my parents up for it as they aren’t going to use a lot of data (they claim that they don’t want to use the Internet on their phone but I know better). I’ve done some tests on the SIM I got for my parents. For testing purposes I installed the Kogan SIM in my wife’s new Nexus 4 and had it provide Wifi net access to my phone while we were playing Ingress.

So far after 2 days which involved a reasonable amount of Ingress (I reached level 7) as well as all the usual stuff that happens in the background for two phones (checking email, news, weather, etc) Kogan considers that 177MB have been used out of the 6144MB for the month, which means that even with what is an unusual amount of traffic for us the account in question still isn’t going to use half the quota for the month. Now that 10 days have elapsed with less intense usage Kogan considers that a total of 1373MB have been used.

Kogan also don’t seem to mention whether they bill for transmitted data. I used the 3G Watchdog app to measure the amount data transferred, the above table has the amounts of data that 3G Watchdog considers were sent and received along with the amount that is listed by the Kogan Android app. My past experience with 3G Watchdog and Virgin Mobile is that it’s usually quite accurate but has been over-reporting the data transfers recently (I think that Virgin is only billing me for downloads while 3G Watchdog counts uploads). So the relatively small difference between the 3G Watchdog report and what Kogan thinks I’ve done means that either rounding the “session” up to the nearest meg doesn’t make any significant difference (which would imply that a “session” can be a long time) or that Kogan isn’t counting uploaded data and the session rounding up only adds about 40% to the total recorded transfer.

My current plan with Virgin Mobile gives me 1.5G per month of quota, so as long as Kogan’s rounding doesn’t increase the recorded data transfer by a factor of 4 I will still be able to transfer more data with Kogan while paying less. One disadvantage of using Kogan is that I might have to tweak programs like my email program to poll less frequently to avoid excessive session charges (a program polling every 5 minutes would use up the 6G quota in 21 days if each poll counted as a session) – although current tests indicate that this won’t be necessary. But the up-side is that there are no extra fees with Kogan, they merely restrict data access – for my use and that of most people I know it’s better to have data access cut off than to receive a large bill.

The Kogan Android App

Kogan has an Android app that will give the status of your account and allow you to change the plan etc. This is quite nice but one major disadvantage is that it’s also a sales app for the Kogan online store. This is bad for the user as some aspects of what I consider the core functionality are limited (for example there’s no way to force a poll of the data usage count or determine how current the data is). But there’s an obvious advantage to Kogan in providing a way to sell their goods that is going to be used by every customer of Kogan Mobile.

The sales part of the app isn’t very functional IMHO, it doesn’t seem to have basic functionality such as sorting a list of items by price.

Benefits of Kogan

6G of data is a lot!

$300 per annum is quite cheap, anyone who makes any serious use of phones will be paying more than that in Australia.

Lack of extra fees means that there is little need to restrict net access. I can risk getting cut off near the end of the month but I can’t risk the potential for hundreds of dollars in excess fees.

The Kogan app shows me the data used so I will probably uninstall 3G Watchdog, having one less program running is a good thing.

You get a free SIM (value $5) when you buy a phone from Kogan.

Disadvantages of Kogan

They are new to the Telco business and admit that their customer service is lacking due to unexpected demand.

If you order a SIM now they state that it will arrive in April. Apparently they are deliberately delaying orders because they can’t cope with demand.

The included call quota doesn’t include international calls. While unlimited free calls in Australia is great if you make many international calls then this could end up costing you more. Other mobile telcos such as Lebara offer good deals for International calls, it could be an option to use a Lebara SIM with an old non-smart phone while using Kogan for your smart phone.

I am concerned about the lack of detail about how data is accounted. If the definition of a “session” changes then 6G could turn out not to be enough. As Kogan is reselling a Telstra service it is possible that Telstra could change the deal without Kogan being able to stop them.

Conclusion

I will move my phone and my wife’s phone to Kogan ASAP. My general idea is to sign us up for Kogan about 2 weeks apart, so if one phone runs out of the 6G data quota then the other phone can be used as a Wifi access point for 2 weeks. If the phones don’t both have their quota end at the same time then there is less chance of both phones running out during a high traffic month.

• [1] https://www.koganmobile.com.au/