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ALIVE! Nokia 520 $19.99 Amazon

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Thebobo said:
29 dollars now. Looks like it would make a good MP3 Player. My Zen Photo is dying.
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My number one use for my 520 is MP3 player, and it works great for that. The offline GPS is terrific. I'm tempted to get another in case mine breaks or is lost. If it hits ~$20 again, I'm ordering, I figure. Cheap insurance.
 
thebestMAX said:
Straight (talk) poop

I bought both the Metro PCS 521 and the AT&T 635 deals. Put a Straight Talk AT&T sim in the 635 without unlocking and it is great. Fantastic phone for the price, great battery life, wish I had bought several. Not so lucky with the 521. Put a Straight Talk T-Mobile sim in it but it still wants an unlock code.

Thats ok since I bought the 521 for its off line features and wifi and its fine there. I also like the in hand feel and buttons of the 521 better but the 635 beats it in performance.

Im not a microsoft fan and hate windows 8 on my desktop but its great on a phone. Like that it syncs so well with my other systems. Not much of a learning curve and easier than Android or WebOS IMHO, not that they are that difficult.

Now if it just catches on and the Apps appear from Banks and the like.
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I have an app for my Chase bank stuff on my 520. I used it one time and it worked. I ordinarily do my online banking from one of my PCs.
 
midwestfisherman said:
It works fine as a phone still. You just have to adjust your expectations.
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Yes sorry. I should have said something like "As a phone, for talking to people with your mouth, it does a so-so job at best. For everything else it is a huge pile of trash on fire."

I like the live tiles, that's pretty cool, but otherwise every day is like a test of my will not to just go buy a real device. This is my daily driver phone while I wait out a trickle down from the wife and then move on to some flagship Android device.

I hate every minute of it. The painful gap in the apps that I'm missing from Android are only accentuated by how truly awful the apps are for Windows Phone. Slacker Radio, Sucks. Their own Exchange email client, trash. Gmail, almost unusable. The highest rated podcast app is $1.99 and it is not even worth 5 cents, absolutely horrid software that I'd be embarrassed to have my name or company associated with.

Can't separate notification volume from ringer volume and no notification LED.

Internet Explorer is a huge sigh... It crashes more than female Asian drivers.

Cool things:

It has really good battery life. I can usually get 2 days out of it, but mostly because it is useless to my daily activity due to lack of apps. Again, the Live Tiles are a thing of beauty that I think someone over at Google needs to look at "borrowing". If it is laying on its back you can actually spin the phone around on a flat surface. It gives you something to do. Most phones have a bump out or something that prevents you from just spinning it. It is a $30 phone so you don't have to care much about it. When I'm done I plan to throw it down the road to see if it still works until eventually it doesn't.

I rarely receive a voice call so as a phone, I really don't care about "phones". I really wish they had a better name, it really is a UMPC. 2 weeks ago we started a remodel project and ended up covering the phone up under some plastic on a table, I lost it for about 3-4 days. This thing is so useless to me that I didn't bother to even go looking for it until my boss said he tried to call me one evening. Heh, oops.

All in all, don't expect much of anything for $30. For a backup phone, sure. As a stand-alone GPS, "maybe"? As a media player, laughable. I'm not sure who actually puts up with MP3s anymore, if that's your "thing" then you might be able to come up with some way to use this.

Oh yeah.

Get used to the word "Resuming". It appears Windows Phone (or maybe just this phone) doesn't support real multi-tasking. So say you are in the Facebook app, halfway down your feed, you click a link that takes you out to IE. When you are done with IE and go "Back" to facebook, it goes to resuming, then back to the top of your news feed instead of where you were when you left. F'ing obnoxious.

Resuming...

Cortana I think is maybe the shining jewel of my Windows Phone experience. I was surprised that while in the car it would alert me of new text message and ask me if I wanted to read it. Of course the MIC sucks so bad in this phone that I basically have to yell "YES", but, Cortana managed to get my co-worker's name pronounced correctly. This is something that even our staff can't do. Who knew.

Where was I.

Resuming ...

So if you want to try out windows phone, you like intentionally torturing yourself, or maybe you need a gag gift for someone, go for it. It's only $30.
 
TwiceOver said:
All in all, don't expect much of anything for $30. For a backup phone, sure. As a stand-alone GPS, "maybe"? As a media player, laughable. I'm not sure who actually puts up with MP3s anymore, if that's your "thing" then you might be able to come up with some way to use this.
.
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What makes it so bad as a media player? I dont understand the who puts up with MP3s anymore statement? Are they difficult?
 
RossMAN said:
Mods - please update thread title to ALIVE! Nokia 520 $29.99 Amazon

Thanks.
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RossMAN, since you are the OP, you can make that change yourself. Go to the forum thread list and double click just to the right of your thread title and it lets you edit the title right there.
 
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Muse said:
RossMAN, since you are the OP, you can make that change yourself. Go to the forum thread list and double click just to the right of your thread title and it lets you edit the title right there.
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Thanks for the instructions, I already tried that but it's not working.
 
Thebobo said:
What makes it so bad as a media player? I dont understand the who puts up with MP3s anymore statement? Are they difficult?
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Most people I know have moved away from MP3s for a service like Spotify or Pandora. I ripped all my discs probably 10 years ago now and probably haven't touched the MP3s in 5 of those. Changing out playlists, picking what songs you want, etc. Such a hassle these days.

So far every media app I have used on this thing has had problems. Skipping songs can cause the device to reboot. Apps crash, waiting for resuming ... I tried it at the gym twice and eventually resorted to the fact that I just have to set it to what I'm listening to and not F with it after that.

For $30, it's worth a shot. But you should have the expectations of a $10 phone.
 
RossMAN said:
Thanks for the instructions, I already tried that but it's not working.
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(Almost) always works for me... try it again. 😕
- - - -
Just because an idea is held by the masses does not make it true. Indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, an idea that is widely held is more likely to be false than true. - Bertrand Russell
 
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TwiceOver said:
Most people I know have moved away from MP3s for a service like Spotify or Pandora. I ripped all my discs probably 10 years ago now and probably haven't touched the MP3s in 5 of those. Changing out playlists, picking what songs you want, etc. Such a hassle these days.

So far every media app I have used on this thing has had problems. Skipping songs can cause the device to reboot. Apps crash, waiting for resuming ... I tried it at the gym twice and eventually resorted to the fact that I just have to set it to what I'm listening to and not F with it after that.

For $30, it's worth a shot. But you should have the expectations of a $10 phone.
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I have hundreds of ~3 hour long MP3s and I listen to them mostly in the gym on my 520. Rarely a problem. The weight room in my gym is in a sort of basement and data and FM doesn't come in well, so I forgo data (often have it turned off), and don't usually mess with the FM, the signal not being great. So, I stick to the MP3's and am generally quite pleased. The FF/REW functionality for 3 hour MP3s is about as good as I could want. That for my Sansa M250's used to piss me off no end. It would crawl and then just zoom as the afterburners kicked in, just ridiculous. I do have problems with finding the MP3's I want a lot, but figure that's due to two factors: My not understanding the system that the phone is using and my not setting up the tags adequately on my MP3s.

I love my 520 for GPS, it's the reason I bought it. I'm not sour on it because I had no expectations, it's my first smartphone. To me, it's just the greatest technological device I've ever had! Maybe I simply don't know what I'm missing. What would you say is just 1000 times better? A Samsung android S4/5?
- - - -
Nothing is worth more than this day. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 
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In contrast to TwiceOver's opinion, I have a Lumia 635 (moderate upgrade from this phone I imagine) and I think its wonderful. Admittedly Windows phones have few apps compared to Android or Apple but that doesn't matter to me-all the essential work apps exist. The phone quality is amazing-think back to the old days when ATT owned all the phones before the breakup. The OS is rock solid, my phone has never locked up or even hiccuped since I put it in use in late November, 2014 (my old Android phone OTOH locked up several times a week). As others said, Here (GPS) and mp3 players are fine.

If you don't want or don't need a $600 status phone I'd take a good long look at this one.
 
Muse said:
(Almost) always works for me... try it again. 😕
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I believe title editing outside of FSFT is time limited.

Muse said:
... I'm not sour on it because I had no expectations, it's my first smartphone. To me, it's just the greatest technological device I've ever had! Maybe I simply don't know what I'm missing. What would you say is just 1000 times better? A Samsung android S4/5?
Click to expand...

That explains a lot. 1000 times better, you probably won't find anything as that is an unrealistic figure. But "Ridiculously" better? That's pretty easy to do if you are willing to spend even $100. But it really is how much bang you want for your buck. Admittedly, at $30 there's a lot of bang here.

Thump553 said:
In contrast to TwiceOver's opinion, I have a Lumia 635 (moderate upgrade from this phone I imagine) and I think its wonderful. Admittedly Windows phones have few apps compared to Android or Apple but that doesn't matter to me-all the essential work apps exist. The phone quality is amazing-think back to the old days when ATT owned all the phones before the breakup. The OS is rock solid, my phone has never locked up or even hiccuped since I put it in use in late November, 2014 (my old Android phone OTOH locked up several times a week). As others said, Here (GPS) and mp3 players are fine.

If you don't want or don't need a $600 status phone I'd take a good long look at this one.
Click to expand...

I wish I would have got the 635 when it was $40, sigh. Again, you don't have to go $600 for a "Status" phone. You can get a hell of a lot better phone even in the $100 area. $200 would get you a phone that would blow your mind if the 520 is all you've known. $600... Even I'm not *that* dumb.
 
I've been using mine for a couple of months now and have no complaints. It does everything I need it to do and saves me an ass load of money over Verizon. What's not to love?
 
I'm tempted to get it as an iPod replacement since my Classic won't last forever.

MS is being coy about which phones will fully support Windows (phone) 10, so this might or might not be stuck on 8.1.
 
Doomer said:
I've been using mine for a couple of months now and have no complaints. It does everything I need it to do and saves me an ass load of money over Verizon. What's not to love?
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In my case, the simple fact that it can't run Verizon. They are hands down the favorite service around here, best coverage, simple as that. My AT&T is spotty, relatively speaking. More than 1/2 the time I have no coverage at home. However, I seldom engage in extra-home telephone activity, so I live with it. T-Mobile is no better here, apparently.

Do a local survey among random smartphone users in my area and you'll come up with 80+% Verizon, and that's probably conservative. I have stopped asking.
 
TwiceOver said:
I believe title editing outside of FSFT is time limited.
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In what sense? You have a week to change it? I never noticed that.

TwiceOver said:
That explains a lot. 1000 times better, you probably won't find anything as that is an unrealistic figure. But "Ridiculously" better? That's pretty easy to do if you are willing to spend even $100. But it really is how much bang you want for your buck. Admittedly, at $30 there's a lot of bang here.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm just not knowing here. I used to see people with their face in their smartphones all the time and just wonder "WTH are they doing???" 😕 I still don't know what they're doing, but having a 520 for almost a year now I have a sense of how useful they can be. I do most of my computing on laptops or desktop, though. It's just hard for me to imagine that the internet on a smartphone can be anywhere near as useful as with a dedicated computer with a nice big screen and hardware keyboard.
TwiceOver said:
I wish I would have got the 635 when it was $40, sigh. Again, you don't have to go $600 for a "Status" phone. You can get a hell of a lot better phone even in the $100 area. $200 would get you a phone that would blow your mind if the 520 is all you've known. $600... Even I'm not *that* dumb.
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I saw the 635 selling for $60 a couple of days ago on Amazon and read a lot of reviews. Seems like a good upgrade except for the apparent fact that getting the back cover off is rather difficult. I have 3 batteries for my 520. If I'm about to leave the house and notice that my battery is depleted I can replace it with a fully charged one in 1/2 a minute. If I have the other battery in hand, in less than 10 seconds. I even have a couple of battery chargers for the 520 battery, but I don't use them often because for some weird reason when I let them "fully charge" the batteries the 520 malfunctions. Things do right themselves eventually, but it's a hassle to deal with. If I take the batteries out of the charger before the LED signals full charge, there isn't a problem. I complained to the seller (ebay) and they sent me another but it has the same problem.
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If you inquire what the people are like here, I must answer, "The same as everywhere!" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 
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