Author Topic: Mobile phone upgrade - 5G or not 5G!!  (Read 8515 times)

Audax

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Re: Mobile phone upgrade - 5G or not 5G!!
« Reply #30 on: 27 April 2021, 12:57:05 PM »
That's great information. Thank you for clearing things up. I have been using an ios device for years and didn't think of this. Been an android user before and switched to iphone because iPhones used to get updates more than other os.

Yeah pixel is one good brand as I've been looking up with that too.

I've been researching this again recently, partly due to us considering a new policy at work around device security. Based on this research I would now change my advice to be "only buy either a Google branded pixel device or an iphone". The reason I could no longer recommend an Android One phone or a Samsung is that some Android One phones integrate tools for "diagnostics" which can send your data to various contractors involved in the manufacture of the chipset or components of the phone, some of those companies will be in China. As such, it does provide a vector for your data to go to China. Similar story with Samsung, they have had diagnostic software send data to China in the past (they claimed it was an accident) and Samsung also sell user data gathered on the device to third parties.

Neither Google or Apple allow any third party to have a copy of user data so as far as I'm concerned they are the only option for future devices for me.

nathangardner

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Re: Mobile phone upgrade - 5G or not 5G!!
« Reply #31 on: 27 April 2021, 05:42:24 PM »
Quote
I've been researching this again recently, partly due to us considering a new policy at work around device security. Based on this research I would now change my advice to be "only buy either a Google branded pixel device or an iphone". The reason I could no longer recommend an Android One phone or a Samsung is that some Android One phones integrate tools for "diagnostics" which can send your data to various contractors involved in the manufacture of the chipset or components of the phone, some of those companies will be in China. As such, it does provide a vector for your data to go to China. Similar story with Samsung, they have had diagnostic software send data to China in the past (they claimed it was an accident) and Samsung also sell user data gathered on the device to third parties.

Neither Google or Apple allow any third party to have a copy of user data so as far as I'm concerned they are the only option for future devices for me.

Very well said. I agree with you on that point. Some android phones really gather any information you input and they send it to China. Huawei in particular right?

So you mean Google pixel phones are still safe?

Audax

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Re: Mobile phone upgrade - 5G or not 5G!!
« Reply #32 on: 27 April 2021, 07:20:21 PM »
Very well said. I agree with you on that point. Some android phones really gather any information you input and they send it to China. Huawei in particular right?

So you mean Google pixel phones are still safe?

Huawei and Xiaomi... having worked with developers in China and Asia in the past, I would simply just not trust anything from there.

As far as I know Google Pixel phones are OK as Google want to keep any of your data to themselves so they don't pass it on (although, they do let advertisers target you based on that data), same as the iPhone, honestly wouldn't touch anything else though if it's not Google or Apple.

TomPaine

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Re: Mobile phone upgrade - 5G or not 5G!!
« Reply #33 on: 28 April 2021, 12:24:40 PM »
Very informative posts, thanks Audax.

nathangardner

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Re: Mobile phone upgrade - 5G or not 5G!!
« Reply #34 on: 28 April 2021, 02:21:21 PM »

Quote
Huawei and Xiaomi... having worked with developers in China and Asia in the past, I would simply just not trust anything from there.

As far as I know Google Pixel phones are OK as Google want to keep any of your data to themselves so they don't pass it on (although, they do let advertisers target you based on that data), same as the iPhone, honestly wouldn't touch anything else though if it's not Google or Apple.

Thank you. I really appreciate every info you provided. Having someone to talk to with a lot of knowledge about it is more convincing than what you see on the web.

Steve McF

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Re: Mobile phone upgrade - 5G or not 5G!!
« Reply #35 on: 03 May 2021, 01:08:36 PM »
Well, I was looking at some phones available to me on the O2 website as an upgrade. I was then having a look at other websites and found the same phone, with the same data package, but a 24 month contract rather than 36 months, still with O2, for £10 a month cheaper on the Mobile Phones Direct website.

Has anyone used these people before, and would you trust/recommend them?

sgould

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Re: Mobile phone upgrade - 5G or not 5G!!
« Reply #36 on: 03 May 2021, 02:17:32 PM »
I reviewed my phone use a year or two ago.  I kept the phone and went for a SIM only contract. The best deal was with Tesco.  Not long after that I "needed" a better phone, and the most economic option was to buy the phone and continue the Tesco SIM only deal.  Tesco Mobile are very good and there are phone people in a lot of the big stores for you to speak to.

[edit]
Oooops!  Looking back, I said all this earlier in the thread...  ::) ::)
« Last Edit: 03 May 2021, 02:22:41 PM by sgould »
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Geoff1951

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Re: Mobile phone upgrade - 5G or not 5G!!
« Reply #37 on: 03 May 2021, 04:08:17 PM »
Hi Steve, MPD are a subsidiary of the online white goods retailer AO.com, so not likely todisappear overnight.  Looks like a similar setup to Carphone Warehouse, but online only.  Full contracts, SIM free, SIM only.  I see they don't offer any deals on EE, but that's irrelevant to you.  The virtual carriers they offer, Smarty and VOXI,  run on 3 and Vodafone respectively - you know the pros and cons of this setup, so I'm not going to dig that one up again.

Many of the poor Trustpilot reviews are the fault of their trade-in partner or people using a cash-back website first. Seems all their cusomer service people are called Lauren.  But their Trustpilot rating is much better than CPW, though I've used the latter half a dozen times and never had a problem.

Audax

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Re: Mobile phone upgrade - 5G or not 5G!!
« Reply #38 on: 03 May 2021, 08:58:04 PM »
I reviewed my phone use a year or two ago.  I kept the phone and went for a SIM only contract. The best deal was with Tesco.  Not long after that I "needed" a better phone, and the most economic option was to buy the phone and continue the Tesco SIM only deal. 

Depends where in the phones life cycle you buy, when I got our pixel 3 phones the total price of the contract over 2 years was as cheap as buying a brand new pixel 3, simply because the pixel 4 was about to be released and the retailers wanted to clear stock...

When I was looking at the iphone 12 on contracts recently they were astronomically expensive as I guess the networks want people who are desperate to upgrade but who can't afford to buy outright to lock themselves in for 2 years at a higher price. If I was going to get the iphone 12 I would buy outright and get my service elsewhere, but if you look at contract deals for the iphone 11 then there are some deals where it's cheaper to get the bundle.

If you want good deals on phones then https://mobiles.co.uk and https://affordablemobiles.co.uk are both good.

Audax

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Re: Mobile phone upgrade - 5G or not 5G!!
« Reply #39 on: 09 June 2021, 09:10:54 PM »
....and here's a new one on me! our phones are now out of contract, vodafone was £25/month and EE was £35/month and currently there are no phones we want so figured we'd go sim only on a 30 day contract for now.

After looking at options we decided we'd move to plus.net for a few months while we wait for new phones to be released as 12GB of data can be had on plus.net for just £8 a month! even better as plus.net advertise how they use EE as their network provider who have given me great signal over the past couple of years at home. Anyway, both numbers ported over to plus.net today and.... I now have terrible signal with the same phone that was perfect earlier today!

After a little bit of digging I have found out why, turns out that EE do not let the MVNO who piggy back on their network use the 800Mhz radio band which gives good reception indoors... Looks like we will have to move again already but I'm preparing for a bun fight with plus.net as they advertise that they use the EE network, I disagree, they only use a subset of the EE network and I think it would be reasonable to assume that you would not have signal problems if you moved from EE to plus.net based on their advertising.

Anyway, I'll raise this to the ombudsman and complain to ofcom and see what happens as a result but let that be a warning that with the cheaper providers who advertise which network they piggy back off may be misrepresenting the situation!
« Last Edit: 09 June 2021, 09:17:38 PM by Audax »

sgould

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Re: Mobile phone upgrade - 5G or not 5G!!
« Reply #40 on: 10 June 2021, 10:24:11 AM »
We had something similar when we swapped from Vodafone to Tesco.  Tesco piggyback on the O2 network.  Some services were limited. For instance, we couldn’t link a laptop to the internet  via the phone as we had done before, but the overall service was so much better than Vodafone that we stuck with it.  After a year or so, Tesco seem to get all the facilities. 
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Audax

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Re: Mobile phone upgrade - 5G or not 5G!!
« Reply #41 on: 18 June 2021, 09:22:33 PM »
Anyone looking for a good deal on a top end 5G Android phone, https://mobiles.co.uk currently have the Google Pixel 5 for £26/month with 30GB of data on Vodafone for a 2 year contract, there's also a slightly cheaper option over the term with 18GB of data. Such a good deal I bought one for myself!

Steve McF

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Re: Mobile phone upgrade - 5G or not 5G!!
« Reply #42 on: 19 June 2021, 12:40:57 PM »
Anyone used www.buymobiles.net before?

If so, any good?