I finally got very serious about getting new phones this week and today we have brand new Pixel 6 phones from Google and new phone service from T-Mobile.
I first spent a lot of time online comparing different phone service plans. I was very disappointed with Verizon which we have been using in one form or another for over 40 years but they would not give us any kind of discount to improve our phone service. In fact they just kept ripping us off and I recently discovered some new protection fee they had added on without clearly telling us which added another $30 a month to an already overpriced bill without unlimited coverage or service and only 3G. Well, we decided no Verizon anymore but ATT wasn't any better. No senior discounts either.
I spent hours online looking at different phones and comparing features and costs. I was shocked at how expensive phones were these days. Most of the good ones were at the very least $600 and many were significantly more. It also seemed that the ones with lots of data storage space and access to the fastest 5G service were the most expensive. Now we are certainly not power phone users but I did want some kind of upgrade of service and not just a new phone that we didn't have to constantly put on a charger. I wanted some unlimited data, access to a fast service and maybe some significant storage on the phone so I did have to constantly be deleting photos to make room for taking more of them because we liked taking pictures of our grandkids and other stuff too.
There certainly were lots of options out on the market but I didn't want to spend a lot of money on a couple of phones so I had a very short list of what were considered good phones for under $200 but they were all with a lot of limitations.
It turns out the only place I went to for looking at phones and plans was the T-Mobile store on Delaware at Kenmore. That was all it took. The folks there were very nice and informative but what really made my decision so much easier was the nonpromoted sale they had on the Google Pixel 6 phone which retails for $599 was on sale for new customers at $99. That was a game changer along with their special for seniors on their mid level service program Magenta 55+ which I had researched and was already interested in.
So we ended with T-Mobile and one of the reasons was a significant discount for seniors over 55. The staff was very helpful and when I was there yesterday I made an appointment to come to their store today at 2:15. Well, when I got there it was very crowded and it took nearly a half hour before I could begin the process of setting up an account and getting the new phones. They also had to send someone over to another store to pick up two of the Google Pixel 6 phones that were on sale because they no longer had any at their store. They were back with the new phones a half hour later and that time was spent setting up an account with T-Mobile and closing our account with Verizon which would actually take a couple of days to completely shut down. Yea!
It took more time to do the phone setups which included transferring all the data from the old phones to the new ones. I had to complete some of Becky's phone setup later at home because I didn't know her Google account password. I didn't get home from the phone store until a little after 4pm but happily we had our new phones.
Becky ordered a couple of phone cases on Amazon and also a couple of new chargers since these phones used the USB-C cables rather than the ones we had with our old phones. I'll also order an adaptor later. I was able to charge our phones with the cables that came with the phones connected to the laptop. They also worked with our wireless charger.
There is still a lot of tweaking to do and some getting used to the new phones but were happy so far with everything and we are paying a lot less money for our phone service now.
No comments:
Post a Comment