On Friday, 2 June 2017 8:31:47 PM AEST Craig Sanders via luv-talk wrote:
Well, I know someone who was happily using a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 on Amaysim (the Optus network) when it suddenly stopped working. It seems that either my phone is on iinet (also an optus reseller). 3G still works fine, but i'm aware of the fact that one day it will vanish and i'll have to switch to 4G or newer.
There's lots of variables. Where you live is one thing. Which subset of 3G frequencies your phone supports is another. During the time that your current phone was new both Optus and Telstra (and their resellers) were selling phones that wouldn't work well on the other network. Now that GSM has gone away that causes some serious problems for some use cases.
at that time, almost any cheap current model unlocked android phone will do as a replacement (and iinet will send me a new 4G sim within a day or two). i really don't need a fancy high-end phone.
Sure.
not as a tablet replacement. i want something with a larger, higher resolution screen than my nexus 7.
The 2012 Nexus 7 has a 1280*800 display which is less than any phone you might desire nowadays. The Nexus 6P has a higher resolution than the 2013 Nexus 7. Not that this matters if you want a physically large screen.
I have considered getting a newer, bigger ~6" phone and just having one device but i really want a bigger screen for my ebook reader. and battery life will be longer with wifi disabled and no SIM.
True. Tablets tend to have much bigger batteries than phones.
The Kogan Agora 6+ looks pretty good at a decent price. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much activity on XDA or other android sites regarding alternative ROMs for them. And I have a horrible suspicion that ordering anything from Kogan will get me added to their spam lists (in fact, their T&C pretty much guarantee that - i have my own domain so i can create a kogan@taz address to use, but i'm not keen to buy from a company i'm certain to boycott as soon as they inevitably spam me).
I don't know what they are like in that regard as I WANT promotional email from them. The Agora series tend to have QC issues. A friend has a history of owning them and has got used to having a phone with a feature missing. If you return it then you tend to get a replacement that has something else broken. Keep doing it until the thing that's wrong is a thing you don't use. If you like using the Melways then you may end up happily using an Agora with broken GPS like my friend did... But who knows, maybe they started making quality phones under the same name. You didn't buy a cheap phone last time and you seem to have got value for money out of it. Buying something that's designed as a high end product is probably a good strategy for you.
In recent versions of Android you can disable them and have them not run. I think you can do it with Android 5 but there is a tendency for some Google apps to get enabled again - this isn't a problem in more recent versions.
in a rooted Android I could just delete the damn things.
I've just done a quick test of my Note 10.1, and Android 4.4.2 supports none of the features you want for restricting data usage. Fortunately it's still as fast as newer Android devices like my Nexus 6P (and noticably faster than newer devices like the S5 Mini) so this hasn't been a problem. I think you would be really happy with a Note 10.1 2014 edition. It also makes a nice ssh client as well as all the other features. https://www.koganmobile.com.au/medium-prepaid-plans/ Kogan has deals like the above so restricting data usage isn't such a problem nowadays. Kogan is on the Vodafone network which is the worst of the networks in Australia. But I have a phone I use for Ingress on it and it's working well. I keep a spare SIM active for when a client cancels "that phone line that no-one ever makes calls on". -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/