August 18, 2020
I finally received my new phone. My old phone worked fine, but it was limited to 16gigs and 2 megs of ram. It also didn't have an sd card slot. Needless to say, I also ran into a bit of a problem with the landlord because they wanted to use the cable line that I was using for the internet. Hence no more internet at home for me. This is what happens when you rent an apartment that isn't actually separate. In any case, this got me thinking about a new phone that could do hot spot and tethering. I also checked with my current cell phone provider (usmobile) to find out if I could do this with their service which they said no. Either way, I figured if I could get a phone that could do this for me, I could then connect my laptop or any computer to the internet, without having that cable at home. I also started looking for routers that work in the same way. I found some online, but until I get my hands on one, that will be another write up.
For now we"ll focus on this phone. Here's why I chose this phone...
1. It's under the $100 dollar phone mark. So it's on the more affordable side.
2. It has the specifications I am looking for. More memory, an sd card slot, newer android OS, and most importantly better connections for wifi and hot spot or tethering to a computer with the right provider. I don't have one yet, so that's still something I'll be looking for.
3. This phone is already about a year old, so it's not the newest, but it has what I need and it's a new company I thought I check out as I liked what I saw. Plus you would be hard press to get a similar spec phone here in the US for the same amount of money.
4. This is an unlocked phone too.
So without any more typing here are screenshots of what I bought.
Here's the second one I got.
Now you must be wondering why I posted these which actually look to be the same specs. They are, but my first phone actually came with android 10 installed. The second one came with android 9 which I thought was also 10. Unfortunately after updating things on the 2nd phone itself, there is no android 10. Both phones were purchased from the official aliexpress Ulefone stores. So this is something I have to look into as I want both my phones to be on the latest OS possible. Here is the kicker though, both have different chips so I'm not sure what happened if they updated them or if I can still update the one with android 9 to 10. There seems to be an update through the computer, but I have not look into that just yet as I just got the phones in the mail yesterday. I'm still trying to get used to the new OS as well which works a bit different than the older ones as expected. Android 9 and 10 are much better than the older android versions since your programs don't run a much without your letting them run.
Now, I ordered the first phone on May 25, 2020. The second one was ordered on May 28, 2020. Both of these phones just arrived yesterday, August 17, 2020. They literally took over 3 months to get to me. Obviously the pandemic and things being closed had a lot to do with this. Things have slowly been opening so lets hope that at least that keeps going. The political side of things also has not helped one bit everywhere either, so keep that in mind when ordering things from other countries.
Here's how you actually get this in the mail. A bag, some foam around the box and that's pretty much it.
The box is shrink wrapped sealed.
I didn't notice that this one was stamped with the android 9 on the box here.
You can just see what's in the box in the following pictures as I took this out.
It's nice that they already installed a glass covered on it and you get an extra. I like to keep these on my phones to keep the scratches off.
This is the one thing that really sucked. Although I got the global version of the phones, I wasn't expecting European plugs as I am in the United States, and my address also says that. This power adapter is useless to me. Both phones had this same plug unfortunately.
Here you can see the android 9 on the left and the android 10 on the right. Keep reading, it gets more interesting.
Here you can see the different chips under platform. Well I'll just let you take a look at the rest. Slight differences, but still different nonetheless.
This is all I got for now. I need to figure out whether I can just update the android 9 to 10 from their site, or not. Also, I was able to just put in my usmobile card into this phone and it worked. I just had to install their setup for sending text messages which the system automatically saw and sent me a message. So it was almost automatic this time around instead of manually putting in the information there. At least on the Android 10 it was. I did the same thing with the sim card from the metro pcs, even though it's the same t-mobile on the android 9, but it just would not work. My previous phone was already an unlocked phone, but the other person using this has a samsung older model phone. So I still have to figure that out.
Here's the page for downloading the updates.
Here are two more pictures of this stickers. EEA and Non-EEA. I'm not sure what these mean, but you can see the android 10 version is eea, and android 9 is non-eea. Now I have used an ulocked phone previously and when I put the chip in it, it worked right away, although I did get a message that the messaging and texting wasn't working so I had to install that. No more manually putting in the apn information.When I tried it with the metro-pcs sim, it picked up the network, but it would not work. Meaning the service would not work in the phone with android 9. The specs in terms of the bands are the same I believe. I know metro pcs uses the other network, but this phone still uses a sim card and I did notice it said T-mobile, just like the android 10 phone. I'm not sure if they now use the android 10 version of the chip or maybe they use both and will update both versions, eventually. We'll have to wait and see.
Update: October 1, 2020
I finally had a chance to test out the hot spot and although the signal sucks there, I was able to get my desktop online with it. So in short, the hot spot feature on this phone works as intended. So I'm happy because now I can at least get online and check email and routine stuff like that. I was even able to play some youtube videos. I will only be using it for regular things so it should work fine for that. I also noticed that there is a newer version with more memory and space of this same phone which is nice. So far I have also gotten an update on the android 9 version of this phone. If this company keeps up with the software updates. I think this hardware works really well and that software updates will make it a solid phone. They are on the heavier side, but it's the connection I needed and so far it's been fine. It's not perfect since the camera is slow to focus, but I can live with that for now.
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