Verizon RAZR V3m versus TracFone LG 420G

I recently transferred my main mobile number from Verizon Wireless to Google Voice and purchased a TracFone to have everything forwarded to. The total cost of this was $20 for the port, $20 for the phone w/ lifetime double minutes, $40 for 400 minutes (e.g. doubled), and finally $61 for the last month of Verizon service which does not get discounted and officially disconnects when you pay your last bill. I'd like to talk about the pleasing and disappointing aspects of the phone, but let me begin by explaining the services themselves.

Services

People are often surprised at my paying so much a month to Verizon merely for "nationwide" 450 minutes and 500 text messages and I admit no less chagrin. However, be aware I'm no longer on any sort of contract and have refused their offers to renew and commit to some new, temporary deal, however tempting it may be. Also, I asked them for the cheapest plan back in February 2010 and this is what they gave me, but it's entirely possible I was lied to either for the purposes of profit or simply out of customer assistance ignorance ... or even language barrier.

Now TracFone is prepaid and generally cheaper, but only depending on your usage. If you make a lot of phone calls or send a lot of MMS, then it will cost you much more dearly than if you mostly use SMS like myself. The MMS on my plan cost 1.5 minutes (15 cents) and SMS is 0.3 minutes (3 cents). Thus if I sent 500 text messages it would cost me $15 versus the $10 I paid on top of voice to have that amount at Verizon. Remember, though, that was on top of the $50+ I already paid just to have their phone and service. Thus my reasoning is that I'll pay about that much anyway, assuming I don't go over 500 and make many phone calls: a $46 savings per month or $552 per year!

Alright, onto Google Voice. If you haven't tried this then go do it now, because it's free except for international calls and you'll likely be impressed by the feature set. I can use it to make a call to my mom, for example, and talk as long as I want without it costing a dime. Sure it won't work so great over my MiFi, but any consistent DSL/Cable (even the lowest speeds) can handle it fine. And it forwards to my TracFone both voice and SMS (the latter took several days before it started working) while providing me a blocking point for unwanted harassment.

Downside on services? Neither TracFone or Google Voice support "short codes", so I can't use them with Twitter's mobile service since I can't send a message through to 40404. This is certainly an annoyance, but I do begrudge Twitter mostly for this since they don't even support email notifications and their stability leaves much to be desired.

One last upside? No more advertisement texts from Verizon telling me about great upgrade opportunities or even random commercial crap from their "partners". It didn't seem to matter how many times I opted out, I'd still end up getting something from Garlic Jim's ...

Phones

First, you may wonder why I don't have a smart phone; that's a fair question but my answer is always simply that they don't provide me any extra value. What a particular person deems as valuable is a matter of preference and, to me, having a distracting internet-enabled computer always on in my pocket does not fit that bill. It may be convenient but to me it is not valuable and thus not worth the money. I can look up maps on my Kindle, call who I need to, and heck ... you can always ask a street urchin what bus to take.

That being said I would really love a product that combines phone, camera, and music player gracefully. Add the usuals like calendar, contacts, and alarm clock and I'm good to go. There's a limited amount of software I'd actually use consistently and I'd prefer something that does those things well. But anyway, that's neither here nor there for this particular post since I don't have a smart phone and this isn't technically about them. Let's move on ...

The interface on the LG actually feels snappier and less sluggish than the RAZR, everything is more colorful and more animated, less retro spreadsheet and more Saturday morning cartoon. Navigating around is simple enough, although there seem to be more options than necessary and unfortunately there is a "web" button that is way too easy to hit (and it immediately charges you 1.5 minutes if you make that mistake).

Pictures on the RAZR look a magnitude better: clearer, sharper lines, richer colors, etc. I had no idea how much of a difference there would be until I pulled the pictures off the LG and was disappointed to find them to look washed out, blurry, and people's facial features smudged into nothingness; like images scanned from a brochure. I naively though that its 640x480 pics would be comparable to the RAZR's of the same resolution. The RAZR can take higher resolution pics but they just look like the 640x480 blown up to a bigger size and thus, isn't very useful to go bigger.

Next the camera can only be used for stills and not video. This is less of an issue since the RAZR's video is fairly deplorable, but it's at least enough to get the gist of something.

Opening the phone, as strange as it sounds, is not particularly easy on the LG. The RAZR was built such that flipping was quick and easy, but the LG requires me to pry it open by jamming my fingers in the sides. It seems intent upon staying clam-shelled shut.

The alarm and sound recorder features are easier on the LG; I can't even remember where the latter was in the RAZR. However, I found that if I use the LG alarm, afterward pressing "Stop" the power-save is disabled and the screen stays on until it drains the battery dry. Power-cycling it is the only way to get it to  go back to normal.

Text input is different on the LG, but much better. I've been having trouble adjusting to using 0 for space instead of #, but otherwise it feels like there's less to press to get stuff entered. I turned off auto-suggest almost immediately because, not being used to it, I couldn't handle all the psuedo-random words undulating at every key press.

Finally, there's the issue of backing data up off the phone. I spent a lot of time and effort to learn how to do this with BitPim for the Verizon RAZR (I say Verizon and not Motorola because they took the phone and hobbled the hardware before releasing it), but I got it down and was able to copy all messages, videos, and pictures over USB. The LG has a mini USB port, but you can only use that to charge because BitPim doesn't recognize the phone. You can use BlueTooth to copy the pictures and sounds on/off quite easily (it was a snap in Ubuntu), but messages cannot be accessed this way.

In conclusion, I like my new "plan" and the phone is comparably functional depending on your usage, but I liked the RAZR better. I may try another TracFone to see if I can get something that takes better pictures, I'm less concerned about being able to backup messages ... gotta let those things go.