cell phone 101 questions (and maybe email questions too)

What the hell is Platinumtel? Are they a reseller for whom? Sprint? T-Mobile? Virgin? Etc...? How did you find this place? I hope not just a random Googling. There is no way one can trust an arbitrary company popping up to sell you a cell phone on a simple Google search for a cell phone.

You should be able to buy a compatible memory card from an electronics store should you feel you need it later in the phone's life.

That's basically it.

If you won't take pictures or video with the phone and you won't use it as a music player then you really have no need for the card. Most phones come with internal memory that will do a fair number of things including taking pictures. It just might be harder to get the pictures off the phone without a card.

absolutely, positively won't ever need or use something like that.
nope. no way, no how, not ever.

I'm only getting this phone to keep it separate from everything else, just as I'm opening a new yahoo email account strictly for this venture.

http://www.platinumtel.com/

http://www.best-prepaid-cell-phone-plans.com/platinumtel.html

No, it wasn't random, I looked around at other providers.

tsar... you said "what the hell"
I've never heard you say that.

thanks parados!

Looks like they are a reseller for Sprint as well as Virgin.

Not gonna ever use it to take pix for your EBay sales?

I was feeling a bit ... saucy!

Nope!

I got a digital camera, and that's all I'll need until I'm dead in the ground!

I'm like that guy in the electronics store in the movie "Diner"

I want a 15", black and white Emerson. That all I want. I don't need all that "color" stuff. That's not for me.

Well, I've got my legs back under me now. A bit touch and go for a moment.

$100 sounds like a large outlay if you aren't going to be using a lot of minutes/texts. If you use it for text only that's 5000 texts. If you use it for voice only that's 2000 mins, or 33.33 hours.

Can you get a phone for a few bucks that doesn't make you put up $100 in prepaid calling/texting?

I had to think about this....not ebay, but the picture taking thing.

I'm just not a gadget person.

I like things like oh, emery boards and maybe a hammer or something. Beyond that my palms get all sweaty.
Don't get me started on packing tape.

I know it's a joke, but I actually cannot figure out how to make the vcr player play a movie, because the tv has to go into some different mode, and I end up somehow making the tv go off, and can't turn it back on, let alone get this nutty thing called a "signal"

One time Wally was out of town for a couple of weeks, and I made all that happen to the tv, so I just walked away from it. Every couple/three days I would half heartedly pick up one of the remotes and randomly mash some buttons, trying to point it in a generally correct direction. Then I would wander off again.

Funny, because I'm sharp as a tack with other things.

That's 33 hours that lasts for a year. That's less than 6 minutes a day. Other phone/minutes I checked out that you could get less minutes, the minutes only lasted 30 or 60 days.
Plus, if this venture works out, it'll be a write off for taxes. Even if it doesn't, it'll be a tax write off.
It comes out to $8.33 a month. much less than adding a line to my husbands cell phone plan.

I looked, and it's harder to find one with a qwerty keyboard. I found one on tmobile, but they were out of stock.

you're not gonna start selling your used knickers, are you?

PQ has dibs on that idea, I believe...

I'm going to add on to Chai's list of 101 cell phone questions so other cell phone newbies can find the answers too.

I recently purchased my first smart phone, an LG qwerty phone with camera, texting, web browsing, etc. It is a prepaid phone and I'm using up a lot of my minutes just trying to figure out how to do basic things. The manual that came with it is pretty useless.

Here's what it looks like, for reference.



Thought I'd start asking here when I can't find any answers from a Google search for them.

The first question was how to quickly alternate between numeric and alpha input on the qwerty keyboard when entering passwords, etc. I found out that if you hold down the key for a duration, it switches from an alpha character to a numeric character. Took me about 10 minutes of air time to finally figure that out.

I still haven't found an answer for this one. I have taken some photos with the cell phone's camera and now I want to get them onto my computer so I can edit them. I thought I could send them to my gmail as an attachment to a text message but I can't seem to find anything that tells me how to do it. I can find numerous articles on how to send text messages from a gmail account to a cell phone, but not the reverse.

Now that I can enter my alpha-numeric password for my gmail account while web browsing, I am thinking that I can just send an email to myself with the photos as an attachment and download them to my PC.

Is this the best way to do that, or is there a much easier (and cheaper) way via text messaging to the gmail account?

I also have web access to my Facebook account if that is an alternate method; although I'm not really keen on giving Facebook access to my cell phone.

Well, the gmail idea isn't working. Just tried to access my gmail account on the cell phone and I keep getting a "connection failed" message.

I have noticed a trend in manuals for the past decade. They're basically written for people who already know how to use the product.

That's mostly because the authors of the manuals write them to describe what each button or feature does, not how to use them.

The manual for this phone is a great example:

It tells me I can swap input mode between alpha and numeric by pushing a sequence of buttons, but it didn't tell me the shortcut of just depressing the alpha key for a duration to toggle between alpha and numeric for input fields such as passwords that use a combination of the two.

It tells me this button gives me access to the web, but it doesn't tell me how to connect to anything once there. I have to spend all my access minutes doing trial and error to figure it out.

It tells me I can take photos and how to do that, but it doesn't tell me how to do anything with them once they are on the phone. I can easily send them to another mobile phone, but can't seem to figure out how to get them off a phone and onto the internet for access to them with my PC.

By the way, Chai, if you haven't purchased your qwerty phone yet, the one I got was only $20 and another $99 prepaid for a year's service and 800 airtime minutes. With that phone, airtime minutes are doubled for life.

Got it from tracfone (aka net10).

That looks like an LG 500g. I'm not familiar with it, but it should have shipped with this cord...

If so, I'd guess it would be the easiest (and cheapest) way to transfer media between your phone and computer.

Oh. And happy new year