When Verizon announced that they were buying TracFone, I happened to be
in need of a phone. My wife had lost hers, and she drives for "Meals on
wheels" once a week, so I gave her the one that my Sister-in-law had
given to me: a 4G smartphone that was already set up on a Verizon post
pay plan.

I was in Walmart a couple of days later, and although they didn't have
any TracFone packages on the shelves, they were featuring a "Verizon"
prepaid offering, including a "flip" phone, for $35/month, with $5 off
each bill if I paid with an automatic debit from my bank card. It
sounded good to me: my cellular needs have always been modest, even
before I retired, and I thought that $30 per month would serve me very
well, especially since the "smart" phone was costing me over $70 on each
bill, with it's postpaid plan.

The phone came with the box: an off-brand unit made in China. I set up
the account, agreed to the monthly debit, and turned it on, and ...

Nothing, Nada, zip. It didn't work. No talk, no text. My old phone was
still working fine, and I used it to ring up Verizon. After several
waypoints, I arrived at a tech-support person that knew the phone I was
trying to put in service. She told me to throw it in the trash and wait
for a new one she'd send me.

I did. She did too. The mail lady brought me another display box,
complete with plastic hanger, and it had another off-brand phone made
in China: the box was labelled "Orbic Journey." It sort-of worked for
a few weeks.

Then, problems appeared, and nobody at Verizon knows how to fix them:

1. The keypad isn't usable with Verizon's voice-mail or other
Touch-Tone response systems. Pushing a key for the first time
generates a short - in face, very short - tone burst, which (for
example) the voice-mail system ignores. If I want to delete a
message, I have to push "7" twice, with the first key-press serving
to get past the short beep, and the second serving to actually get
through to the Touch-Tone decoder. That's bad enough by itself, but
it gets worse: the behavior is erratic, and sometimes I delete a
message with one key-press, and the second push of the button
deletes the NEXT message. The voicemail system usually accepts my
password without any double taps, but the rest of the time, it's a
(very irritating) guessing game to find out what each key-press will
do. It's not just Verizon's Voicemail: the defect shows up whenever
I try to send Touch-Tone codes to any auto-attendant system.

2. The phone speaker port is on the bottom of the flat-bottomed case,
so it's very hard to hear the ringing, even though the ringer
volume is turned up to seven, which is as high as it will go. If
the screen is visible, the only way to hear the ringing is by
putting a pencil under it when you put it down.

3. The menus are cryptic and VERY hard to back out of. There is no
"home" button or other "Go back" choice.

The only reason I can think of for Verizon to put such a phone out
under their name is to use it as a bait-and-switch invitation, and
here are the possibilities as I see them:

Verizon will cut off all the "Lifeline" accounts on TracFone, and...

1. Offer Orbic phones and their own prepaid service as a substitute.
and then entice seniors into some more profitable version of
"Lifeline" service, or,

2. Offer "family" Lifeline plans with the hope of shaming the
relatives of current Lifeline users into paying a lot more to keep
in touch with Grandma, or.

3. Verizon will lobby to have Lifeline relegated to an "As available"
tier of 5G VoIP service, with 911 calls forced to wait for
more profitable corporate traffic.

Well, my Crystal Ball is as cloudy as anyone else's, so I'll just leave
you with this anecdote - when I graduated from Programmer Basic
Training, I was selected to attend the Initial Corporate Development
Program a.k.a. "ICDP." It was a prep school for those whom had showed
unusual promise, and I worked very hard to show that I deserved the
honor. My ICDP group invited the owner of a COCOT (Customer Owned Coin
Operated Telephone) company to come and talk to us about the industry
and the future.

After we had talked for almost an hour, I asked our visitor to tell us
what he thought was our company's most important skill: what we, as a
company, did better than anyone else.

He picked up his coat, opened the door, and then turned around and said
"You're very good at hiding what you really want."

Bill Horne

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On 11/25/2021 23:37, Bill Horne wrote:

my cellular needs have always been modest, even
before I retired, and I thought that $30 per month would serve me very
well, especially since the "smart" phone was costing me over $70 on each bill, with it's postpaid plan.

The phone came with the box: an off-brand unit made in China. I set up
the account, agreed to the monthly debit, and turned it on, and ...

Then, problems appeared, and nobody at Verizon knows how to fix them...

Bill Horne

It's like this with T-mobile, and many other retailers. I've heard
others echo your findings. Basic and flip phones are a very small
market now, and they are of terrible quality.

When my old Nokia 3390 started to give up about a year ago, I found a
used iPhone SE model, and got used to it. As I understand it, there
aren't any quality basic phones still made.

That being said, there are industrial-type flip phones that are still of
good quality, if you are willing to pay. Here's a Verizon example, on Amazon.com (I shortened the URL):

https://tinyurl.com/2wr7frv4

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