3G speeds are not bad. I use Straight Talk's 3G hockey puck hotspot (Umax U240C), which is 3G-only, and can do everything I need to on it, including stream Netflix.

Also, I usually get the 4Gig/40 dollar card, which is good for 60 days. It's about as good as it gets price-wise, for pre-paid at least.

The sort of people who pay slave wages probably consider 6.8 hours of "free time" a day more than adequate for such self-catering needs as sustinance and rest.

Considering this was in Fremont, CA, figure an hour commute each way - even if the company were generous and provided transportation, so 4.8 hours "free" time.

I would imagine it's down to too few people being on it still. There was such initial hype for it, then nothing. How long do you suppose people will wait before just not bothering with it?

Is your work heavy on graphics and/or video?

In the 80s/early 90s there was a string of postal workers freaking out and subsequently shooting office co-workers.

Basic web browsing uses almost no data. A friend was able to browse through my lumia last night because her internet was down and 10 minutes of browsing and sending a couple emails didn't even show on the usage summary.

I disagree. Can't remember the article, but somewhere recenly there was an article talking about the average web page size these days being about 1.7M, with 1M of that being images.

Try using a metered service sometime like a prepaid hotspot with 3G or above. You can blow through 100M easily in half an hour just looking at news sites with no video, just images and text.

I have the 840G and still use it as a backup phone. All I really needed to do to make it feel really functional was install Opera Mini and GMaps on it, both of which are installable java apps. The battery lasts forever, too.

An 11 inch device is no less portable than a 10 inch device. And they're making plenty of those in the form of Chromebooks, capable of running complete OSes (I know, I have one). Hell, the very first comment in your link even points that out.

I won't jump to satellite, though. Here's why: I stream a LOT of shows. I mean most of what I watch is done over the internet. I may occasionally have to wait for a buffer to fill, but other than that I have no problems. Satellite comes with bandwidth caps (unless I want to be up all night taking advantage of "free" off-hour bandwidth). With all the shows I watch, I clock in around 50G download, 3-4G upload every month, and that's at the lowest resolution I can get, if and when I have a choice to change it. No way a satellite provider would let me do this month after month, year after year.

Your comment pretty mirrors the (currently) 19 comments on the reg site.

I suppose a lot of people deal with tragedy through humor, but I sure wouldn't want to be a surviving family member and read some of the comments posted so far.

At least you did it anoncowardly.

I went back to a decent feature phone (LG 840G). Cheap, capacitive touch screen (albeit low resolution), no contract, and has WiFi.

I find I use the phone completely differently in a rural area where I am now compared to living in a city when I was on contract. So all I really need is a decent maps app - GMaps touch (J2ME) works fine and a decent browser - Opera Mini, which is sluggish but serviceable.

Until Android can *reliably and consistently* restrict when, where and how network chatter happens, I don't imagine going back. At least not while living in the country,

They're also producing a few new Asha phones that are marketed and sold in developing countries. From what I understand, the OS is based on a souped up version of S40 (or maybe S60?). I think they're meant to compete with the Firefox OS phones coming out.

For low end phones, they look pretty decent.

Both the headline and the summary are just laziness.

Had the submitter taken 5 minutes and done a search, he would have found plenty of software available - and cross-platform at that - to do what he wants.

Or maybe it was just an excuse to link to his soundcloud page?

Actually, this phone could work well for some prepaid markets in the US, too. Well, I should say it *could have* worked. I think it's too late now, but not by much - less than half a year.

I have an LG 840G that's roughly the same specs on tracfone for when I'm at my cabin. Tracfone seems to be the only thing that works consistently in the middle of the woods. Anyway, tracfone could have added that to its line of phones and I bet it would have sold like hotcakes. But as of last month, tracfone now offers a couple of low-end android phones for half the price (ZTE and Samsung) with better specs.