I finally took the plunge. After 8 years I’m walking away from the iPhone and as a result breaking the shackles that tied me to AT&T. I was planning to wait until my contract with AT&T is complete in October 2016 before breaking my contract with them to avoid any early termination fee, but as I mentioned my phone bill recently doubled from $45 a month to $90 a month without even having unlimited data. And that is a straight up ridiculous amount to pay for a phone service I barely use (I’m mostly on WiFi). So I started thinking about breaking the contract early when something wonderful happened. I received the impetus I needed.
My partner received an email from Republic Wireless offering $50 off one of their phones. Unfortunately this email came a few weeks after he had to replace his own phone, but he said he would sell me this discount for $20 – still a $30 savings overall. Of course this offer had an expiration date so I ran the numbers, created a timeline and dove in. And so begins the tale of my relationship with Republic Wireless.
Based on my research, which included consuming a ridiculous number of written and filmed reviews of the various Android phones Republic Wireless offers (currently Moto E, Moto G, Moto X 2013 and Moto X 2014) I had decided that the Moto X 2013 would best suit my needs for one reason: The Camera. While not as powerful as the iPhone 6 camera despite having more megapixels, the Moto X has a pretty good camera while the Moto G (what my partner has) does not. Since the iPhone 4 I have completely replaced my camera use with my phone. I don’t even carry a camera anymore unless I’m going somewhere exotic with tricky lighting.
So my ideal phone would have a comparable camera that I could continue to use for the hundreds of pictures I take in daily life. So I ordered the Moto X 2013, picked their $5 WiFi only plan since I’m going to Fiji on vacation this weekend and waited for it to arrive. I unintentionally built up my expectation of the device by watching more review videos, unboxings and walkthroughs. After a long weekend it arrived. My first Android.
And I was supremely disappointed. From the second I took it out of the box my Moto X 2013 (1st generation) had serious problems. Including a sim card error saying sim invalid, shutting down randomly, not responding when I try to turn it back on, the battery dropping straight from 35% to 0% which shut down the phone, taking a shockingly long time to charge and other strange glitches.
But most shockingly, the camera was horrific. I was shocked at how bad it is. I looked back at the reviews I’d read and videos I’d watched that showed what kind of pictures the camera could take and realized something was wrong. The camera actually took worse pictures than my partner’s Moto G which has half the number of megapixels (not that megapixels are a perfect indicator of camera strength – they’re not, but it’s a universally understood metric). Luckily I still had my iPhone and my partner’s Moto G and I set about doing camera comparisons in various lighting scenarios. Something was very wrong.
So I searched on Republic Wireless’ online forums and when I didn’t find anything similar to the problems I was seeing I sent them a support ticket. And didn’t hear back for 25 hours. Republic Wireless apparently does not have phone support for their product which I find a little ironic and while I understand that they are trying to keep costs low and 24 hour phone support for a few hundred thousand people is expensive not getting back to me quickly as a new customer when my new phone completely doesn’t work out of the box is unacceptable. So while I was waiting I sent them an additional message with other things that were going wrong with the phone and was about to email them again when they responded.
They suggested I do a factory reset on the phone. I did. Nothing changed. I emailed them back updating them and expressing that I was surprised with how long it took them to get back to me. Luckily the rest of our interactions were much faster. After the factory reset did not work I emailed them and they responded 12 hours later saying apologies for the delayed response. We kept going back and forth with suggested fixes and they were very helpful and addressed all of my concerns. They fixed it! When I was freaking out thinking I’d made a mistake, running scenarios in which I return my phone and buy a Moto G since the camera on the Moto X was so bad and then use a real camera when walking around like a tourist they fixed it all. While it is very strange that the phone out of the box had so many problems they’ve all been addressed and I am now a satisfied Republic Wireless customer and Android user. Phew.
This weekend I am planning to port my number from AT&T which will automatically close my account right in time for the end of this month’s contract. I’ll keep you posted on how the switch and having a new phone service goes.