Mark D. Montgomery II
Member
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2013
- Messages
- 220
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So I played with those cheapo generic phones I'd ordered around Christmas on sale and they turned out to be not so great for what I needed.
1. They refused to keep WiFi on when the screen turned off (even with all the keep awake options turned on in CSipSimple)
2. I couldn't use OpenVPN because even though they were Android 4.2, apparently the kernel they were running was too old.
3. I couldn't connect them to the guest wireless at work - not sure what the deal was, maybe something with our Cisco APs - if I'd try to connect to it the phone would go full CPU load and everything would drop offline until I was out of range of that network. Weird.
4. They didn't support 3g (I TRIED SIP over EDGE on one...it connected..but was impossible to have a conversation lol).
As a basic phone phone (or sip phone when awake) they were ok, but didn't meet my needs.
So I figured I'd buy a real phone and after searching around I got myself a Blu Life Play X (they run about $200-$230) - a fair bit cheaper than the similarly spec'd big name phones.
The Life Play was released last year and has rave reviews all over.
The Life Play X was released in January I believe and they basically bumped up the specs a bit (faster cpu and video, more memory, etc).
I've been playing with it for a couple days now and have been quite impressed so far.
It's quick, pretty, and the battery life seems pretty good.
I'm running it with 2 SIMs - my old GoPhone SIM, and a new StraightTalk SIM (The $45 unlimited plan).
I have openvpn connected and CSipSimple configured to use the IP of the PIAF server.
I've done a couple quick tests over the cell data connection and it's worked nicely.
Switching between WiFi and Cell Data is fairly seamless. I think it's maybe a minute or two when the connection switches (when it gets in/out of WiFi range and switches from/to Cell Data) for OpenVPN to reconnect and CSipSimple to reregister.
It seems to be running a fairly clean Android build with a few customizations - settings menu is tweaked a little and it has a couple things like Torch installed by default.
With VPN and SIP and Xabber (for Vitelity sms) connected full time (I have GPS and Bluetooth off though, since I don't have any use for them at the moment - I'll turn them on when/if I need them), and with it syncing gmail and my other mail account, and whatever other background tasks are running (weather checks and evernote syncs and probably others), the battery lasted almost a day and a half (somewhere around 1 day 8.5 hrs or so it dropped below 10% battery and went into low power mode - I'd changed that to 10% from the default 20% - where by default it turns off pretty much all data connections and high cpu usage stuff - wifi, bluetooth, gps etc. - it's customizable though if you want).
The second I plugged it back into power everything turned back on and reconnected.
So yeah, hooray for a new phone that actually does what I want it to (i.e. be a proper Cell Phone and SIP Phone and handle other smartphone stuff)!
If you want to see how it looks, I have my unboxing pics and some phone running pics up in my gallery at
http://gallery3.techiem2.net/index.php/techiem2/Product-Unboxings/2014-02-19-Blu_Life_Play_X
1. They refused to keep WiFi on when the screen turned off (even with all the keep awake options turned on in CSipSimple)
2. I couldn't use OpenVPN because even though they were Android 4.2, apparently the kernel they were running was too old.
3. I couldn't connect them to the guest wireless at work - not sure what the deal was, maybe something with our Cisco APs - if I'd try to connect to it the phone would go full CPU load and everything would drop offline until I was out of range of that network. Weird.
4. They didn't support 3g (I TRIED SIP over EDGE on one...it connected..but was impossible to have a conversation lol).
As a basic phone phone (or sip phone when awake) they were ok, but didn't meet my needs.
So I figured I'd buy a real phone and after searching around I got myself a Blu Life Play X (they run about $200-$230) - a fair bit cheaper than the similarly spec'd big name phones.
The Life Play was released last year and has rave reviews all over.
The Life Play X was released in January I believe and they basically bumped up the specs a bit (faster cpu and video, more memory, etc).
I've been playing with it for a couple days now and have been quite impressed so far.
It's quick, pretty, and the battery life seems pretty good.
I'm running it with 2 SIMs - my old GoPhone SIM, and a new StraightTalk SIM (The $45 unlimited plan).
I have openvpn connected and CSipSimple configured to use the IP of the PIAF server.
I've done a couple quick tests over the cell data connection and it's worked nicely.
Switching between WiFi and Cell Data is fairly seamless. I think it's maybe a minute or two when the connection switches (when it gets in/out of WiFi range and switches from/to Cell Data) for OpenVPN to reconnect and CSipSimple to reregister.
It seems to be running a fairly clean Android build with a few customizations - settings menu is tweaked a little and it has a couple things like Torch installed by default.
With VPN and SIP and Xabber (for Vitelity sms) connected full time (I have GPS and Bluetooth off though, since I don't have any use for them at the moment - I'll turn them on when/if I need them), and with it syncing gmail and my other mail account, and whatever other background tasks are running (weather checks and evernote syncs and probably others), the battery lasted almost a day and a half (somewhere around 1 day 8.5 hrs or so it dropped below 10% battery and went into low power mode - I'd changed that to 10% from the default 20% - where by default it turns off pretty much all data connections and high cpu usage stuff - wifi, bluetooth, gps etc. - it's customizable though if you want).
The second I plugged it back into power everything turned back on and reconnected.
So yeah, hooray for a new phone that actually does what I want it to (i.e. be a proper Cell Phone and SIP Phone and handle other smartphone stuff)!
If you want to see how it looks, I have my unboxing pics and some phone running pics up in my gallery at
http://gallery3.techiem2.net/index.php/techiem2/Product-Unboxings/2014-02-19-Blu_Life_Play_X
Phone System 