Sunday, July 16, 2006

Tracfone Stuff, c139 on GoPhone

First off, the Motorola c261 is out in the wild. It's at Wal-Mart, but not on Tracfone's site. But people say it's priced around $80.

I'd like to review the phone, but the price is sorta steep at the rate at which I get funds from the ads on this blog. To help raise money, I'll be selling some of my phones as son as I get back to Texas. Granted, the Motorola v170 used to cost this much, but then again I didn't get that phone either.

OK and now let me ell you how to rig Tracfone's phone selection page. No, really.

Go to the phone selection page by putting in your own zip. Then look at the URL. There will be a part that says "tech=?????" where ????? is either TO, CO or GSM4. If you edit the URL to have the first as the tech, you'll get TDMA phones, namely the Motorola v60it, which is no good (that's what happened in my zip...big messup on racfone's part). For CO you get CDMA phones, namely the Nokia 2126 with starter kit. For GSM4 you get...GSM phones, hich consist of the Motorola v170, c155 and c139, and the Nokia 1100 and 2600, with various "free phone" promos on the v170 and the 1100. Hope this helps whoever wants to get whatever phone. Thanks to CellGuru for this tip.

And last: Motorola's c139 is now available on Cingular GoPhone. For $39.99. Personally I'd pass it up at this price. At $30 it's a dubious value for the money, with monophonic ringtones and a pretty small, low-res screen and an interface that doesn't use it well, at least in my opinion. But it does have nearly 11 hours of talk time. But why would you talk for 11 hours on a GoPhone? Sounds expensive to me, even if you have Pck Your Plan. ;) Yeah, I know, standby times are also better...but personally I would get the Nokia 6030 for $10 cheaper.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

for the tech, you need
GSM4 for GSM
CO for CDMA (that is a letter O)
TO for TDMA (that is a letter O)

The current TDMA v60 in some areas must be a mistake. It eems unlikely that anyone is activating TDMA anymore.

--cellguru

Anonymous said...

That's a nifty tip. Does it cause no problem in getting a local number later? Also, Net10 is much better for price than TracFone, but do they only sell GSM phones?

--Contrarienne

Anonymous said...

as far as the c139 being "passupable" as far for me personally, yes I would say it is passupable, but for some people, ESPECIALLY those who held on to their old TDMA Cingular phones because of the simple display they will see this as a good transition phone (as was the v173)

having said that...
Did you notice that cingular started marketing 2 good transition phones, the c139 and the v173 (aka 170/171) AFTER Tracfone marketed them. Interesting... --JP