Done it

I’ve done something that I said I never would. I’ve got myself a smartphone. Up to now I’ve managed with an old-fashioned device with a small screen and no frills, two actually, one with a French sim and the other with a UK one, but something happened recently to cause me to have a rethink.

First, a little bit of background. I’ve never been a big mobile phone user. Sure, like everyone else, I like the convenience of having a mobile with me, but on my own terms. I mainly want it for if I need to phone someone when I’m out and about and it’s also handy for receiving text messages from my son because like most of the younger generation, he can’t be bothered with making real phone calls. It’s nice for friends to be able to call me when they need to but otherwise I don’t want to be making and receiving calls the whole time or walking round with my eyes glued to a screen like a zombie.

So up to now I’ve been quite content to have Pay-As-You Go mobiles both in the UK and France, although for the latter, there’s an important consideration. All of the major French networks offer PAYGO phones but if you don’t use up any prepaid credit within 30 days, they steal what’s left off you. Yup, you read that right, and I don’t know how they get away with it either.

However, I managed to find a company, called LeFrenchMobile, who operate in the same way as a UK provider ie your credit is carried forward indefinitely until you use it all up. So that suited me fine, and I also had a jolly good number from them as well. That was until nearly a year ago when they announced that due to their changing network provider, I’d have to use up all of my credit by a certain date, or otherwise I’d lose it, and I’d have to buy a new number from them too.

That was OK as far as it went, although I didn’t much like the idea of losing my number, but it seemed that I had little choice. Except that it didn’t happen. The deadline date came and went and my old number kept working. And I was even permitted to top it up a couple of times, until, that was, a couple of months ago when I wasn’t, with the result that my credit ran out and I was unable therefore to make any more calls. I could, and still can, receive calls, but making any was, and is, out of the question.

So what to do? I still have my UK PAYGO phone which allows me to make calls, albeit at slightly higher cost, and I can still receive calls on my LeFrenchMobile number, but clearly it’s inconvenient, to say the least, walking around with two phones and the situation can’t be allowed to go on forever. LeFrenchMobile have told me that if I’d contacted them earlier, they could have arranged for the number to be transferred to another paid-for network but now they couldn’t help as their contract with the original provider, Bouygues, has expired. Armed with that information, I’ve contacted Bouygues direct, but as they haven’t bothered to reply (hey, this is France!) it appears that I’ll be forced to give it up. So now what?

Clearly, it’s silly to walk around with two phones in my pocket (not that I was when my French number was working – I just left my UK phone at home turned off) but until the position with my existing French number is clarified one way or the other, that’s what I have to do if I want to be able to receive and make calls. But thinking ahead to the future, even if I could find a basic dual sim card phone (quite hard these days) is that what I want?

I think not. Since having my little Asus Android tablet, I’ve realised (OK, I’m a latecomer to the party) how handy having mobile computing is. And if you can connect to the internet as well… you can see where I’m going with this. I think that if we’d had the equivalent of my tablet connected to the internet on our west coast trip (a) we’d have been able to update our weather, NOTAMS etc in real time for our daily flight plans and (b) we’d probably have avoided the fiasco of changing our flight plans and heading for an airfield that didn’t exist. And the equivalent of my tablet connected to the internet would be a half-decent smartphone.

So it’s a done deal. Never the conformist, instead of just nipping into a local mobile phone dealer, a couple of weeks ago I logged onto aliexpress and ordered a smartphone direct from China. I could have had the very latest model with a big 5 1/2″ screen but personally I think that’s a bit too hefty to carry around in your pocket. So I went for a 5″ Android, dual sim model with octa core processor, and it arrived today. Here are a couple of pics of it.

It cost me the princely sum of 71€ including delivery. As you see, it looks fairly normal. It has the usual stuff like wi-fi and bluetooth and also gps so I can if I want to, run my MMap navigation app on it, which I successfully loaded this evening. I first loaded my full-size UK PAYGO sim card, which worked fine straight away. I then cut down my French PAYGO card from mini to micro size using a template that I downloaded and after a little bit of fiddling around, that works fine too.

So for now, I can receive calls on either sim and I’ve set it up to allow outgoing calls on my UK card only for now. So that’ll do me for the time being while I wait for another week or so to see if Bouygues get around to answering my request for them to release my existing number. Then, either way I’ll have to decide on what package to go for with which French service provider – do I assume that I’ll stay making just a few calls per month and add a low-use internet connection or will I become like most other smartphone owners, and start ramping up my usage once I have a data connection available? That’s a decision that I’ll need to make in a week or so’s time – in the meantime I’ll just content myself with playing with and finding my way around my new toy.