Freedom Phone Samsung Galaxy Note 4

Deal Chatter Electronics
2

Hi Woot! So happy that we were asked us to come back to offer a new round of great phones bundled with our 100% free phone service. I’ve add our top FAQs below (along with a link to a more expanded set). I’ll also be around to answer any questions in this thread or through PM!

** 1. Is FreedomPop really free?**
Yes, by activating on the 100% free, you’ll be able to get 200 minutes, 500 texts, and 500MB of data for free each and every month. Just buy the phone and you’ll never have to pay another phone bill again. Upgrading to unlimited talk & text is only $10.99/month.

** 2. What network does FreedomPop use? **
FreedomPop uses Sprint’s 4G LTE and 3G networks. Calls and texts are made through FreedomPop’s VoIP messaging app, so you must have a data connection in order to send/receive calls and texts. Go to www.freedompop.com/coverage3g4g to view the full coverage. As a way to save your free data allotment, you can also connect to any local WiFi network, such as the one in your home or work.

** 3. What do I do after receiving my phone? **
After you get your FreedomPop phone, please go to Activate | FreedomPop. Enter in the MEID of your phone, along with your desired email address to be associated with your FreedomPop account. Follow the steps to get fully activated. You will select your FreedomPop phone number during the activation process.

To see an even more expanded FAQs, please check out this page of the FreedomPop Community Forum! Hope everyone has a great day!

3

Run away!
Customer service is a 45 min wait time joke. CHECK out the site, there is NO PLACE to “cancel” your account, ever. That can only be done with customer service. Once you stop using the phone, you continue to get “free service”, even if you don’t want it. Can’t switch to another carrier because your phone is still in use with it’s “free service” plan. Remember the song “hotel California” by the Eagles. . .?
Ever wonder WHY they have a rep online for every one of these sales? Seriously, think about it. WHY do they need to defend themselves at the start?

BAD BAD BAD DEAL. STAY AWAY.

4

Ditto to above! Treat this as a great deal on an unlocked phone. I tried them in Feb 2015 when Woot offered the Nexus 5. I could never get the service to work because there is no WiFi where I work and the phone could never get a signal from their network (Sprint or T-Mobile). so I ported my number to another prepaid service. They kept charging me (yes, the service was actually $14/month) for 8 months afterwards. When I called customer service they said I never cancelled my account. Every other carrier I have ever used closed the account after I ported out my only number. So Freedom Pop closed the account and generously offered to refund the most recent charge. That’s my experience. Do research before you join Freedom Pop. Do think about buying a good refurb handset and going to another carrier :smiley: (you will need to unlock the phone and flash the Rom so be prepared)

5

I agree with the two posts above! I got one of these phones (an LG) from Woot last fall. It’s a nice phone, but my experience with the company has been horrendous.

First, there was NO WAY to sign up online for JUST the FREE SERVICE. Their website trying to add various charges, “free trials,” etc., which I didn’t want, so I called them. I went round and round with the rep, who kept telling me I would get a “free trial” of the premium service, which I kept telling her I didn’t want. She finally gave up and told me ok, I could have just the free service without the free trial, but she still made me give her a credit card to charge me a one cent activation fee. I stupidly gave her my credit card number.

The phone did seem to work okay, and a friend was even able to send me a voicemail! Yeah, that’s free, but if you actually want to LISTEN to your voicemail, it costs $2.50/month! But you don’t find that out when you sign up for this “free” phone. You find it out when you try to listen to your first message!

I threw the phone in a drawer and didn’t use it at all after that–it just wasn’t worth the aggravation. A few weeks later, I noticed that FreedomPop charged my card $27.98 for the Premium Service I specifically told the rep many times I didn’t want. I guess the rep lied to me just to get me off the phone. After several rounds of emails, they refunded that charge, but they ignored my request to cancel my account and release the phone, instead downgrading me to the free service I’d asked for in the first place, which I no longer want because of the way this company does business.

I tried several times calling them to cancel the account, but each time I got stuck in their awful phone tree and there was no way to talk to a human being. When I emailed them to request cancelling the account, I got back a canned response telling me to call them.

I went on the FreedomPop forum (which is heavily monitored and censored) and noticed that people were posting requests to cancel their accounts and apparently having success, but I couldn’t log onto the forum to post because of a password issue. I tried multiple times to reset the password, but when I tried to click into the field to type in my new password, it would instead send me to a page on slickdeals.com where they had a phone on sale!

TLDR: For me, this “free” phone service is not worth the hours of aggravation of dealing with FreedomPop. I’m keeping my Tracfone.

6

Totally disagree with everyone. FP’s customer service has much improved over the last couple of years. I use it now and pay $0/mo for my phone bill. Their free phone service call quality last I tried leaves a lot to be desired (you can get better call quality with their paid premium service), but I just use google voice with my FP galaxy S5 and get much better call quality for free.

Here’s how I use it:

-cell number ported to google voice $20
-500Mb free with FP basic free service every month
-find the slickdeals forum and find a bunch of “friends” for another 500Mb per month (50Mb per referral I think)
-I have 5 other phones, data sticks and hot spots that I got from FP for about free and with each of them I can “share” 100Mb per month free to my main phone - Galaxy S5, giving me a total of 1.5Gb per month.
-Like their paid service, GV uses voip but unlike FP airtime, GV does count against your data. However, I calculated that it’d take about 2000 minutes to burn through 1.5Gb of data. Obviously, if you use it over wifi, it uses nothing.
-Use Google hangouts as your default dialer, makes dialing out and receiving calls pretty seamless.
-I flashed the default Samsung ROM from sammobile.com that clears out all the FP apps and dialer integration.

7

I hope others read these reviews and look for another alternative to pop. I almost dropped sprint to go with this service, thankfully the reviews saved me the time and aggravation. I mistakenly thought since I have sprint my service would be just as good, but that’s not true. The voip uses sprint data and it can be weak in many places. The voice quality suffers badly. I ran into someone who owned but was not using a pop phone. They let me try it for a bit. I could not keep a call at a usable quality level anywhere I went. The pay for voicemail is maddening. You miss many calls that never ring the phone. They go to voice mail where you pay to get it. I initially loved the concept years ago when I heard about it. The reality leaves alot to be desired. The customer service sounds like it sucks. Maybe if they moved their promotional people from commenting on woot and slick deals to customer service it might help the long hold times.

8

I am very sorry for your poor experiences with us previously. In the recent months, we have seriously increased the number of Customer Support Agents on staff, as well as increased our overall QA process, in order to ensure our users are getting better experience when they contact us. One can always call us (888-743-8107), email us (support@freedompop.com), post in our community forum, or even PM me here.

9

We got this back in December, and for the price, no complaints. I checked their coverage map and we have decent coverage. I had problems with voicemail, I emailed them via their website link I believe, and they were very helpful in resolving the problem, I would get daily emails with suggestions to get it fixed, and it didn’t take long to resolve the problem. We’re casual users, so the data plan is adequate for us (I work from home and use wifi). Is the call quality as good as what I did have? No, but it works for what we need it for. (My phone isn’t a Galaxy, it’s the LG) My thoughts - if it works, great, if it didn’t, my wife needed something to play music on at work, so it was a win-win either way for me. If I used my cell phone a lot, for work, etc. I wouldn’t rely on it, but for what I use it for, it works. I’m on the $7.99 which gives me data rollover, enhanced voice, and voicemail. It’s worth $7.99 to me.

10

I have never been able to make any phone calls with FreedomPop.

I have had this service for two years and have never been able to make even one working phone call. I even pay a small monthly fee for the service which was paid in advance (total costs/fees were about $300). I have made numerous calls, emails and even private messaging to support but to no avail. I have tried 3 different phones. I did get data for a while but that stopped too. I have had the phone service since March 2014.

It was just too hard and difficult to get good service/help the first year, then the second year I got help, but still nothing worked. Even if I had chosen the free plan, this would not have been worth all the trouble I went through.

11

And here come I, knight in shining armor, spamming these Freedompop pages to tell you to STAY. THE. HELL. AWAY. from these people unless you are a very very basic phone user.

  1. The 500MB thing is false advertising. You can only use ~395MB, because there must be a minimum 100MB free on your account and I’d leave a bit more than that to be safe. If you go over 400MB EVERYTHING stops working. Voice, text, data. You have an Angry-Birds-playing brick and nothing more. You can’t even call FREEDOMPOP from the freedompop phone to hand over a credit card.

  2. EVERYTHING is an add on service. I get these people need to make money but COME ON. $2/mo for MMS and media messages. $3/mo for voicemail. $4/mo for the tethering option. Any carrier that doesn’t let you use tethering for free is the spawn of the devil IMO. No, you can’t use the Hangouts app to send SMS messages with your carrier number.

  3. The speeds of the $25 unlimited plan are false advertising. I talked to four or five different reps and they all said throttled speeds are 128kB/s (yes I know bits and bytes, they all said bytes). I’ve been getting an average of 16kB/s. Better than other carriers’ 64 kbps but still unacceptable from what the reps advertise.

I have (had) a Freedompop S3. They do their own firmware mods on the phone, and there’s a LONG list of shit that’s broken on mine:

  • Videos around 720p & above stutter and don’t play back smoothly. The full HD videos taken by the DEVICE ITSELF don’t play at all. My 1GB RAM WXVGA tablet can play two(descaled) full HD videos at the same time, for reference.

  • Tethering is disabled via Bluetooth and USB (mine work but sporadically, for some reason); the Wifi Hotspot - that you have to pay monthly to use - turns off every few minutes…

  • …because the data connection CONSTANTLY drops nearly as often. It pops right back up in a dozen seconds but if you’re playing online MMO games or streaming it kills the experience.

  • the phone is occasionally slow to the point of tears, and devices with lesser specs have run full blown desktop OSes with ease.

  • call quality is SHIT unless you have full bars of coverage. It constantly tries to use your WiFi to make calls, so when you’re at Starbucks and 50 people are torrenting pron off the network, don’t be surprised if the call quality is unusable. Unless you have fan-flipping-tastic Sprint coverage you need the Premium voice plan - which lets you sue the regular voice network as opposed to the VOIP crap - for an extra $4 per month. Free phone service what?

  • the latest Stagefright SECURITY UPDATE for the device can’t be installed. The outsourced overseas coders who made this shit beep-boop-bip-do-beeped up somewhere.

  • Customer service…does not suck as hard as it used to. I’ll give em that. They will still transfer you 3-4 times in a call, with NO communication between departments so you have to explain your issue every time. Getting my phone replaced once was a nightmare, I had to literally call 5-6 times and escalate before they sent out a shipping label. And even then it took MORE than a month to get a new device. I begged them to hold my credit card and send a new device out ahead of time but they would not budge. They said the devices were on “backorder”. Funny how, when I called from a different phone number and was “interested” in the S3, they had one to send me with priority shipping!

  • Oh, and your warranty still only applies to the original device purchase date, so if you replace it - and they eat up a month of the warranty getting you a new one - tough luck if you have any more problems after the 90-day window.

Oh yeah and I’m not even done.

I’ve bought more low-end stuff from these people. Some LG Volts, a Moto E 2nd gen. The LG Volts have the tethering features physically carved out of the firmware. Not only is there no menu, but I tried installing shortcuts to the switch in the OS directly, and it’s gone. These people will limit your phone in any way they can think of.

My 2015 Moto E is a blessing with Lollipop by comparison. All FP did was root and install a custom ROM for their carrier software.

I ain’t tech savvy enough to put stock Android on 'em and go to a different Sprint MVNO, but if you wanna, these are nice refurb devices for a good price. That’s the one redeeming quality.

OK I’m done.

12

Hey coolcat20, I am very sorry for the issues that you faced when using our service.

Our free plan does offer 200 minutes, 500 texts, & 500mb of data each month. If a user opts to turn off our automatic top-up feature, then data access will turn off as you approach your limit (in order ensure you don’t exceed your limit since there’s a data reporting delay from Sprint). Beyond our basic free service, there are some value-added services that you can signup for at a slight cost (services include voicemail, mms, tethering, data rollover).

As with all phone carriers, service is dependent on coverage, so we encourage users to check their location (www.freedompop.com/coverage3g4g). We also have a service called Premium Voice which allows users to make calls using Sprint’s voice network.

Once again, I’m sorry that FreedomPop did not work out for you. You can always PM me here if there are any lingering issues on your account.

13

My most recent frustrating attempts at trying to cancel the account happened four days ago, so I don’t really see any improvement over my experience in November. I did get what looked like a canned email reply yesterday saying my account has been canceled, but the robo-emailer didn’t tell me whether the phone had been released or unlocked or whatever.

14

Yep its truly free… so with that price tag you know what to expect… Usually. Freedompop is an exception! The data service is WONDERFUL. The phone service has finally become useful. Before the switch to the Sprint LTE network I would not have recommended freedompop phone to anyone. NOW it works like a charm. For Voice service you will need a mid to high end device for the voice service to be acceptable. This Samsung Note II made all the difference in the world. As soon as I switched phones the echo vanished and the network connection became reliable.
So for future freedompop customers… Data services are great, voice services depend on the device (so dont get a cheapy one) Customer service tries very hard but falls miles short of effective. But for free I can deal with that.
Update:
Ported my number to my old freedompop phone then tried to have the new phone added to the account and the old one removed… (the number and service level are attached to the account and not the phones)
WHAT AN ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE…
Sept. 15th , 2015 I ordered an LG Optimus F3 from Freedompop during one of the promotional sales. This ordered included free Unlimited Talk and text and 500mb of Data as the base plan. It did not take long to realize the phone was difficult to see even with my glasses and the voice quality included a lot of echo that was annoying to callers. So I purchased a Samsung Note II Last month to replace the LG.
I was told I needed to have a temporary account for the Samsung… so we created newxxx@gmail.com. The Samsung was given a temporary phone number. I was then transferred to tech support.
Tech support was NOT ABLE TO swap the phones on the account. Instead she transferred the phone number from the LG to the Samsung.
The original oldxxx@gmail.com account is the one with the unlimited talk and text I acquired on Sept 15th of 2015…THAT IS THE ONE I want to use. The “temporary” account does not have the same service.

Tried talking to customer service some more, then support email sooo far I am not feeling the love… So I sent the matter off to the BBB of LA/SanJose. Not sure it will accomplish much considering the C+ rating , but have to try.
http://www.bbb.org/losangelessiliconvalley/business-reviews/internet-services/freedompop-in-los-angeles-ca-100115567
Currently trying to get someone to make some changes thru their facebook contact… (last time I complained on facebook then blocked my account…)hopefully i will be successful this time… will keep ya posted. As stated above, product is awesome, its the people that are not fun to deal with.