Their service is horrendous! Sprint is their carrier. In network calls and texts are delayed. I was locked out of my house TODAY, 4:30AM, called my other FP phone the wife has, it said not available; she had full bars, and the phone was ON! So, I had to bang on the door and woke everyone up. Calls and texts out of network are just fine. Paid or not, the service sucks, so stick with the free plan. Oh, and all features are paid plans; voicemsil, and sending MMS texts - ALL for a fee.
Fought with the idiots for weeks,and they persisted on blaming the “area” when both phones were in the same room, full bars, but it took 15 minutes before the other phone rang (ended the call 10-15 minutes prior), or the text went through.
Total CRAP in network service. I can call and text anyone on any other carriers. Call my house phone, rings right away, but can’t make immediate contact between all THREE of my FP phones; so I went ALL free!
Also, when you type a text,and say turn the screen off to come back to it later? It’s saved as a draft, and even if you send it, it NEVER goes away. Every time you go back to send a text to that person, the entire daft will be there, so you have to erase it, enter your new text, then send. However, turn your screen off, then go back? That draft is back, and will not go away, even if you send it AGAIN. You have to erase all DATA and CACHE in app management to get rid of it, and that also removes all your history.
Talking to them is like talking to a wall, they want to blame everything on YOU, or the phone, that they sold you…
Just out of curiosity, when you say both have full bars do mean the 3g or 4g symbols are there also? You realize these phones use your data connection to make/recieve calls/texts? No matter how many bars you have, if it doesn’t show a data connection, or it’s a bad or weak, they won’t go through. And it doesn’t matter if your phones are in the next room, no data, no calls. It sounds to me like the rep was right, your location doesn’t get good data reception, what else could it be? The only other thing it could be is your out of data. Did you check your account at the freedompop website? If you have week data, so the app waits until it gets a good enough data connection. Can both phones surf the internet at those locations? If so, your data is good. Try using Hangouts like I do, works great for texts and calls on my Freedompop S4.
I’d wait a year or two to see if FP works out the kinks.
I bought the Samsung S3 about three months ago.
I live in an area with Sprint 4g, yet the FP service is poor.
-Texts are sent quickly, but if someone replies I do not get it until I’m connected to a separate WiFi.
-The Stagefright update keeps popping up, but I was told by tech support not to update it. The update appears every other day.
-It’s pretty obvious Tech support is overseas (India?). They try and are friendly, but the menus they work off of don’t really have solutions. They respond quickly to emails, but those seem like form letters.
-A few days ago they charged me for data.I think the phone started to update apps and it used the 500 mb of allocated data while the phone sat in my glove box.
-If the phone is shut off and then turned on, it will not reconnect unless I’m using WiFi. In order to reconnect it needs to update the FP settings which oddly enough needs to be done using WiFi. Once that is done, then it will allow connection to the FP services via Sprint.
-The phone tries to connect to every non-secure WiFi that it detects. I have even shut the WiFi off when traveling and through some weird programmer magic the WiFi turns back on by itself.
If you want a cell phone that has FREE cell/data service, but has so many kinks that you have to constantly play, fiddle, mess with, and tinker with it – this is the phone for you.