Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Purchased this phone for my wife to replace her LG800. Although a good phone, she'd had enough of the tiny screen and keyboard. Phone arrived and it looks great. Entire face, even over bottom nav buttons is glass, feels solid, high quality and graphics look crisp and vivid (especially compared to old phone.) UI feels snappy. Was nicer than I had expected for the price. Charged it up with the included cable, and using tracfone's site was able to activate this phone and transfer old number and her 2000+ minutes over without problem. Set up home wifi - browsing the web and adding new apps was very easy and looked great. Wifi reception was good throughout the house. Websites render nice on the included chrome browser (you can also add Firefox from the google play store if you want.) At this point though, we realized texting and voice was not working. All attempts to troubleshoot failed. Ended up having to open a ticket with tracfone and within 3 hours we received a call from a support agent. After a few minutes of back and forth, the issue was fixed on their end and texts started rolling in. All was working well. One thing to remember is that at home, work, etc, wifi will provide you with free data, but voice and txts will still use your phone's minutes. Due to the android OS, the phone is very customizable and simple to figure out. Comes installed with few gigs of internal storage and another 4GB microSD Card pre-installed that you can replace with a larger if you wish. The camera is so-so. Better than the LG800 but still pretty low end. Outside use results are good but indoor is grainy and dark - there is no flash and it is only 3mp. Phone battery life seems good. One short thing: You must add a "Your Account" app from the play store to be able to check your minutes, etc on phone. It doesn't work too well for us. The two app tabs show different information and tracphone feels the need to send several duplicate txts as a follow up with the same info eating up your store of texts. At this point, it works much better to just check your info on their website. Overall it was a good purchase for my wife's needs. She is able to significantly upgrade for a low price and keep her minutes and 10 months left on account. Besides what seems to be growing pains in Tracfone's adoption of these Android phones (trouble with the app widget and issues getting the voice and sms to work) this phone was a good purchase. Now my reason for removing one star from this phone: Tracfone's new minutes plan, and specifically the cost of each sms txt message. The old phones used one meter for voice and texts. The plan for these Android phones uses 3 separate tanks for voice, texts, and data. Sounds good on the surface, but the cost of sending a sms message used to be .33 minutes. Now it is a full minute. Since the carrot these phones advertise is triple minutes, your one-year 400 minute card will give you 1200 texts a year. This averages to 3.25 texts a day. For most of us who text more than voice, this isn't going to work. My own tracfone is up for renewal in 44 days and also want to go android (also currently have LG800). When txts cost .33, a year card lasted all year for me. Now I'd have to buy two - twice as much $$ for tracfone. Understand why they changed the plan this way, but it will likely send me to another provider. Yes, there are a few other very good options for no-contract phones if you search around. So since everyone's personal use is different, if my last gripe doesn't have an effect on your typical usage, this phone is a great option for the price. ----------------- 2\13\14 Update: Read a few places that the case for the LG Optimus L4 II / E440 would also fit this phone. Unfortunately, while the camera and all the buttons do line up, the case is a little big. We purchased one of the gel snap-ons for like $3.00, so no big deal. Phone snaps in ok but slides around. Still looking for a case. I'm sure soon they'll be out if not already. I'll upload a pic.