Electronics

[gardenman]

I've been looking at new Tracfones and saw that the Moto G7 Optimo Maxx with a pair of Bluetooth earbuds was on sale for $89.95 at the Southern channel so I've ordered that and it should be here around the 31st. The folks at TracfoneReveiwer.com say it's the best of the Android Tracfones out there, and at that price with a full year's service, it was too good to pass up. I don't expect much from the earbuds, but maybe they'll surprise me. If nothing else, they'll be good to wear when out as I won't worry too much about losing one or both. Getting just the phone and the service at that price is pretty good though.

I'd been debating between the LG Premiere Pro Plus ($99.95) the Moto G 7 Optimo Maxx (typically $119.95) and the Samsung A20 ($149.95) but when the Optimo Maxx hit $89.95 it sealed the deal. It's got the best rating overall by the folks at TracfoneReveiwer who have never led me astray. YouTubers who have bought it seem to like it just fine. I like the dual cameras on the LG and Samsung, but that's not really a make or break issue for me. I liked the idea of the Samsung working well with the Samsung smartwatches, but I don't have a Samsung smartwatch and may not get one, so that's kind of a wash also. And the Samsung smartwatches work with Android phones, so it shouldn't be a big deal. 

The Moto has 32 GBs of internal memory with about half available after the preinstalled apps. It has 3gbs of RAM, Android 9, though some users are being upgraded to 10. The screen is 6.2" compared to 6.4" on the Samsung, but two-tenths of an inch isn't worth the extra $60 to me. I like my old LG Premier Pro, but it's time to upgrade.

Now I wait around for it to come, get it activated, transfer everything over, and start to learn all about the new phone. (Lots of camera features on the Moto that will be fun to play with.) My old service expires in late September and the old phone had mysteriously stopped making/receiving calls after a recent upgrade until I rebooted it, so it's time for an upgrade to a faster phone with double the storage (going from 16GBs to 32GBs.) 

I'd looked at a lot of the unlocked phones on the market, but by the time you buy the phone, add the service, you're paying a lot more and getting essentially the same thing. So, this was the best option for me. It would cost $50 to just add another year's service so for an extra $40 I get a bigger, better phone.  

[software]

Moto is a good brand, been around a while, known for good quality.

The best phone I ever had was a Sony Xperian.   That is one sweet phone, until it would no longer take a charge due to a defect in the outlet inside the phone, which could not be repaired.   Some phone, huh?    But when it worked, it was awesome.

Do you know why the markdown, is  Moto coming out with the next generation?  Not that it matters.

I've had a couple of Samsung Galaxy's.   It was top of the line when it first started to compete, and beat, the iPhone. It's still one of the best Androids out there.  As with any phone, if you want an excellent product, you have to pay an excellent price.   I'm tired of lowballing, looking for sales, getting excited about $100 or less.  I use my phone A LOT.  Not just as a phone.   I hope when I'm ready to upgrade again, I can go with something a bit better than what I've had.

Here's something from CNET, my go to for information.

I'm sure you will enjoy your purchase, let us know.

Removed link to other retailers

[gardenman]

Why the markdown? The prices on the shopping channels fluctuate a lot on a regular basis on the Tracfones. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. I started checking the prices each day this month and waited until one of the three phones I was watching went down in price. If none did I was going to get one at the end of the month and likely would have settled for the LG since it was $20 cheaper. Now the Moto G7 Optimo Maxx is $10 cheaper than the LG so that made my decision even easier. 

It's a pretty neat phone with a 5,000 mah battery and does everything I need a phone to do. The extra camera features on it are nice also. You can go fully manual on the settings if you want. It's got user adjustable focus. Simply touch what you want in focus on the screen and it'll find it. You can have it ignore every color but one on the screen and take a black and white photo with just the color of the thing you touched in color. It has face smoothing/contouring/beauty settings. It has Google Lens which lets you take a photo of something and Google will figure out what it is and tell you all about it, even showing you where you can buy it. It has a self-timer. It lets you take slow motion or elapsed time video. (As you can tell I've been reading the online manual.) If you're shooting a video and you're not happy with the lighting you can touch the torch icon and it'll turn on the flashlight on the back of the phone to help light the subject. You can go auto on the flash, or lock it on or off. 

It's a pretty neat little gadget. I like the idea of Google Lens a lot. If you see something you like, you simply take a picture of it and Google tells you all about it. That could be very handy if I'm plant shopping and stumble upon a plant I don't know. 

I'll see how I like it when it gets here (expected on/around the 31st) but everything I've read about it and the reviews sound good. I'm not a big fan of the cheap cases they include with the phones. I find the cases tend to start to fall apart at the corners pretty quickly, but the case I'm using on my LG is also available for the Moto, so I've ordered one of those for the Moto ($6.95) that will be here before the phone. I'll swap my micro-sd card over to the Moto, charge it up and then do the transfer, and I should be good to go for another year or so.

Tracfone doesn't offer any 5G phones just yet and the relatively few 5G phones out there tend to be the very expensive flagship phones, so it'll likely be another year (maybe more) before that feature works its way down to the more affordable (at least to me) phones. When that happens I'll upgrade from the Moto, but for the foreseeable future, the Moto looks like it'll do everything I need it to do. And at $89.95 for a year's use, that's not so bad.

[Ainhisg]

Wow!  I'm so glad you posted this!  Thank you!  I have the Moto G6, and it's been my most favorite Tracfone ever!  I don't even need a new phone or a plan; my service doesn't expire until May of next year, but this is a heck of a buy, and my G6 will be two years old in November.  ETA:  I have a Spigen case on my G6, and Spigen makes a case for the G7, but it's not a hybrid case (soft inner liner, hard outer shell), which I am bummed about.  Which case did you buy, @gardenman ?

[gardenman]

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@Ainhisg wrote:

Wow!  I'm so glad you posted this!  Thank you!  I have the Moto G6, and it's been my most favorite Tracfone ever!  I don't even need a new phone or a plan; my service doesn't expire until May of next year, but this is a heck of a buy, and my G6 will be two years old in November.  ETA:  I have a Spigen case on my G6, and Spigen makes a case for the G7, but it's not a hybrid case (soft inner liner, hard outer shell), which I am bummed about.  Which case did you buy, @gardenman ?

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I looked at the Spigen case and saw it was well-reviewed, but then I saw that the SYONER case that I have for my LG was also available, and given my experience with that case I opted for it. It's a bright neon green and black colored case which isn't my favorite (easy to see though) but it's nicely grippy, fits well (at least on my LG) and I've dropped the LG a few times without it dinging the phone at all, so I went with what I knew. It's a little harder of a case than I'd prefer, but it works. There were a couple of others I looked at also. Casemart had one with a metal ring preattached to the back of the case that could serve as a stand also that was pretty neat. There are almost too many options for cases and most have hundreds/thousands of five-star reviews so I'm not sure you can go too far wrong with any of them. 

It is a good deal on the phone. I'd been checking the phones here and there every day in August to see if one of my three contenders would get marked down and the Moto did, so I bought it. The phone pricing on both channels is very fluid. Getting the phone, charger, earbuds (kind of iffy about them, but how bad can they be?) and a year's service at that price is hard to beat. Now I've just got to wait for it to get here. 

[Nuttmeg]

@software

You answered your own question. A high end smartphone is expensive. The Note 20 Ultra gets high marks until Apple brings the IPhone 12 Pro Max to. market.

Samsung is giving customers three Android updates with an S10, S20,  Note 10, Note 20 and any new phones in these series .

The A51 and 71 series phones  maybe includes in these upgrades. 

I have been able to find the Android update schedule and security patches online. 

[Ainhisg]

@gardenman , if it's anything like the G6, I think you will love it.  The turbo charge charges it in less than 30 minutes--I mean truly turbo.  The fingerprint sensor is wonderful, you wave your hand over the front, and you can see the date, time, if you've gotten a text, etc., the moto actions are fun although I've found the Google Lens to not be so accurate in identifying what I've taken a photo of but maybe that's just the subject matter.  Anyway, thanks again for posting, and even though a new one with Android 10 may be coming down the pike soon, this one is a newer model than the one I have so will be an improvement, and you can't beat the price.

[gardenman]

This phone will do everything I need a phone to do and does them well. When you jump up to the flagship phones you're still using the same apps you're just paying a lot more to use them. If I can buy an $89.95 phone that does everything I need a phone to do, why spend $1400 for a phone? If this phone breaks, gets lost, or stolen, I'm just out $89.95. I wouldn't be happy about it, but it would bother me a lot less than if I'd spent $1400 on it. This phone even records 4k video at 60fps in HDR (I think. I know it has HDR for photos I'll have to see if it also records videos in HDR. It does shoot videos in 4k at 60 fps though.)

The value in lower end phones these days is amazing. It's got an eight core snapdragon cpu, 3gbs RAM, 32gbs internal storage, can accept up to a 512 gb micro sd card. For perspective, my first desktop computer had a 1.2gb hard drive and cost $2,000. The flagship phones have 5g, and fancier cameras, but at a much higher cost. This phone with the service is costing me less than $8 a month. I'm very happy about that. It won't impress the phone snobs who always want the latest and greatest, but it does what I need it to do. But then, I've always been more of a Timex rather than a Rolex kind of guy. Both watches tell the same time, but one is a whole lot cheaper.

[gardenman]

The new phone has shipped and is coming UPS ground and expected to be here by the 27th now.

[cowboy sam]

@gardenman 

I also bought the same moto g7 back in June  at the  same price,place w/free s&H   total  after state tax it came to $99.00 but you got a bonus gift with yours..the earphones

Mine has also upgraded its self, etc 2 or 3 times already!

I don't use the finger print or face reg. tho...

Love mine and haven't had any problems with mine at all!

Let us know when you get it!