Republic Wireless

Well, I'm in for a great experiment. I've picked up a Moto X from republic wireless and their 25$ per month 3g data plan and I am EXCITED. I've had about a week to play with the phone so far and I am honestly very impressed with my experiences. I'm a pretty tough customer to please, too, because I was pretty happy with Boost mobile and the service they have provided me over the years, most especially over the last few months with my most recent phone.

I've been using the HTC One SV and it was by far the best phone I had ever used. In fact, if it were not for with the give and take advantages/disadvantages between the plan/phone I'd say it is dead even tied with the Moto X for me. The One SV could last a day and a half easy with 4g LTE turned on and running, and even moderate use over the time period. Games would burn out the battery, but what phone do they not do that on?

The Jellybean O/S ran smooth as silk, the screen was bright and large enough to be comfortable but not too large to function conveniently as a phone. The one and only hiccup I ever had with it was the disk storage space management. With a limit for 2 gb of app space and a fairly large list of pre-installed apps that could not be removed the updates eventually made it very difficult to keep any games installed on the phone and still allow for all the apps I wanted to be able to update regularly. In the last few months disk space management actually became quite serious any time a list of apps needed to update.

The Moto X has a massive internal drive comparatively, and though it can't use an SD card, even though the One SV would let you plug one in, it couldn't REALLY use it either. Using my internal storage space without a care in the world I still have about 10 GB free internally to play with on this phone allowing me to really breathe and enjoy games and other media really easily and conveniently.

The contextual features are also really sweet and I really enjoy playing with them, though, honestly they are not as impressive as I had initially hoped. Using NFC to lock and unlock the phone turned out to be less awesome than I had hoped mostly because of software. You can't unlock it just by touching it to a RFID chip, you have to push the unlock button, then touch it to the RFID, and it's just an extra step that feels nu-neccessary. I just wish it could completely unlock with a swipe. I just think the software isn't quite there yet.

And I am a battery life junky, the longer without a charger the better. You never know when you'll be in an emergency and need to go as long as possible without charging, so those extra hours mean a lot to me, and the Moto X just doesn't give me the same battery life.

Overall, between the price of the phone time, the list of features and advantages and disadvantages, I'm happy with the difference, for now I'll be sticking with Republic Wireless and their truly fascinating service plans, which I highly recommend anyone check out.


On a side note, I can't wait to live in the future when my phone can unlock my house, turn on my car, and pay for things on site with NFC wallet apps and RFID for EVERYTHING, and even be used to authenticate my identity and my driver's license. On that day, I wont need my wallet or my keys anymore. I remember when I only needed my keys, and then only my wallet and keys.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a phone case that holds a few cards, enough to hold all the essential ones I carry around with me. Since I do not carry cash this means I can finally experiment with leaving my wallet behind.

The last two days of my life I've pared down to just a wallet and keys and it feels AMAZING.

I can't wait for more of the future!

Facts About Me

I guess I have to do this, 15 facts about me:
1. I once ate an entire tablespoon of 600,000 scoville hotsauce and it was the single most painful experience in my life. I was sincerely concerned that I needed to call an ambulance the pain was so bad.
2. My favorite book is the Count of Monte Cristo, and my favorite translation of it is the copy that was given to me by Marcia Reynolds forever and a day ago.
3. I once cooked a turducken, and it was delicious! It took me several days of preparation and was tons of work, but I loved every minute of it and the end result was the best of the franken meats.
4. When I was in my teens still my parents gave me my first guitar and a couple of guitar lessons. I really resented it at the time, and I was mad that they didn't understand who I was, but almost 8 years later when the circumstances were right and that guitar was still there for me to pull out and play and begin to learn with I could not have been more thankful that it had been given to me, even if it was almost a decade before I knew it was good for me. I just wish I'd been a smarter teenager.
5. My favorite regional food style used to be Mediterranean, with all the sharp tangy cheeses, fish, vinegars, textures, etc. until I visited Korea, now my favorite regional food is Korean, I didn't have a single bad meal there, no matter how cheap or how tiny the restaurant, they were all in my top 100 of my life.
6. I failed high school because I was lazy, and had to go to summer school to pass my final class in order to get my diploma.
7. When I was a child and had finished reading the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, I was really mad when my dad didn't let me read the Silmarillion because it was too mature. This only bothered me more when I was old enough to just read whatever I wanted, and I realized all he had to do to stop me from reading it was let me try. Most boring book ever.
8. I think the octopus is the coolest animal on the planet, but kittens are cuter.
9. My favorite movie of all time is still The Shawshank Redemption. My very close second is Fight Club.
10. I couldn't even begin to pick a favorite song or genre, almost every style of music has produced at least one song that moved me emotionally to the very core of my being and I couldn't pick one of those emotional experiences over another.
11. I never had cable as a child, it wasn't until I was a full grown adult that I paid for it myself to get the best internet connection.
12. I used to stay up all night and read over the edge of my bed to the light of my closet, and every book was precious to me. I don't even know when I would fall asleep most nights, but the important thing is that I fell asleep reading.
13. I think a lot about how the expanding space between intergalactic bodies that lack sufficient gravitational pull to hold them together means that there is a hard limit beyond which objects projecting light will never be visible to us because the space between us is expanding faster than the speed of light. I thought the universe was pretty big before that, but now that I know this I believe it is so big that we will never comprehend its true size and will never have any way of measuring it. The words Too Far Away have never felt so final to me.
14. My favorite reading spot as a kid and young adult was nestled in the arms of the third or fourth level of branches of the tree in my front yard.
15. I started working on a podcast with a friend of mine, Sean Foley, Words Are Bullshit.