What's the verdict so far on Project Fi?

Ya, I used to not bother going onto WiFi, partially because my past phones always seemed to have issues transitioning between the cell network and wifi smoothly. The Nexus does it perfectly, and so I’ve got a bunch of wifi networks in it, so it ends up staying on wifi most of the time. As a result, my data usage has dropped hugely.

Haven’t gone through the process (though plan to today after finding out there is in fact a wifi network I can use at work), but that scenario works out just fine. As long as you activate Fi within 30 days of them shipping the phone you get the promotional price, otherwise your Payments account is charged the additional $150.

what I remember of the porting process:

I think I cut up my old Sim and used old service (straighttalk) on the new phone. I couldn’t start the phone number porting process until I had the fi sim in my hands.

Wait for the sim
pop sim into phone
The phone then has some process you need to run, Project Fi.
It asked a couple of questions.
It asked for NFC contact to import old crap from phone
Then it worked on fi for a little while

Thanks for the info Locker and wisefool. I ended up talking to a support agent from Project Fi. He seemed a little conflicted when I told him what I was trying to do, but suggested I could remove the SIM card and it wouldn’t try to activate. I’m still slightly concerned that it might give me a little grief about not activating, but we’ll see.

This year’s little Project Fi activity is a game. And it is terrible.

And the reward for playing it is a code so you can get free Wifi on a plane if you travel before March 2018? And only from Gogo, whatever that is. I’m not even sure which airline has that.

Anyway. Pffff. Last year’s $10 was much more appreciated.

American, Delta, United, British Airways, Aer Lingus, Air Canada…

Free wifi on planes is actually awesome. I gotta get that.

Ah. I haven’t flown any of those since the 90s. In the 2000s onward, I only flew Continental and Southwest. No scratch that, I did fly United in the mid-2000s as well, which is why I ended up at Chicago a few times.

Is this just a USB-C issue? My phones still use micro USB, and I am curious if there are similar dangers with the older standard as well.

Interesting changes to Project Fi were just announced.

If you use less than 6GB any given month, you still pay $10 per GB used. But if you use more than 6GB, the data bill is “capped” at $60. In other words, $60 gets you unlimited data whenever you need it. This is all assessed month by month, so you might pay $60 for 50GB in January, and just $10 for 1GB in February.

Caveats:

  • Once you hit 15GB, your speed is throttled. You can pay $10 per GB to maintain speed

  • The point at which unlimited data starts is different for family plans. For example, a plan shared by two people becomes unlimited at $100 (10GB).

I think this is a good move by Google. Poor value for heavy data users has been a consistent complaint, and this will make Project Fi more competitive.

Project Fi had saved me like, infinity dollars over my old Verizon plan, and I’ve never had any issues. Best cell plan ever.

This. Granted, I’m on Wi-Fi most of the time between home and work, but going from my old Verizon plan at at least ~$100/month to $40-50 has been amazing. And knowing that it doesn’t really matter if I go over the 2GB I set up is great because a) it’s already so much cheaper and b) unused parts of the 1GB blocks get credited back.

I’ve been very happy with Fi. I’ve been a subscriber since the start of the service and never had any problems with it at all.

100% Ditto

Yep Fi is great, I haven’t had a bill over $30 since I signed up.

If you have good wifi access, Google Fi ends up being super cheap.

For me, my only good ISP is Comcast… but one good effect of this is that I have access to XFinity hotspots… which are basically everywhere, which means I basically always have wifi access, and rarely need to use actual cell data.

Yeah, I’ve been using it for 15 months now, for me and my wife. Our highest bill was the first couple of months, before my wife understood that she shouldn’t watch youtube videos while I drive. Once she stopped doing that, from month 3 to month 15, our collective bill has always been between $41 and $46, that’s for both of us combined. So $21 to $23 for each of us, on average, since September of 2016.

I’m very happy with it.

But I am a bit nervous at the lack of options on which phones we can use. The Nexus line was relatively affordable. The Pixel and Pixel 2 have both been very expensive. I guess that Motorola phone that joined the lineup might be our best option going forward once our 5x and 6p bite the dust.

I’ve been on Fi for about a year and a bit, and am overall reasonably satisfied with it. It might be the phone (I’ve got the Nexus 5X I think…) but the GPS is crap whenever the weather is overcast, and there were a couple of times when the signal has shown good strength but when I tried to use it I didn’t really have a signal, but for 98% of the time it’s been fine.

I am not a demanding user though.

It’s definitely economical - just like @lordkosc, I have not had a bill over $30 since subscribing.

I broke the screen of my Nexus and have been thinking about getting the Motorola one to replace it (though I’m in no big hurry since I broke my iPad at the same time and I might decide to replace that one first… still wafflilng). If you do get the Moto phone I’d be interested in hearing your impressions. The general reviews of the phone give it middling marks (as in “it’s decent but nothing to get excited about”) - which is fine by me, considering the only other choices here is the Pixel or the Pixel 2, both of which cost a butt-load more.

Hopefully I won’t need to for a long time!

Judging from this thread, most people replace their android phones if they break them or they start running out of space or if they start slowing down, or most commonly, if they start having to be rebooted too often. The latter is how all my older android phones bit the dust eventually. I just got tired of having to reboot them all the time, and the reboot times get longer and longer too, exacerbating the problem.

This time I’ve been trying to get around that by installing almost no apps on my Nexus 6p. Every other useful app I still install on my old Oneplus One. Audiobooks? 1+1. Listening to music? 1+1. Fandango, Mint, Google Newstand, NPR news app, MyFitnessPal, CardioTrainer, Redbox, Kodi, Steam app, Amazon Music, Games, etc, I try to limit to only my old 1+1. My Nexus 6p only has my Google apps, Kindle app, my ESPN fantasy football app, and my credit card/banking apps, and Whatsapp. I’m hoping this means that the phone will last a lot longer than most Android phones have lasted for me in the past.