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Indian phones are weird

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Re: Indian phones are weird

#11

Post by philovivero »

_Marak_ wrote: post #6

Slightly related, one of the worst things about the Indian phones and telcos are the spam advertisements that have subscription opt-ins by default. Essentially, you will get several sms messages a day which if you accidentally hit one of the keys on your phone ( which is actually very easy ), you get billed $1 every week ( think daily fortunes / love poems / etc ). It's very easy to accidentally opt-in to several of…

I used one telco provider in Philippines for a while that did something like this, sending lots of SMS spam. I had to threaten cancellation to get it slowed down.

In the USA, T-Mobile spammed me like this. Again, very difficult to stop the spam.

I think eventually this will be unstoppable, at which point I guess I'll stop using SMS and/or stop using phones.

I can't wait 'til the day I'm sitting in a group, and everyone keeps pulling out their phones every 30 seconds to clear another SMS spam, and then call me a luddite when I say I don't have a phone.

Re: Indian phones are weird

#12

Post by pkaye »

philovivero wrote: post #11
_Marak_ wrote: post #6

Slightly related, one of the worst things about the Indian phones and telcos are the spam advertisements that have subscription opt-ins by default. Essentially, you will get several sms messages a day which if you accidentally hit one of the keys on your phone ( which is actually very easy ), you get billed $1 every week ( think daily fortunes / love poems / etc ). It's very easy to accidentally opt-in to several of…

I used one telco provider in Philippines for a while that did something like this, sending lots of SMS spam. I had to threaten cancellation to get it slowed down. In the USA, T-Mobile spammed me like this. Again, very difficult to stop the spam. I think eventually this will be unstoppable, at which point I guess I'll stop using SMS and/or stop using phones. I can't wait 'til the day I'm sitting in a group, and everyo…

That is strange regarding T-Mobile. I've yet to get any spam from them. The only thing I get is an SMS a few days before billing occurs monthly.

Re: Indian phones are weird

#13

Post by voltagex_ »

Does anyone know if the Firefox phones are still around / in use in India? I actually had a friend import the Intex Firefox phone (don't remember the name, it's got 128mb of RAM and a dead-end FXOS version). It's utterly painful to use - I hope the situation has gotten better for users there.

Re: Indian phones are weird

#14

Post by rasz_pl »

_Marak_ wrote: post #6

Slightly related, one of the worst things about the Indian phones and telcos are the spam advertisements that have subscription opt-ins by default. Essentially, you will get several sms messages a day which if you accidentally hit one of the keys on your phone ( which is actually very easy ), you get billed $1 every week ( think daily fortunes / love poems / etc ). It's very easy to accidentally opt-in to several of…

Its a sign of heavy corruption and non existent consumer protection laws.

Re: Indian phones are weird

#15

Post by nononosisisi »

philovivero wrote: post #11
_Marak_ wrote: post #6

Slightly related, one of the worst things about the Indian phones and telcos are the spam advertisements that have subscription opt-ins by default. Essentially, you will get several sms messages a day which if you accidentally hit one of the keys on your phone ( which is actually very easy ), you get billed $1 every week ( think daily fortunes / love poems / etc ). It's very easy to accidentally opt-in to several of…

I used one telco provider in Philippines for a while that did something like this, sending lots of SMS spam. I had to threaten cancellation to get it slowed down. In the USA, T-Mobile spammed me like this. Again, very difficult to stop the spam. I think eventually this will be unstoppable, at which point I guess I'll stop using SMS and/or stop using phones. I can't wait 'til the day I'm sitting in a group, and everyo…

It is fairly easy to block a number now.

Re: Indian phones are weird

#16

Post by swatkat »

_Marak_ wrote: post #6

Slightly related, one of the worst things about the Indian phones and telcos are the spam advertisements that have subscription opt-ins by default. Essentially, you will get several sms messages a day which if you accidentally hit one of the keys on your phone ( which is actually very easy ), you get billed $1 every week ( think daily fortunes / love poems / etc ). It's very easy to accidentally opt-in to several of…

May I know which operator was that? I've used Airtel and Vodafone in India, and I didn't had any "services" enabled by default.

By the way, there's a centralized DND registry in India called "Commercial Communications Customer Preference Portal"[0]. You just need to send an SMS to enable/disable unsolicited commercial calls/SMS. It has been very effective so far.

[0] http://www.nccptrai.gov.in/

Re: Indian phones are weird

#17

Post by 0xmohit »

voltagex_ wrote: post #13

Does anyone know if the Firefox phones are still around / in use in India? I actually had a friend import the Intex Firefox phone (don't remember the name, it's got 128mb of RAM and a dead-end FXOS version). It's utterly painful to use - I hope the situation has gotten better for users there.

> Does anyone know if the Firefox phones are still around / in use in India?

Since Mozilla stopped developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones a while back, you don't get to see those for sale on major retailers.

I still own (and use) one. Agree that it's a bit of a pain. But if you need a phone for making/receiving calls and test messages, it's reasonably good (especially for the price). Not bad if you get a phone for $30 and you're still using it for almost 2 years.

Re: Indian phones are weird

#18

Post by gopalv »

voltagex_ wrote: post #13

Does anyone know if the Firefox phones are still around / in use in India? I actually had a friend import the Intex Firefox phone (don't remember the name, it's got 128mb of RAM and a dead-end FXOS version). It's utterly painful to use - I hope the situation has gotten better for users there.

> It's utterly painful to use - I hope the situation has gotten better for users there.

I bought the bright orange ZTE Open C fxos phone to try it out.

Haven't done much more with it that travel around with it, mostly using it as a primary phone for calls. The battery life is insane on that one - I went about 4-5 days without charging it when I was traveling (barely any calls, mostly standby).

The good part was the HERE maps downloaded onto its SDCARD and I could use at least some of the GPS functionality when it is offline.

However for the same amount of money I could easily buy a Micromax or Karbonn phone which would have 2 killer apps to use - PayTM and Ola Cabs.

Re: Indian phones are weird

#19

Post by maheart »

I know that Intex will soon be shipping (currently is shipping?) phones with SailfishOS (Jolla's OS).

I've been using SailfishOS for almost two years, and I confidently say that underneath the GUI, it is just a regular GNU/Linux system[1].

Why do I bring this up? Jolla, and the community are developing a more inclusive mobile OS (that has Android app compatibility, and can be ported to Android devices relatively easily using libhyris[2]). I'm hopeful that it will help minimise the hackery described in the article.

For example, SailfishOS ships with Gecko engine v31 at the moment (soon to be updated...), QtWebkit, and (soon, after the port to Qt5.6 is complete), QtWebEngine (Chromium).

I'm hopeful that more Indian (and Chinese) phone manufacturers can start contracts with Jolla. I'm not aware of any software houses (as opposed to internal) that customise Android for your device.

[1] glibc, systemd, BlueZ, Pulseaudio, gstreamer, connman, Telepathy, Python, gcc, Qt, etc.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_%28software%29

Re: Indian phones are weird

#20

Post by [deleted] »

pkaye wrote: post #12
philovivero wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used one telco provider in Philippines for a while that did something like this, sending lots of SMS spam. I had to threaten cancellation to get it slowed down. In the USA, T-Mobile spammed me like this. Again, very difficult to stop the spam. I think eventually this will be unstoppable, at which point I guess I'll stop using SMS and/or stop using phones. I can't wait 'til the day I'm sitting in a group, and everyo…

That is strange regarding T-Mobile. I've yet to get any spam from them. The only thing I get is an SMS a few days before billing occurs monthly.

[deleted]
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