Category Archives: Cell Phones and Electronics

ArtofBeingCheap.com’s articles on how you can save money on cell phones, computers, and other electronics

Is Direct TV Now the best deal in TV? It might be for sports fans

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watching tv

The cable monopoly has finally been broken and it is a glorious thing. A couple companies have already started offering cable TV packages streaming through your home internet at prices much more reasonable than you are used to from your cable company.

I recently signed up for Direct TV Now to give it a try. Here is what I thought:

Price

Channel packages start at  $35 per month and even the lowest package has a pretty complete channel listing. I checked with my local cable company and getting all the same channels I care about through my cable company would cost me $60. That isn’t a bad deal at all.

On top of that HBO is only an extra $5 a month. Buying stand alone HBO Go costs $15 per month as does getting HBO through most cable companies. At $5 per month Direct TV Now is the cheapest way I know of to get HBO

How it works

Direct TV Now is an app that runs on apple, android, smart TVs, and other devices built to only run on TVs such as Chromecasts, Roku players, Fire sticks, and Apple TV (You can find my review of these devices here). You can watch the Direct TV Now app on any of your devices or your TV if you have the right device and can watch as many as 2 shows at once. For a limited time Direct TV Now is giving away a free fire stick if you prepay for 1 month or a free apple TV if you sign up for 3.

Once you get into the app, it doesn’t work entirely differently from your cable TV system. You can select the guide to see a list of all channels and what shows are currently playing on them. You can setup a watch list to quickly find all your favorite shows. You can select a channel and see a list of all the shows available from that channel. You can also do a search to find any show you can remember the title of.

It’s pretty simple, and shouldn’t give you too much trouble after you take a few minutes to study it.

Channels

You actually have a few different options for streaming pay television, but the channel line up is the one area where Direct TV now is the clear winner. The $35 per month package has all the channels I would want. You can see the complete channel lineup here.

Where Direct TV Now really wins is with sports fans. For years people have been searching for ways to get rid of cable and watch TV over the internet. What those people found is while they had no problem finding all their favorite sitcoms and dramas, live sports is the one thing they were missing out on.

Direct TV Now has fixed the sports problem because their sports channel line up is great! I get ESPN, ESPN2, and Fox Sports 1. I have found that these channels for sports lovers are usually not found on the most basic cable packages.

You know how TV executives always put your favorite teams first round March Madness game on some ridiculous channel you have never heard of that nobody gets like TruTV or something? I have double checked and the cheapest package has all the channels that will be televising March Madness games. (Assuming you can get CBS from an antenna)

Direct TV Now really is the package for cheap sports fans.

There is one glaring problem with DirectTV now and that is they don’t get your local broadcast channels. This problem is somewhat mitigated by the fact that most shows from ABC, NBC, and FOX are available on demand. After the show airs for the next week or so you can watch the show any time you want from the Direct TV app.

CBS shows are not available, but that is OK. CBW has it’s own app where you can watch it’s shows from the same device you watch Direct TV Now on.

I used this TV antenna (affiliate link) which is currently the best seller on Amazon to get local channels, so this isn’t a problem at all for me.

 DVR

While Direct TV Now doesn’t come with a DVR per se, it does come with an on demand feature that works almost as well. My family has had a DVR for so many years that the concept of having to watch a TV show when TV executives want to air it is a completely foreign idea to us.

The on demand feature works almost as well as a DVR. The only problem is that you can only watch a show for a few days, while a DVR keeps a show forever. This might be an issue occasionally if you go on vacation or life finds you too busy to watch TV for a short period of time, but I am guessing for most people it isn’t a big problem.

Problems

When Direct TV Now first launched in December 2016 there were a lot of problems with it. Searching the web you will find tons of reviews older than this one that are universally negative. All those reviews were true at the time. On demand basically didn’t work, shows you were watching would pause and freeze from time to time, and on some rare occasion the whole damn thing just didn’t work.

Because I really don’t watch TV that much, and because I can easily find something else to do if my TV is temporarily not working I wasn’t as upset by this as some people. My patience in giving the good folks at Direct TV Now to work out the bugs was rewarded as the service is now greatly improved.

The review you are now reading was written in March 2017 and by this time those issues seem to have all been fixed. On demand is working fine and my shows rarely freeze. When they do freeze switching channels and then going back gets them back on track.

At this point I would say Direct TV works well enough for all but the most serious TV lovers to enjoy. There is the occasional problem, but when you weigh them against the huge channel lineup for a reasonable price they don’t bother me too much.

Contracts

The number #1 rule for signing up for TV service right now is don’t sign a contract.  2017 will see a pay TV revolution with several new services coming online and competition to get customers will be fierce.  Do not for any reason sign a long term contract.  Direct TV Now doesn’t have contracts unless you count the free apple TV when you prepay for 3 months which isn’t a bad deal at all.

Disclaimer

I was not compensated in any way by Direct TV Now and paid full price for their service.  There is an affiliate link to Amazon.com in this article. 10% of all revenue generated from this affiliate link is donated to a charity chosen by the ABC’s readers.

Photo by flash.pro

Vidangel: Not just for religious nuts. Cheap new movies for everyone

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VidAngel (affiliate link) is a movie/ TV show streaming service that is primarily marketed towards religious nuts for its ability to edit nudity, swear words, and other ungodly things out of movies. But all you nudity loving, frugal, Satan worshippers (and those of you who fall somewhere in between the spectrum of religious nuts and nudity loving Satan worshippers) out there need to hold on just a second because Vidangel is an unholy good deal!

The economics of streaming video is broken

The entire video streaming industry has been broken since it was invented and VidAngel  has finally fixed it. Let’s say you want to rent a movie at Redbox. All of the following things have to happen and expenses have to be incurred for you to rent a movie at Redbox:

1. The DVD needs to be manufactured

2. The DVD needs to be packaged

3. The DVD needs to be shipped somewhere

4. The DVD needs to be unpackaged

5. The DVD needs to be put into one of those clear plastic Redbox containers

6. The DVD needs to be taken to the Redbox

7. The Redbox machines has to be manufactured

8. The Redbox machine has to be taken to its retail location and installed.

9. Somebody needs to fill the Redbox with all those DVDs and take out the ones nobody watches anymore

10. Somebody has to fix the redbox machine when it isn’t working right

11. Redbox has to pay rent for the space it’s machines take up

So all of those things have to be done and paid for and still it only costs like what $1.25? That is incredible!

On the other hand look at streaming. All you need is a server to store the movie on and an internet connection to send the movie out over. The marginal cost of you renting one more movie over a streaming service may not be zero, but it is a number awfully close to zero.

So why the hell does it cost me $5 to rent a movie over streaming?!? Sure you can pay a little under $10 per month to Amazon, Netflix, or Hulu to get a relatively small selection of unlimited movies that are many years old. But, if you want to watch a recent movie you have to shell out $5 bucks to Google Play or Amazon video. Why? It doesn’t make sense! Streaming should cost a fraction of Redbox, not 5X more!

Vidangel fixes the economics of streaming video. Finally, somebody has come out with a streaming video service that makes sense. The cost is $1 for standard definition or $2 for high definition. That is a fair price. Sure there are a few minor but obnoxious catches, but the bottom line is Vidangel is the best deal out there for seeing new release movies.

Here is how Vidangel works.

First you buy the movie for $20, then you watch it, then you sell it back to VidAngel for $19. I know it sounds screwy, but that is the way it works. My family watched a couple of movies this weekend to test it out, and sure enough, a credit for $19 appeared on my account making the net price of the movie $1. Why mess around with buying the movie then selling it back instead of just renting them? That is how they can legally do their stupid editing tricks, but we will get to that later.

In addition to movies, you can also watch TV shows. A dollar per episode of a TV show really isn’t a very good deal in my book, but there are some exceptions. My wife loves watching the HBO show Game of Thrones which leads to an annual fight over whether or not we are going to be spending $15/month on HBO for several months until this year’s season of Game of Thrones is over. One dollar per episode is a whole lot cheaper than $15 a month for HBO, so those fights have now been resolved.

Vidangel is simple to use

VidAngel is as easy as it is cheap. You can watch it on the always easy to use Roku player (affiliate link), Amazon Fire stick (affiliate link) or the chromecast. I chose to watch it using my ipad and a chromecast.

First I installed the chromecast and Vidangel apps onto my Ipad. From the Vidangel app I found a movie and sent it to my chromecast so I could watch it on my living room TV. The Vidangel app was easy to navigate, and completely intuitive. I found the movie I wanted to watch, clicked just a couple of buttons to buy it, clicked a single button to watch it, then clicked a single button to sell it back to Vidangel for my $19 credit when I was done. It just couldn’t have been easier.

The stupid editing nonsense

Even though VidAngel is a hell of a good deal, that isn’t how it is marketed. It is marketed towards religious nuts as a service to edit out all the naughty bits of a movie or TV show. If you look at all the other reviews (besides this one) of Vidangel you find on the internet you will find an endless stream of praise about how great it is that (insert my brand of fundamentalism here) people like me can finally watch movies without having to hear swear words or how wonderful it is that children can finally be allowed to watch movies made for adults.

vidangel

Is this really that big of a problem? I have a couple of kids myself, and it just never occurred to me that I should be angry about this. When my kids were little, we watched family movies together. That was fine, we had a great time. Never once did I say to myself “I wish I could watch movies full of drugs, sex, and violence with my kids.” Honestly, it just never occurred to me. My wife and I watched those movies later, when my kids were in bed.

Now that my kids are older we watch movies that have a little more adult themes, but this still isn’t a problem. The movie industry puts the ratings of PG or PG-13 on movies to tell me how appropriate a movie is for my children and that works just fine. My kids simply don’t need to watch rated R movies.

OK, enough of my ranting, back to the review. If you are the kind of person who wants to let your kid watch dirty movies with all the dirty parts cut out then VidAngel is for you. This is why you have to originally buy the movie for $20 before selling it back for $19. You have to actually own the movie to legally be allowed to edit it. If you were only renting the movie then it isn’t yours and editing it would be a copyright violation. There you go.

So after you buy a movie you are taken to a screen where you choose which parts of the movie you want edited out. If you are not a religious nut then at this point you are probably thinking “This is easy, I will just choose not to have any parts of the movie edited out.” That is what I was thinking also, but it doesn’t work that way. You have to edit out at least 1 part of the movie, and Vidangel won’t let you watch it until you do. Why can’t you just watch the movie without editing it? Because screw you! That’s why!

So you look at a list of all the parts that can potentially be cut out of the movie (You know, because a teenage girls shoulder can be seen or whatever) and look for the part that looks like it will matter the least if you cut it out.

To test things out, my wife and I watched Ted 2, a movie full of drug use and sexual innuendo just to see how things would work out. We looked at the list of things to edit out of the movie and decided to edit out the closing credits, because that seemed to be what would interfere with the movie the least.

It worked fine. We watched the whole movie except for the closing credits. We saw lots of sex jokes, drug jokes, bathroom jokes, and violence. It worked just fine. By the way, if the closing credits of Ted 2 are just great and I should go back and watch them will somebody let me know?

The editing part of Vidangel is obnoxious, but it really doesn’t hurt things all that bad. Just a minor inconvience you have to pay to in order to get brand new streaming movies for $1.

TL/DNR

Vidangel lets you stream brand new movies or TV shows for $1. Yay! It is also super easy to use. It has this obnoxious forced editing deal where religious nuts can take dirty parts out of a movie. No, you can’t just ignore the obnoxious editing deal, you have to edit out one small part of your show. Despite the obnoxious editing deal Vidangel is still the best deal in streaming movies. You can sign up for VidAngel (affiliate link) here.

Hate mail

I’m pretty sure many of you religious nuts out there would love to send me some hate mail over this review.  You can direct it to artofbeingcheap@gmail.com.

Review of the Republic Wireless Moto G 3rd Gen

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moto-g-republic-wireless

My wife and I have loved our high end Moto Xs for the last 2 1/2 years, but when my wife’s phone finally stopped working I found out Republic Wireless doesn’t offer the Moto X anymore. Instead, Republic Wireless offers a budget option, the Moto G 3rd gen. We gave it a try to see if we would love this budget phone as much as our old high end phone.  Here is what we thought:

Coverage Area

My wife has had her new Moto G about a week and hasn’t noticed a difference from her old Moto X.  She has tried making phone calls on our home wifi network, a restaurants wifi network, around town, and in rural areas.  There was no noticeable difference in coverage areas from the old Moto X and the Moto G.

For reasons I don’t understand, RW seems to like to keep information on how roaming works a secret.  The information is out there, but you have to really dig to find it, and it isn’t going to be on page 1 of your Google search results.  When you aren’t on Wifi, RW runs primarily on the Sprint network.  When the Sprint network isn’t available, RW runs on the Verizon network.  You can make all the calls and texts you want while roaming on the Verizon network, and it is all completely free. No roaming charges.

Data works a little different.  When you are on the Verizon network, you can use data, but it is expensive. On RW, you prepay for data at a rate of $7.50 for 500Mb of data. However, if you use Verizon data, that data counts at 18 times the normal rate!  That means if you roamed on Verizon all the time, you would only get about 28Mb of data instead of the normal 500!

You can look at this different ways, but I actually look at it as a good thing.  In the RW app you can easily disable roaming data so all the data you paid for doesn’t disappear on you.  I find myself in Verizon only areas from time to time and I go ahead and leave roaming data on.  But, when I am roaming I am pretty careful with the data I use.  I don’t do any downloading, streaming, or surfing while roaming. I pretty much only use it to let emails and other important alerts come through.  A simple email with no pictures doesn’t take up much data at all.

Our Grade: Excellent

Call Quality

This is the one area where we found the Moto G 3rd gen to be a little disappointing.  The call quality was OK, but not great.  My wife finds the speakers to be not quite loud enough and wishes she could turn them up a little.

Our Grade: Average.

Screen

The screen of the Moto G 3rd gen is a big 5″.  My wife loves the bigger, brighter screen. The trend in phones over the last several years is to get bigger and bigger and bigger. I might be the only person that feels this way, but I don’t want a bigger phone. I want a smaller phone I can easily slip into any pocket and will fit into my arm band when I go jogging.  This is the biggest reason I have decided to hold onto my old Moto X until it completely stops working.

Our Grade: Excellent

Performance

When I first wrote a review of the Moto X and the original Moto G 1st gen 2 years ago I came up with a test to compare the performance of the two phones.  In the interest of comparability, I repeated that test on the new Moto G 3rd gen. The test consisted of timing how long it took the phone to complete the following 8 tasks:

  1. Make a phone call and hang up as soon as the call connects after 1 ring.
  2. Send a text that says “hi”
  3. Send an email that says “hi”
  4. Go to the Google Play store and download/install the game angry birds
  5. Open the angry birds app and shoot one bird as quickly as possible without aiming
  6. Open the internet browser and navigate to artofbeingcheap.com.  Wait for the page to load
  7. Take a selfie
  8. Take a regular picture

In the original test 2 years ago the Moto X took 3:35 and the Moto G took 3:44.  This time?  The Moto G 3rd gen completed these tasks in an amazing 3:15. That is 9% faster than the old Moto X.  Impressive!

Our grade: Excellent

Camera

The camera is very good and takes fine pictures for a smart phone.  The new Moto G’s camera is 13 megapixels vs 10 megapixels on our old Moto X.  That is 3 megapixels better, but I can’t really tell a difference.

Our grade: Excellent

Battery

The Moto G has an excellent battery.  My wife is a heavy phone user and her new Moto G lasts all day with no problem. All batteries degrade over time so it isn’t fair to compare to our old phone, so I will leave it at that.

 

Our grade: Excellent

Storage

This is one area where the Moto G 3rd gen has a huge advantage over other phones.  The Moto G 3rd gen allows you to add storage with a SD card up to 32 G in size.  This allows you to add more storage for audio books, music, pictures, apps, and everything else you want to store.  Most phones nowadays don’t do this because they want to con you into buying a phone with more internal storage.  Good for the folks at Motorola for not screwing consumers and allowing them to add their own storage!

Our grade: Awesome!

Cost

Republic Wireless offers the Moto G for just $199, which is $100 cheaper than they use to charge for the old Moto X.  As you probably already know, their plans are the best available. $10/ month for unlimited talk and text plus $7.50 per 1/2 G of data with whatever data you don’t use refunded to you at the end of the month. You can’t do better than that.

Our grade: Awesome!

The Bottom Line

The Moto G 3rd gen is an excellent phone and an excellent deal.  Republic Wireless is by far the best phone plan available and it continues to get better over time.

Note:  I was not compensated by Republic Wireless for writing this article.  I was not given a free phone or free service and paid for both all RW phones I own with my own money.  Links to RW are affiliate links.

 

Republic Wireless plans just got cheaper

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republic-wireless

Photo by Johan Larsson

Ever since Republic Wireless went out of Beta in November of 2013, they have been without question the best cell phone plan available.  If you had Republic Wireless you knew you were getting the best deal in the industry.  Ever since then there has been news story after news story about other phone companies dropping their prices.

Other cell phone companies publicized price drop after price drop, but none of them ever dropped low enough to really became competitive with Republic Wireless. So while RW users knew they were already getting the best deal, it kind of seemed like we were missing out on the fun of the price drops from all the other companies. It may not be logical since I was already paying much less to begin with, but if somebody else is saving money then I want in on that action.

Incredibly, now even RW is dropping their prices. The new plan doesn’t have the beautiful simplicity of the old plans, but the savings are big so going through one additional step is worth it. New RW customers will automatically be signed up for the new plan, but old customers can either change to the new plan or keep their old plan for a while.

How it works

Under the new plan, you only pay for the data you use. The base plan is $10 for unlimited calling and texting over either wifi or cellular networks, and then you pay $7.50 per 1/2 GB of cellular data.  (All the data you use on a wifi network is still free of course).

You select how much data you want. We will look at how much you should buy further down, but I think the most common choices would be $7.50 for 1/2 GB or $15 for 1GB. Even if you go with $10 for the base plan plus $15 for 1 GB of data, you are still saving a bunch of money versus any other phone carrier.

If you use up your data, then your phone stops being able to access cellular data.  At this point you can do one of two things. You can either go without cellular data until the next monthly period begins or you can buy another 1/2 GB for $7.50 right from your phone.

Here is the exciting part.  Whatever data is left over you don’t use gets refunded to your account so you get a credit on next months bills.

How much data should you buy?

data-usage

If you are an RW customer, you can check your data usage right in the RW app, like I did on the screenshot above. I looked at the last several months and saw the most cell data I had used was 855 MB, which is .855 GB. Since this was well below 1GB, I decided paying $15 for 1GB of data was perfect for me.  Whatever I don’t use gets refunded, so buying extra is not a problem.

My wife on the other hand uses about 1.2 GB per month.  However, I decided that she could easily cut down on the amount she uses so $15 for 1GB should be enough for her, too. See below for my plan to reduce her data.

If you aren’t a RW customer, look for data usage under your phone’s setting app, and that should let you know how much data you are going to need a month.

How to reduce your data and increase your refund

Now let’s talk about a few easy ways to use less data so you can get a big fat refund. The RW app will tell you which apps are using the most data.  Let’s look at my wife’s phone which looks like this:

republic-wireless-2

You can see that 2 of the top 3 data users on my wife’s phone are Audible and Amazon Music. These two apps are a great opportunity to move cellular data to wifi data, which is free.  With Audible and Amazon Music, you can listen to audio by either streaming it on demand or by downloading it to your phone.

Downloading is the option you want.  Download all the audio books and music you want while you are on wifi.  Then the audio is already saved on your phone so you can listen to it whenever you want without using any more data.

If you stream the audio (which my wife did) then the audio is sent to your phone right as you are using it.  If you aren’t on wifi, that means you are using cell data to pull that sound into your phone, and you are killing your RW data refund.

In the case of my wife, streaming caused her to use up 867 MB of data that she could have downloaded for free over wifi. That 867MB would have amounted to a $13 refund from RW had we been using this plan at the time.  My wife now knows to download not stream.

So what kind of apps stream when they could download? Look for any apps that involve listening to audio. Audio books, podcast apps, and music apps are likely candidates.  Some music apps such as Pandora, Spotify, or Stitcher stream music instead of letting you listen to it.  That is fine if you are on wifi, but if you want to listen to music on the go you might want to check out Amazon Music which lets you download songs to your phone and take them anywhere, which will help you use less data.

Do you really need all your apps all the time?

There are some apps you might need wherever you go, but I’ll bet there are some apps that you could get by just fine by only using them on wifi.  In the two cell phone screen shots above, notice the little blue slider to the right of all of the apps?  With that slider you can turn off cellular data for all the various apps which will allow you to use the app over wifi just like normal, but will not let the app use cellular data while you are on the go.

My wife and I went through this list of apps and turned off cellular data for the apps we could use on wifi only.  The first thing we did is turn off data for those streaming apps that were mentioned above.  This isn’t a permanent decision.  If I need an app I turned off to use cellular data, turning it back on takes just a couple seconds.

So what apps do you really need cellular data from?  That will vary person by person.  In my case, I decided I needed cellular data for navigation apps such as google maps, any travel related apps, email, and web browsing so I can do web searches wherever I go. Since I occasionally drive for Uber, I needed to leave that one on. Most of the other apps I turned off.

I have both facebook and twitter on my phone.  I only check facebook every couple of days, so I turned that one off. I don’t need to get notifications that my cousin Stephanie wants me to play Candy Crush while I am out and about. That can wait until I am on home wifi.  My wife on the other hand uses facebook to communicate all the time, so she went ahead and left hers on.  I use twitter to read all the news headlines I want to see, so I went ahead and left that one on so I can have it wherever I go.

Even with as many apps as I left on, this should make a big cut in my cellular data and give me a nice big refund.

 Resources

A step by step guide on how to change your plan can be found here.

If you aren’t already with RW, you really should be. No contract Moto X from Republic Wireless. Plans starting as low as $5/month


Best cell phone plan calculator

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best-cell-phone-plan

It seems every week one cell phone company or another announces lower costs on their cell phone plan. Writing an article trying to find the best cell phone plan is almost impossible because they change so often.  Instead, I wrote this calculator to help you figure it out for yourself.

The calculator is simple to use.  If you are thinking about switching plans type in the information about your old plan, the plan you are considering and some information about purchasing new phones.  The calculator will tell you what your total cost will be over the next two years along with your average monthly cost over that same period.

Why two years? Because two years is the average time for a new cell phone contract (Even though I recommend you not sign a cell phone contract under any circumstances) and because two years is the average amount of time the average American keeps their cell phone.

Some places to look for a great cell phone plan

I’ll list some of your best options here, but first let me tell you what the worst option is.  Under no circumstances should you sign a two year contract with a cell phone carrier.  There is no possible scenario where that is a good idea.  In the short term signing a contract means you will be paying more, and you can use the calculator below to prove it to yourself if you don’t believe me.

Secondly, prices in cell phone plans are dropping like a rock and locking yourself into a high priced contract ensures you won’t be able to take advantage of the lower prices we will have in the future. I can’t say this strongly enough, do not sign a contract.

OK, so here are some of your best options:

Republic Wireless Moto X $5/month. Data, Talk & Text.– The king of the cheap cell phone plan. RW offers great service and is the plan my family uses. Plans start at $5/ month although I think the $10 plan is more viable.  You can find my review of RW here.

Total Wireless– There are a lot of companies with $35/ month no contract plans, but Total Wireless is the only one that runs on the Verizon network.  Republic Wireless allows you to make calls and texts over Verizon, but does not allow you to use a significant amount of Verizon data.  If you have to use Verizon because you need the wide coverage area and thought you couldn’t have a reasonable cell phone plan then Total Wireless is for you.

Ting-Ting is for people who don’t use their phone a whole lot.  It allows you to estimate how much service you will need, then pay for only that amount.  I find that process to be needlessly complicated when you can just get the much simpler unlimited everything plan from Republic Wireless but I know a lot of really smart people who think Ting is a great deal.

Ok, enough talk.  Let’s figure out which plan is the best deal.

How much can I sell my old phone for?

If you aren’t sure how to answer this question, just head over to Amazon.com, search for your phone, and see what a used phone goes for.  I normally sell all my old electronics on Amazon because I find it easier than eBay or Craigslist.
Photo by Eric (Hash) Hersman