im looking for a mobile phone for my grandparents.
not worried about size/weight/extras etc
it just needs to have big buttons / big display / easy to use interface. and the cheaper the better.
suggestions please. cheers

I would suggest using an older phone as many new phones have tiny buttons and confusing interfaces. An old school nokia like a 3310 (maybe not as old as this) would do the trick as they have large buttons and an easy to read display and don't have all those extra features that your grandparents will not need. Also they are really cheap you can get them of ebay for like $20 and you can drop them and they still work fine.

vhsorbeta I'm in the same boat though I'm looking for myself not my grandparents. Theres NOTHING out there!

I want a phone that can send and recive txt messages and one that has BIG buttons, monochrome display (or something easy to read) doesnt have a camera, can have an external antenna and one that wont die in the ass if i fart near it.

Dead set there is nothing out there.
If you want a phone that can film your nads whilst its sitting in your pocket then theres millions of choices. Heck I'm sure you cen even get ones that brush your teeth and remind you to breathe - but a simple no bullsh!t phone doesnt exist.

Im going to get one of these for my old man. Simple no BS phone, and i found a shop that has one left, reduced to $39 brand new! (From $59 RRP)



Specs/Features here:
http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_c300-1768.php

it moves dude

Cant have your cake and eat it too.

I gave my 99 year old grandmother a Motorolla V3x even with the bells and whistles she had no probs using it. she could easily see the buttons and they were big enough to press AND it was easy to hang the call up (close the flip). I will admit she couldnt text or play the pre-loaded java games tho

My Mum's boss has got a phone, of some description, with a stick on magnifier.
Like this: http://www.phonemerchants.com/celphonmag.html

Might open up your options a bit.

i did see something on the crave site once about a phone coming out that had big buttons and a big plain screen...

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/
was somewhere on that

the phone we sell at work to most of the oldies is a samsung a411 + a412 (both got great coverage, one is prepaid, other is plan)

the black a411 is most popular, numbers contrast well, and they are big buttons. most people can operate it with a little bit of instruction

here we are:



i spose most people in town don't like telstra, but out here in the middle of next to nowhere its good enough.

Telstras next G sucks balls

bring back CDMA - at least we could get some coverage to make a phone call. I dont need the internet on my phone - io need a fricking phone. if i want the internet i have a computer. Telstra = NFI

The Samsung is the phone my Telstra dealer wants me to get - but IT MOVES. I want a phone that does nothing with 17 buttons

Go - Menu - Stop
1 - 2 - 3
4 - 5 - 6
7 - 8 - 9
* - 0 - #

Volume up - Volume down

I want to send and receive text messages (this is often the best way to get messages to my site guys when they are working on tight sites)
and to make and receive calls in regional and remote areas

What about a Motorola MOTOFONE. It is the simplist new phone on the market. All it can do is send and recieve text messages and make calls. There is no camera no confusing menu and it has an easy to read display.

Click to view attachment

i was actually thinking about this at work the other day, Nokia SHOULD bring out an "O" series of phones ("O" for Oldies)

Next G may suck balls, and i do admit i hate the browsing idea.

but those browsing ideas are to target the people with too much money.

the reason i like next g is the fact that when (no if) i break my phone i can keep the same number without fighting with some idiot that says i can't

either way, out here, its all we got.

Yeah not having to have a punch-on over keeping the same number is a nice change but the rest of it sucks. Its coverage is no way near as good as CDMA its voice quality is worse than the first gen GSM it drops out. most of the phones freeze because the network is so hard on the hardware.

Plus being a telstra product its been released about 4 years before its ready so all the current users are basically telstra BETA testers who are paying (through the nose) for the priveledge.

I actually get better reception on my 3G phone (switched to GSM coverage only) though an external antenna than a mate of mine gets with his Next-G through an external antenna...

i spose it depends on the phone, the 6120 gets great coverage and it isn't a blu tick approved phone, but one of the samsungs is and it doesn't get as good as the nokia.

it all has to do with the way it is used i spose. the little glass mount antennas sometimes do better than the big ones mounted on the bull bar, cause they turn the roof into a giant dish to catch the signal. others just arent designed for that use.

the problem is telstra get cheap crap and sell it. you have to pay big bucks to get a decent phone. sucks, but true.

and even working for a telstra dealer, they stuff us around quite a bit. mongrels

Glass mount cant use the cars body as a dish for a start they are just passive. a good antenna is a hole through style located centrally on the roof of the car because the roof becomes the ground plane. Most bullbar mount ariels are ground independant this gives better coverage than mounting a "proper" ariel to the bull bar because of the polar pattern from the front of the vehicle, but obviously no way near as good as a propper through hole antenna mounted centrally on/through the roof. Plus most people dont like drilling holes through the roof of their car.

The reason not many nokia phones are bluetick is because nokia dont allow connection to an external antenna other than through a passive setup.

The ideal phone for me would be something like the 6230 without a camera that has a connection point to an external antenna

perfect i reckon, forgot all about this beast!

komodo should take a lil ride out of town from time to time, next g is better than cdma ever was (in most area's) most of the problems were actually in the phones themselves, and most people just dont like the idea of change....

also fudd, befor you get/buy one of those motorolas i'd just ask to have a look though one hey, coz i order'd one in for a customer and i couldn't use the thing, so i couldn't sell it as a easy to use handset....

LOL WhiteKnight I trip out of town regularly enough - I clock up about 1100k's a week in my car and I travel to work with dad 2-3 days a week

I also do a lot of remote and regional travelling as a keen camping and 4x4 enthusiast I've even travelled a bit around your great state (though no way near as much as I would like to - I think I have a fair amount of "real world" experiance with these things.

NextG simply is garbage AT THIS STAGE.
I have NO doubt what so ever that NextG will be bloody awesome soon. But much like the whinging that went on when we switched from "analogue" to "CDMA" way back when because CDMA wasnt at the same standard of coverage (though it had the potential, which it soon realised, to be as good as and better than analogue).

But the fact of the matter is they are trying way way too hard to market mobile internet and bull sh!t wank to country and regional users who simply don't want / need that technology and simply want a good phone that can make and receive a phone call.

Look at the F156 its an AWESOME concept they have come a great distance with that phone. Places they went wrong - letting the contract to manufacture the phone (only available to Telstra) to a crap company like ZTE. You wouldnt drive a daewoo lanos up gibb river road - why the funk would you take an equivilant build quality phone up there?
An antenna for greater reception on poor coverage areas - a piss pore flimsy retractable unit? Why not use a decent SME or BNC type mount for a GOOD high gain antenna?
Mini-USB connection for the handsfree kit - are you fricking kidding me. You talking about a phone you want to give to truck drivers, grey nomads, bushies and tradies (probably the hardest people on a phone) and you want them to connect / disconnect it from a pissy little mini usb connection every time they enter / leave the vehicle.
Plus on top of that it has a confusing, slow menu and its basically a POS.

NextG (or any telecomunications infrastructure for that matter) should be government owned and telsra should be purely a retailer and NO telco should have exclusice access to any "network". This would increase take up of new technology and would keep prices down.

i work as a telstra dealer and it's 50/50, half the people say it's got better coverage and the other half sook thats it's not as good as there old cdma phone....

i would have to agree, ZTE really do suck, 4 of there 5 models got recalled with software problems (i now dont sell them)

also komodo have you taked to, or informed telstra that your getting black spots in certin areas with your next g mobile?

Yep - beleive me we pretty much have a direct line with telstra these days after dad went to sue them for a few 100k in damages for providing and installing the wong phone system (a system for land line dialing off the mobile via ISDN and a set of GSM routers) which almost cause several life threatening situations along with lost business due to in opperable phones. They still havent 100% resolved the issues but they are continually working on it.

geez, thats crazy, hope they end up sorting it out for you (and your old man) think a few minesites from around here have done the same thing.

Yeah - on a side note we scored a "$10k" alcatel ISDN "digital" pnoe system our of it for free when they replaced it with a Panasonic plus ive got 3 motorolla GSM routers down stairs doing nothing which i beleive are worth a few hundred dollars each LOL.

Cheers,
Kirk