I bought this phone because my LG EnV kept turning itself off and I didn't want to extend my contract with Verizon. I did a lot of research and read a lot of reviews before buying it and this one seemed to be the best choice for the price. If you will notice, most of the negative reviews about this phone are directed at the OEM shop and not the phone itself.
I recived the phone and activated it on Verizon. Of course my bill went up by $30 a month and I was unhappy about that. I waited out the rest of my contract and as soon as it was up, I transferred all three of my lines from Verizon to PagePlus via Kittywireless. This process took me about 3 hours. The important thing to remember is not to transfer the parent line first (call Verizon and ask which line is the parent line). All of my phones ported over with absolutely no glitches! There are forms to fill out online for the porting process on Kittywireless and each port costs $15.
Once the phones ported over I got e-mails saying that I was now a PagePlus customer. I was able to quickly set up the phones by following the instructions in the e-mail. Then I went to KittyWireless and put all of the phones on their TNT 1200 auto-pay plan. So each of the phones gets 100mb of data, 1200 minutes and 3000 texts (I ran reports on Verizon.com before switching to be sure this was enough to cover our usage of the phones). This costs me 29.95 per line. I was paying 180.00 a month for my phones on Verizon.
So anyway... back to the Pixi. The data on this phone is super-easy to turn off. You tap on the phone icon, tap on the top left tab that says "Verizon Wireless", tap on preferences and then scroll down and turn data off. This way you aren't using data when you don't need to. I turn my data on once a day to get my MMS messages. And if that's not easy enough, there is an ap you can download (if you put preware on your phone) that toggles your data on and off. I haven't seen anything like this on an android phone.
The phone connects to WiFi without a giltch. You tap on the right top corner, it shows a list of options, you click on wifi and tell it to connect. It will then ask for a password if your wifi is password connected. To save on battery, when you are out of range you can simply turn off wifi AND data.
The battery on the phone can last two days. You just have to make sure to turn WiFi off when it's not in range because it expends a lot of battery power to search for available WiFi.
E-mail sets up easily and if you are connected to 3g or to WiFi it pops up in the bottom part of your phone, you can click on it or slide it off and not see the notification.
The gestures on the phone make it very easy to use. WebOS actually encourages people to develop apps so you can download all kinds of apps for free using preware. I did a youtube search on how to put preware on my phone and a 12 year old kid on the video explained the process easily enough! LOL!
Pandora works well using the WiFi on this phone so I'm not using up all my data to stream music. The phone can do basic web searches and some videos without a problem.
The touchstone charging dock and cover are kind of a nice addition. You just set your phone down and it charges. The phone charges rather quickly compared to androids too. The nicest part about it is that these items cost very little on Amazon. I also got a few covers for just 2 or 3 dollars.
The phone is super slim and I like that a lot. I don't like carrying a brick in my pocket! It's light and small and you can barely notice it in your pocket. There's a silent button on the side of the phone that will put it on vibrate without going through dumb menus or unlocking the phone to try and get it to be silent during meetings and such.
Now here are my gripes:
I have small hands (wedding ring size 5) and it took me a while to get used to the small buttons for texting. There isn't an option for a touchscreen key-board so you are stuck with what you get. Now that I'm used to it, texting is just as quick as it was on the large keypad of my EnV. When I'm texting quckly, for some reason instead of an X, C or V sometimes it inserts a space. So saying live looks more like li e. That's annoying but if I slow down I can take care of it easily enough.
Every once in a while no matter what I try to do with the phone I get a message "too many cards open". All I have to do is push the top power button while turning the volume down. This pops a menu up and gives me the option to restart the phone. After restarting, the phone doesn't give that annoying message anymore. It hasn't happened for about five months now though.
The phone can get glitchy if you have too many things going at once. Like if you are looking at email and running pandora in the back ground and texting it can get slow. Re-starting it the same way I described earlier is helpful and so is cutting down on mulit-tasking.
Taking the cover off is a pain in the behind. I always feel like I'm going to break the back cover but I haven't yet.
Another downside is the fact that there really isn't any new software being developed for the phone. You can get angry-birds and certain games or books on the phone but you aren't going to be the coolest kid on the block with the newest apps.
Overall this phone has helped me save a lot of money. It's capable of doing some things that basic phones can't do. It's still pretty cool but not top of the line which is perfect for me because 100 mb of data can last me a whole month. KittyWireless' coverage has been the exact same as what I had with Verizon. If the TNT 1200 plan isn't enough I can always upgrade to unlimited for $40 or $55. Heck... I want to buy a couple more just to have for back-ups at this price!!
**Update: I've had this phone for a year now and I've gone through 3 back covers for it. Two touchstone covers as well as the original cover. They start peeling apart where the power button is and I can't stand it so I mess with it and the rubber part comes off the back. Also the little magnetic strip for the battery cover falls off quite easily. I just ordered my fourth back cover from Amazon for 4.35 so at least they are cheap.
