89. Resident Exclusive Miniseries- Choosing the Right Phone

In this episode, we dive into the world of cell phones and VoIP landline phones with Michael Lynn, Resident Technology Support Analyst at Parasol Alliance. Whether you're considering a new phone or exploring VoIP options, this episode breaks down everything you need to know!

Michael covers the pros and cons of iPhones, Android phones, and Jitterbug phones—helping you decide which one best suits your needs. Plus, he shares expert tips on saving money when buying a new phone and accessories. We also explore VoIP phones, what they are, and how they compare to traditional landlines.

Topics Covered:
✅ iPhone vs. Android: Which is better for you?
✅ The best budget-friendly smartphone options
✅ How to save money on phone accessories
✅ What are VoIP phones, and should you switch?

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi, my name is Michael Lynn, resident Technology assistant with Parasol Alliance. I'm based out of Champaign, Illinois. Today we'll be talking about cell phones and VoIP, landline phones. First, we'll go ahead and talk about cell phones. So there's three major. Groups with cell phones when you're looking to get a new one.

They'll have Apple iPhones. They'll have Android phones, and there's another one that's not as common, but it is called a jitter bug phone. And we'll get into kind of why these are good and why they're bad kind, the pros and cons of them. But just to start off. The Apple iPhones are the most expensive in the group.

This is mainly because they have a lot of proprietary software on there, which just means a lot of software that works with Apple products. So if you have anything like an Apple TV, [00:01:00] an AirPod, Apple Watch, all of those different items will work a lot better with iPhones. So they have that software in there to make it work better.

So they do raise the prices of their phones a little bit as well as a lot of people know what iPhones are, so they just have that credibility in the market to make them a little bit more expensive. iPhones do provide a lot of accessibility features as well, so they have a lot of things on there to make the phone easier to use, easier things to hear, see all those different features that you might want on a phone.

And we're gonna move on to Android. So in regards to pricing, it is about in the middle of the pack. They are cheaper than iPhones but they can be a little bit same price or more expensive depending on what kind of phone you're getting. If it's the newest one or older. Androids do have a lot of customization on them but it can cause some issues if you customize too much or it can be too overwhelming at times.

So that's the downside [00:02:00] of it. But you can change a lot of things. If you're very familiar with smartphones, you can change it to whatever you'd like it to be. How you like to see where the apps are, how they look, all that kind of stuff. They do have accessibility settings as well, but what I'll say is they have the basic settings that need to be in there for hard of hearing.

If you have sight issues, anything like that. They do have features that can help you. But I would say iPhones have some better features on there that help you out a little bit more. And then to go into the last category, the Jitterbug phone. These are the cheapest phones in the group. But they are the easiest phones to use.

So they're pretty generic. They're very simplistic. There's not many things on the phone that you can do, but it can do all those basic things you need it to do, like calling, texting, checking your email, and any other basic things you wanna do on a smartphone. So to get started, we'll go ahead and talk about iPhones and go into a deeper dive into how much they cost, some of the benefits of them, and kinda the [00:03:00] features they have.

So when you're buying an iPhone, something I always recommend to anyone who's trying to always buy the one below the current version or even the one below that. A lot of the upgrades they make on iPhones don't really have that much of a benefit. Most of the time it's something to do with the camera.

They'll make the camera better. Or they're gonna make the battery last just a little bit longer. But for the most part, if you get an iPhone 14 compared to the newest one, iPhone 16, there really won't be too much of a difference on what you can do with those phones. Another thing I would mention, and this goes for really any phone I would always get the case and screen protector somewhere other than the store.

So when I say the store places, like if you're going to AT&T or Verizon or something to get a new phone to upgrade those cases will always be a little bit upcharge because they know people are going in to get new phones. So they have those cases available. And they have them all on a set price for the most part, [00:04:00] depending on the case.

But I would always go through something like Amazon. They have some pretty good cases on there that are pretty durable as well as screen protectors that work just as good as any other ones at a lot cheaper of a price. So that's something else you can definitely take a look at. And again, this is really for any phone in general.

The cases are gonna be a little bit more expensive at the store rather than buying them online through Amazon or anyone else. And then to go over the pricing for these iPhones. The average price for an iPhone 14 is about $500. iPhone 15 is about $600 to $700, and the newest one at the lowest is about $700 or $800

and again, these are all the lowest prices for these phones. So if you wanted to get an upgrade in the storage or if you wanted to make the phone a little bit bigger, they have something called XS Maxes. And they just basically take that iPhone 14 and just increase the size of it. So if you want to get those features or anything like that, it will be even more than that.

But it's something if you want, you can definitely get, but just [00:05:00] something to think about when checking out all these different phones. Another key thing that a lot of people ask about is the storage and the battery of these iPhones, like I just mentioned, there's gonna be a wide variety of different sizes for these iPhones, such as 32 gigabytes, 64, 128, 256, all the way up to 512.

It is a little bit overkill once you get to higher storages. But if it's something you might need on your phone, if you take a lot of pictures or if you have a lot of documents, whatever the case is, you might want to get that more storage on the phone. Another way to get a lot of storage on your phone without having to pay that much.

From upgrading the phone to that base $500 to, let's say $600 or $700, just for more storage. Something you can do is called iCloud. iCloud provides some storage on your phone, five gigabytes for free. But if you do want to get, let's say, 50 or even a hundred gigabytes of iCloud storage, you could get that for about [00:06:00] $1 or $2.

They make it relatively cheap, I would always recommend something like this if you want just a little bit more storage on the phone. You already have your phone, so you can't upgrade the storage in it right now. This is one way that you can get that more storage without having to upgrade the phone itself and just to go over what iCloud is on an iPhone.

Basically, it's just a way of storing any pictures, documents, texts, emails. That doesn't store it on your phone directly. So iCloud would store that information on their own server through Apple, and then that wouldn't take up any storage on your phone. It would be its own iCloud storage linked with your account.

So it's nice to have, if you wanna be able to back up your phone as well and keep everything on there just in case you lose it or anything like that. Just another advantage that Apple has, but Android does have a similar feature to it that we'll go over regarding the battery. iPhone batteries last roughly eight hours.

Really depends on which version of the phone you get. [00:07:00] The newer ones, I will say the battery gets better and better every year, so it lasts longer. So it just depends on how often you're using your phone. If you are not able to get a charger most days, you might want the longer battery life. It all depends on how you use it, where you use it, and how you want to utilize it.

And then to go over the accessibility features with the iPhones. They do have a lot of different ones, such as assistive touch, assistive access, things for hard of hearing with hearing aids, things that make things easier to see with increased zoom. And that picture on that right side there is what assistive access would look like.

So this feature makes all the apps. On an iPhone, pretty generic and simplistic. You can see in that picture on the right, it just shows you, let's say your calls, camera, and photos and keeps things all in a straight line for you. So it's not hard to find things. You don't have trouble seeing 'em. It just in general makes the phone easier to use, but it does limit a lot of the things you can do with it.

So I wouldn't [00:08:00] recommend it for somebody who. Likes to customize their phone or change things around or knows how to go around with a smartphone. This would be more for people who maybe have never used a smartphone before or don't feel really comfortable with one. This will make it a much easier transition for you.

We'll go ahead and move on to the next phone. So now we'll talk about Android phones, the differences between them and iPhones and what you might want if you were gonna get one. So on that right hand side there, this is what most generic Android's home screens look like. So pretty similar to an iPhone.

You can customize anything you like with it and you can get almost all the same apps with it. One thing I will say is Android has a lot more apps available on their store mainly because they don't have as strict policies, so more apps can be pushed through. But Apple does have mostly all the same apps that Androids does.

And just to talk about the price difference of an iPhone to an Android phone. The average [00:09:00] android phone which we'll use Samsung as a company but a lot of different companies do make Android phones. The average price is around $300, $300 to $400, and then it'll go up as you get those newer phones.

And then the cheaper iPhones are roughly about $500 to $600. Androids are a lot cheaper than iPhones, but they don't offer all the same accessibility settings. If you have been using an iPhone, you might just like how it looks, you know where things are, where to find things. So it all depends on your preference and how you want to use it in regards to the storage or battery.

In general, Android phones from Samsung have more storage than iPhones. If you were to compare when you know the phone was released to the same iPhone in that release here, androids typically have more storage. Their battery life lasts a little bit longer, and these are the main differences that they try to sell so that they can get people to switch over from Apple products to Android products.

So they, they can't always do some things like the [00:10:00] proprietor software that Apple has to work with all their other products, but they can put more into the phone to make it better for the user. But again, Androids have a lot of customization on it. So if you don't really want to customize your phone that much. I wouldn't really recommend an Android, but it is more for the advanced user. As for the accessibility, I went over it a little bit. But Android does have those basic ones where, you know, if you have hard of hearing, they can increase the volume.

If you have hard of sight, they can make the apps bigger. If you wanna be able to do speech to text, that feature's also available and a lot other ones. So Androids do have those accessibility features on them, but like I was saying, it's a little bit harder to find them. Things in Android phones are just don't work as good as Apple, but in general, for the most part, Android phones will work pretty similar to Apple phones.

Just a few different things with it. If you have a preference on how things look, how things are, definitely [00:11:00] compare Androids and Apple iPhones next to each other, see how you like them and go from there. If you don't really want to pay that much for a phone, you just want a basic phone, just be able to call, text, maybe get email and surf the web.

That's where the Jitterbug phone will come in. These phones are pretty easy to use and available at retailers like Best Buy and Walmart, as well as the main website for Jitterbug. The company that provides these phones is called Lively, and they offer pretty cheap service along with the phone itself.

So the flip phone that you're seeing on that right side. Costs about $48, and that smartphone costs about $72. So they're relatively cheap compared to iPhones especially, and even Androids. But they're very basic. You're just calling people, you're just texting. It does have a camera.

And you can surf the web on it, but if you're trying to do that on a flip phone, it might be a little bit harder to [00:12:00] do. So all depends on who you are. If you're not too familiar with smartphones, you might like that flip phone. If you just want a random phone to use, you might get the smartphone version of it.

But it all does depend on what kind of phone you need, how frequent you use your phone, and how experienced you are with smartphones or these type of phones. To go over the storage and battery regarding jitterbug phones. The battery typically is about five hours. If they're being used for, a lot of time, maybe the whole time.

And then if you're just taking random calls, you just have it on your desk or table and every now and then somebody calls you pick it up. It should last about 12 hours for you. And the same thing goes with those iPhones and Androids as well. All of those hours that I mentioned before or if you're using the phone continuously through that whole time, that's when they'll eat up the battery.

But if you're really not using the phone, if you're just mainly calling people, texting, stuff like that, it won't use up as much battery as it would if you're [00:13:00] streaming something, watching a video, anything like that. They have that camera and web browser feature on there, but they're not as utilized on these phones as they are on other ones like Androids and iPhones.

In regards to the accessibility with these phones, it is extremely easy to use them. As you can see, kinda on the picture on the right, there's not much to it. It looks a lot like that Apple Assistive A ccess I mentioned earlier where it's just big icons. You're not doing too much with the phone as well as there's not many features on there, so you can't get confused.

Or if you misclick something it's easy to get back. They have a lot of these accessibility features built into the phone, so you don't have to go into settings and adjust them. They're just kinda already on there making the apps bigger. You could have the apps like say what they are as well if you're have Heart of Sight, anything like that.

And these phones are just very simple not much to them. But if that's something you're interested in, then definitely get one of these funds. [00:14:00] And that is it for all the cell phones I'll be talking about. And this next portion I'll be talking about VoIP phones. So what are VoIP phones? A VoIP phone is a type of a landline phone that's connected over the internet instead of a traditional telephone line.

So you wouldn't be going through a telephone company like at and t or Verizon or anything like that. You'd be going through the service of the company that gives you that VoIP phone. And we'll go over that a little bit later. So this would really be used only in instances where you wanna keep your landline phone.

Let's say the building doesn't have telephone lines in it, so you can't use any telephone lines, but you still wanna keep your number. You wanna keep that same landline phone you use but you don't have a telephone line. That's where the Voight phone will come in. You'll be able to connect this phone to your landline phone.

And then most of these companies have a thing on here where you can change your number to your previous number. So if it was from [00:15:00] AT&T, you can transfer that number over to, let's say Vonage or Ooma. And I'll go ahead and talk about that now. So the different companies that do offer these VoIP phones are mainly Vonage and Ooma.

The main differences between these two companies is Vonage requires you to have a hard wired connection or an ethernet cable to plug into for it to work. And this one you to go in your router. But Ooma is able to be run wirelessly over the internet, so there's no hard wired connection needed, but it is available if you like it.

And we'll go ahead and talk about these two different companies and what are the pros and cons of them are. Ooma is that first one you're seeing at the top with the black box, Kinda looks like a flower. That service costs about a hundred dollars to buy that device, and then the service itself is $10 per month.

And again, you would be using this if you wanted to have a landline phone. You don't have a telephone line, but you do have the internet connection. [00:16:00] This Ooma device would be able to connect to the Wi-Fi or an ethernet. And then you'd be able to call people like how you normally do with your landline phone if you don't have a telephone line in your area.

But there have been some known issues with Ooma devices having issues over the Wi-Fi, disconnecting, things like that. So it is recommended to have an ethernet cord. But again, these are really the only company that offers wireless VoIP phones. We'll go over Vonage as well. They only do their phone service over an ethernet cord or hardwired.

This makes it so you don't really ever lose connection to your phone. You don't have any many issues as Ooma might have. But it kinda limits what you can do. If let's say you don't have an ethernet port in your room or anything, or any close by, you wanna go over Wi-Fi that's when you would get that Ooma phone and Vonage does have almost identical prices to Ooma.

It's a hundred dollars for the device and then $10 for the service per month afterwards. [00:17:00] And that is it for the presentation. Thank you guys for listening.