walk you through each of these components and how they affect using your Galaxy S6 in the following sections.
Voice usage is the most common, costly, and complex element of most service plans. Cellular providers typically offer plans with a certain number of anytime minutes and a certain number of night/weekend minutes. Some providers offer plans with reduced rates (or even free calls) to frequently called numbers, to other phones with the same cellular provider, or to other mobile phones in general. If you talk a lot, you might be able to opt for an unlimited voice plan (for domestic calls only).
At its core, a Galaxy S6 phone device is, obviously, a phone. In the early days of smartphones, manufacturers were stung by the criticism that smartphones weren’t as easy to use as traditional mobile phones. Indeed, you do have to bring up the phone screen to make a call (more on making and receiving calls in Chapter 3). As an improvement, Samsung has made sure that the screen used to make calls is only one click away from the Home screen.
A texting “bundle” is an add-on to your voice plan. Some service plans include unlimited texting; others offer a certain number of text messages for a flat rate. For example, maybe you pay an additional $5 per month to get 1,000 free text messages – meaning that you can send and receive a combined total of 1,000 messages per month. If you go over that limit, you pay a certain amount per message (usually more for text messages you send than those you receive).
As with voice, the Galaxy S6 phone makes texting very convenient, which in turn makes it more likely that you’ll use this service and end up using more texts than you expect. However, nothing obligates you to buy a texting plan.
My advice is to get at least some texting capability, but be ready to decide if you want to pay for more or stay with a minimal plan and budget your texts.
Although getting texting may be optional, access to the Internet is essential to get the full experience of your Galaxy S6 phone. The Internet, which is sometimes called “the cloud” (after the way it’s symbolized in network diagrams) is where you access the capabilities that make the Galaxy S6 phone so special. Some cellular carriers may let you use the phone on their network without a data plan, but I cannot imagine why you’d want to do that. Although your phone will supplement the coverage you get from your cellular carrier with Wi-Fi, you really need to have a data plan from your cellular carrier to get most of the value out of your investment in your phone. There’s just no getting around it.
Most cellular companies price Internet access with usage increments measured in hundreds of megabytes (MB), but more often in gigabytes (GB).
Some cellular carriers make it easy by only offering unlimited data as an option. This is good news: As you customize your phone to keep up with your friends and access your favorite sites, the cost of access won’t increase. There are no big surprises in store for people who choose this plan, even if it comes at an initially higher price.
Other carriers just offer very large “buckets” of data. In any case, it can be a challenge to figure out how much data you are going to need without going over the limit and paying a usage penalty. Some carriers try to help you by giving you some tools to estimate your usage by estimating the number of e-mails, web pages, or multimedia files you plan to download.
These plans are a bit iffy. One option is to go with the lowest increment of data, unless you plan to be downloading a large number of videos. You can use some of the tools I cover later to see how much data you’re actually using.
Another school of thought is to go for an increment or two of data larger than what you think you’ll need. After you’ve built up some history, you can call your carrier to scale back your usage if appropriate. An upgrade to the next bucket runs about $10 monthly.
A popular option is to combine your usage of voice, text, and data with that of your family members. The family unit on the plan gets to share a fixed allotment of voice minutes, texts, and data. This works well, as long as a responsible person checks your usage during the billing period!
If you travel internationally with your Galaxy S6, you should check with your carrier about your billing options before you travel. Voice and text are usually not too bad when you roam internationally. Data is another story.
Rates for data when you’re roaming internationally can be very high. You can end up with a very unpleasant situation if you don’t check the rates and plan accordingly.
Don’t forget that some web-based services charge subscription fees. For example, WeatherBug offers a consumer service that gives you weather conditions, but it also offers WeatherBug Plus that provides more information – with a monthly fee to subscribers with no ads. Yup, if you want WeatherBug Plus on your phone, you have to pay the piper. Some of these services can be billed through your cellular carrier (check first), but just make sure you’re willing to pony up for the service.
With a few exceptions, such as an “unlocked” GSM phone, each phone is associated with a particular cellular company. (In this context, a locked phone can work only on its original carrier.) Maybe you bought a secondhand phone on eBay, or you got a phone from a friend who didn’t want his anymore. If you didn’t get your phone directly from a cellular provider, you will need to figure out which provider the phone is associated with and get a service plan from that company. Some Galaxy S6 phones sold in the United States all have the cellular company’s logo on the phone printed on the front. That makes it easy to know under which carrier a phone will operate.
If there’s no logo on the front, you’ll have to figure out which cellular carrier it can work with. The quickest way is to take the phone to any cellular store; the folks there know how to figure it out.
To narrow down the possibilities on your own, you need to do some investigation. Take off the back of the phone to find the plate with the model and serial number for the phone. If you see IMEI on the plate, the phone is based on a technology called Global System for Mobile (GSM); it’ll work with AT&T, T-Mobile, MetroPCS (or all of them). If you see ESN on the plate, the phone will work with Verizon, Sprint, or U.S. Cellular.
Surviving Unboxing Day
When you turn on your phone the first time, it will ask you a series of ten questions and preferences to configure it. Frankly, they are trying to make this book unnecessary and put me out of business. The nerve!
The good folks at Samsung are well-intentioned, but not every customer who owns a Samsung Galaxy S6 knows, from day one, whether he or she wants a Samsung account, what’s a good name for the phone, or what the purpose of a Cloud service, such as Dropbox, and how it would be used.
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