From: William Park via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
So, it seems I need to get a new phone. Where do you buy a phone nowadays?
Many places. How much work do you want to put in the purchase? Looking for deals can take as much time as you give it. I'm guessing that you want to buy a phone outright rather than have a fee tacked onto a postpaid service plan. Your provider (Freedom) sells phones. My impression is that the price is OK but not a bargain (but I haven't done research). They have an online tool to check how compatible a phone is to their bands (which are uncommon). Some phones qualify for "Wi Fi calling" the phone tunnels voice traffic through the internet, solving some coverage problems. Best Buy has reasonable prices and occasional sales. Ditto Walmart. Beware: their online stores have a lot of listings from third party vendors. Telling which are sketchy can be difficult. There are second-tier resellers on ebay / kijiji / walmart marketplace / Best Buy marketplace / amazon. I tend to buy cheap phones -- in our household, we don't use the phones a lot and don't get much extra joy from a wonderful phone. Pixel phones from the 8 on have quite long software/firmware support. I value that. iPhones have long support life too. Most other phones have horribly short software support. - bought a Pixel 8 for a good price from a Red Flag Deals buy/sell/trade forum. I was naive: the phone stopped working after a few months because the vendor didn't keep paying his phone service contract. That was a painful lesson - I bought a replacement Pixel 8 from Best Buy, a Geek Squad certified open box. So far that has been good. I've purchased phones from the loblaws phone stores. Not recently.