wiggle's blog

An update on my flip phone

Hey! I started writing this while waiting on a plane. We'd left the gate, found a reportedly small mechanical issue after 15 minutes of taxiing, called someone to repair the plane and discovered we'd have to return to the gate. The flight was scheduled to depart at 20:00. It's exactly midnight right now and we're about to push back. The centre fuel tank was INOP, and we couldn't get a fuel truck for a manual measurement til now.

Anyways, the flip phone.

One of the issues I reported in my last post was a lack of data with my carrier, Google Fi. Turns out the reason behind this was not fixable - Fi requires the 4G bands 2 and 4, neither of which the KY-42C had. I don't remember if I saw this before purchasing, but I assumed the phone would work as I had seen people reporting it working on Fi. A month after I started writing this, one of the people replied, saying they needed to find a tower with band 2 and use their smartphone's hotspot to activate the flip phone... which confuses me, because the phone doesn't have band 2. So does Google Fi check what band the tower using their information instead of the phone's antenna? I'm not sure. According to Mint Mobile, I have band 2 in my area... but I never tried to activate using my smartphone's hotspot.

Thankfully, I could still return the phone (I bought it from a seller on eBay), and the A202KC, another Kyocera keitai with Android 10, supported the two required bands. The phone came in an impressive two days, and I was able to root it within 20 minutes of opening it (practise makes perfect!). My guide is accurate for the A202KC as well as the KY-42C. Google Fi works (still requires Play Services/microG to function), and so do MMS and data. The only APN I have is as follows:

Name: ims
APN: ims
APN type: ims
APN protocol: IPv4/IPv6
APN roaming protocol: IPv4/IPv6
Bearer: unspecified
MVNO type: None

I sourced this from Phobos' A202KC master guide in an attempt to get VoLTE working. I don't have it working, but they do (on a different carrier). Fi's APN disappears soon after entering it. I think the app configures whatever it needs on its own. No APN required.
Edit: I'm not sure if this does anything, and I may have already had VoLTE working. I do not get any specific indicator, though I'm not sure I've seen one before on an Android device. Maybe that's just a Fi thing? Unsure.

One issue that persists is the phonebook. I like the way both Docomo and Softbank's phonebooks integrate with the launcher, so I'd like to use it. I sync my contacts from my Gmail account using DAVx. In either phonebook app, contacts synced this way return a NullObjectException in Logcat and the app crashes on the phone. I can still see the information of a contact in Link Now (opened by pressing the call button on the home screen) and I can freely edit any contact.

Another is with messaging apps other than the default and Google Messages. Sometimes notifications aren't dispatched, seemingly because a Mediatek process kills other apps' processes. The issue can be tracked on the QUIK repository. Phobos seems to have a fix using App Settings Reborn, an Xposed module. Enable "Resident" for QUIK, then disable battery optimisation for QUIK and ASR in the system settings. I'm still testing this.

Using the phone in daily life works. The Transit app frequently crashes, especially on low battery (or in new locations? could be a GPS thing). I'm not sure if this is an out-of-memory issue, as I have tried fully closing all other apps to no avail. When the phone runs out of memory, the C9 cursor is killed, which is annoying when I'm trying to use it. I love the TT9 keyboard, though I wish that it was usable in some system apps. The microphone is good when recording video. The camera is perfectly fine, and honestly better than I was expecting.

I can't think of anything to add here, but I probably will at some point. It's been more than a month since I started this, and I just want to get this out.

Contact me: wiggle@mailbox.org

Edits:

#a202kc #android #ky-42c #tech