Tag: poco f3

Day 734 – Fixing my new phone

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Or: How to enable WiFi Calling on the POCO F3. Solved.
tl;dr? – scroll to the bottom of this post.

The cell phone signal is awful here Chez 6000… so I wanted (needed?) to get a phone which supported WiFi Calling, so that I could hook onto the (very good) internet here to make calls.

The Poco F3 does have WiFi Calling, but could I find a way of getting it to work?
No, I couldn’t.

Pages of online instruction booklets, forums, subreddits and Youtube videos were no help. My cellular provider was no help. With the evidence of WiFi Calling being available on the Poco F3 right in front of him, the guy even told me that the Poco F3 probably didn’t have it.
He opened a support request ticket. I have never heard back from them.
Which cellular provider was this? It doesn’t matter: they’re all equally useless.

But then I found this video:

Which told me a lot of the same stuff that I had seen before, but added an extra step.

Suffice to say, my WiFi Calling is now enabled. What a relief.

So, you can watch the video if you want (and it’s brilliantly and clearly explained), but if it’s a case of tl;dw, and for all the search engines out there:

How to enable WiFi Calling on the POCO F3. Solved.
Go to dialer on your phone.
Dial *#*#86583#*#*
Wait for “carrier check disabled” message.
Dial *#*#869434#*#*
Wait for “carrier check disabled” message.
Go to Settings > SIM cards and Mobile Networks > SIM 1
Click “Use VoLTE” and “Make calls using WiFi” switches to on.
Change “Network Preferences” to “Prefer WiFi”.

You are done. Bob can like to be your uncle.

Day 699 – Phone trouble

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My Sony XZ Premium is 5 years old and in phone years, that makes it 100 years old. I’m sure that you can do the rudimentary calculation to switch between actual years and phone years, despite it being a concept I just made up. Anyway, as with many things 100 years old, my Sony XZ Premium is struggling a bit with getting things done, it’s running out of energy and it’s not always able to connect wirelessly to my car anymore.

Sadly, its life is nearly at an end.

I’m not one for paying our local cellphone companies through the nose (or any other orifice) for the privilege of buying a new phone through them, so I’m looking to buy a handset outright and just lob my existing SIM card into it.

First thought, (obviously) a new Sony, but then I saw the price. I know that this switch was going to be expensive, but that was clearly (a long way) out of reach. Samsung doesn’t interest me, Huawei is a no go and I would rather be strung up by cheese wire around my nether regions than ever own an iPhone.

Not even joking.

Suddenly, the playing field is narrowed somewhat. The Google Pixel 6 Pro seemed to be an obvious choice, but The Guru reports some nasty bugs, even though we’re several months down the line from its launch.

And so, with limited time in which to get this organised, I are back to the drawing board. Am I looking at the Poco F3 (another The Guru suggestion) or a more basic Sony?

For me, the camera is probably the most important part of the whole phone, and the Pixel wins hands down on that, but there’s no use in having a great camera and getting great images when you can’t access them because the fingerprint sensor doesn’t work. But then is there any point in having easy access to your images, only to realise that they’re all rather crap?

Ugh. Such an important decision and nothing is jumping out to assist me.