Moto X4 and Project Fi

I took advantage of one Black Friday deal this year, for a new phone and carrier service.

My old phone was a Samsung Galaxy S5, which was starting to show its age. I got it last year as a refurbished sale, which was cheap but I knew it wouldn't last for long. It's been acting up recently, with battery issues and needing reboots regularly. As my carrier, I was using H2OWireless, a budget outfit which only cost me about $10/month. It mostly worked, but I had occasional connect troubles, especially when traveling. And I had to very carefully watch every MB of data to avoid high usage charges, which got annoying sometimes.

Google has a fairly new phone service offering called Project Fi, which seems to cover exactly what I'm looking for. It's a bit more expensive at $30/month, but has much better coverage and significantly more data allowance. They credit your next month if you don't use all your data, which I expect will be the case for me more often than not.

I don't need a high-end phone, so I went with the budget option that Google recommends: the Moto X4. $400 with a Black Friday sale giving $100 credit on the Project Fi service. The reviews of the X4 are good for a budget smartphone - some small issues, but nothing that will affect that way I plan to use it.

The hardware arrived today and everything's working as expected so far. I'll be testing the new phone and service out over the next few months, but I don't expect any significant issues. And if anyone decides to try out Google's Project Fi as a service, let me know and I'll share a ref link that gives us both some credit.