The TCL 40 XE 5G is now available at a super-low price point.

By Corinne Reichert

Verizon has announced it's the official carrier of TCL Mobile's new
phone, the 40 XE 5G. Even better, the already low price point has
dropped by $50 since the phone's announcement in February, meaning you
can get your hands on a 5G phone for only $120. It has also launched a
month earlier than originally projected.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/verizon-adds-new-low-cost-5g-phone-for-120/

**********************************************************************
* Moderator's Note
* * [RANT]
* * When Verizon sent me a letter that said the "4G" phone my wife had
* been using wasn't "4G" enough for their network, they offered to
* sell me a new, improved, and more sexy instrument that was
* guaranteed to solve the problem - for about $240 dollars. The fact
* that the "new" instrument was *ALSO* "4G" was, AFAICT, supposed to
* serve as a lesson to junior executives-in-traning that the lower
* classes will believe anything: a party favor they could joke about
* while swilling their "Stirred but not Shaken" martinis and laughing
* themselves to sleep every night for a few months.
* * Having helped Motorola to dispose of dated inventory at a nice
* profit - just like RCA and Tung-Sol and Sylvania and all the other
* makers of vacuum tubes had talked the FCC into reassigning the
* Eleven-meter Amateur Radio band to the Citizen's Radio Service, just
* before transistorized designs were to be made available, so that
* they could help to push out millions of CB sets that ran on their
* soon-to-be-worthless inventory - Verizon then reconfigured it’s
* network so that the "Range Extender" I had bought for hundreds of
* dollars when I moved to the high country, where mountains are a dime
* a dozen, but usable Verizon cell towers are nowhere to be found,
* became inoperative. The fact that I capitalized their business,
* saved them the on-so-plebian task of actually building a reliable
* network, and paid for the Internet connection that made it possible,
* well, that just proves that I'm in the lower classes, where ordinary
* people think that the current crop of corporate executives are
* drunken, avaricious tools whom kneel before their betters.
* * [/RANT]
* * Bill Horne
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On 5/10/2023 12:54, The Telecom Digest Moderator wrote:
> The TCL 40 XE 5G is now available at a super-low price point.
>
> **********************************************************************
> * Moderator's Note
> *
> * When Verizon sent me a letter that said the "4G" phone my wife had
> * been using wasn't "4G" enough for their network, they offered to
> * sell me a new, improved, and more sexy instrument that was
> * guaranteed to solve the problem - for about $240 dollars. The fact
> * that the "new" instrument was *ALSO* "4G" was, AFAICT, supposed to
> * serve as a lesson to junior executives-in-traning that the lower
> * classes will believe anything: a party favor they could joke about
> * while swilling their "Stirred but not Shaken" martinis and laughing
> * themselves to sleep every night for a few months.

I understand what you are saying, and feeling, but I'd have to believe
that your wife's former 4G phone was 4G capable in cellular data only.
There are a number of 4G phones which are not VoLTE (Voice over LTE/4G)
compatible -- as in, the voice/text aspect of the phone will only work
over the old CDMA 2/3G networks -- which Verizon is shutting down.

On Wed, May 10, 2023 at 04:23:45PM -0400, Michael Trew wrote:
> On 5/10/2023 12:54, The Telecom Digest Moderator wrote:
> > The TCL 40 XE 5G is now available at a super-low price point.
> >
> > **********************************************************************
> > * Moderator's Note
> > *
> > * When Verizon sent me a letter that said the "4G" phone my wife had
> > * been using wasn't "4G" enough for their network, they offered to
> > * sell me a new, improved, and more sexy instrument that was
> > * guaranteed to solve the problem - for about $240 dollars. The fact
> > * that the "new" instrument was *ALSO* "4G" was, AFAICT, supposed to
> > * serve as a lesson to junior executives-in-traning that the lower
> > * classes will believe anything: a party favor they could joke about
> > * while swilling their "Stirred but not Shaken" martinis and laughing
> > * themselves to sleep every night for a few months.
>
> I understand what you are saying, and feeling, but I'd have to believe that
> your wife's former 4G phone was 4G capable in cellular data only. There are
> a number of 4G phones which are not VoLTE (Voice over LTE/4G) compatible --
> as in, the voice/text aspect of the phone will only work over the old CDMA
> 2/3G networks -- which Verizon is shutting down.

On one hand, that makes sense: the phone wasn't "4g" in the sense that
it didn't have "5G" audio transmission capability. But, on the other
hand, Verizontal conducted a heavy-handed, brazen, fear-based
marketing campaing that ignored their customers' previous investments,
the brand loyalty they could have been building, and the added expense
that I and other customers suffered to buy "range extenders" while
Verizontal took its time figuring out how to extract millions of
dollars in profit from us by dictating a change to a more delicate and
less reliable technology.

Why, I ask, wasn't my wife's phone allowed to continue working through
the "range extender" which I paid them for? Even if only useful as an
in-house phone, it would have taken some of the sting out of the switch.

Why, I ask, wasn't there any explanation of the reason for the order
that I spend hundreds of dollars to replace a useful instrument?
Beyond saying that something called "VOLTE" was involved, Verizontal's
explanation boiled down to saying "You have to buy a new phone."

When, I ask, was Verizontal aware of the number of users that
possessed "CDMA-only" phones, and why didn't it act more quickly to
allow it's customers to prepare for the change? Was the company
betting on a second term for the now Ex-president Trump? Did they hope
to avoid any political interference on behalf of the unions that it is
so afraid of?

That the change to "5G-or else" service was handled in a crude,
arrogant, and dictatorial way is obvious. That Verizontal hopes to
break all the unions and turn their former members into fearful and
maleable task-trained menials is equally obvious.

But, what gals me more than all those things is the way that the best
Congress money can buy went along and allowed it to happen - neither
overseeing the FCC's performance nor intervening to stop such a
vicious and transparent con game.

Bill Horne