(All of this related to the postpaid plans only.

There may be some cap somewhere on the unlimited, but as far as I can tell, they mean proper unlimited. The only conditional is that it's unlimited on device only. Tethering gets cut off at 2.5GB. Each data plan also comes with a (very small) amount of data roaming.

Tethering rules, you get tethering if you have a data plan.

The new postpaid plans have no contract at all service side. The only conditional is that you will sign a contract if you buy a phone from them and choose the installment plan. Then the contract is only in place to indicate the phone will be paid off should service end.

Update: Republic Wireless has a new plan. They'll sell you a Moto X for $299, and then you pay only $40/mo for "unlimited" 4G or $25/mo for 3G (and much less if you only want mobile voice, doing your data purely over WiFi).

The discount on the phone is the real news here. Still, very interesting.

Does anyone here have any experience with Miracast? When this feature was first announced I was really excited about it. But then I started reading the reviews of the available receivers, and it sounds like they're all terrible! The next thing I know the Chromecast is announced and there's no more talk about Miracast.

While I think the Chromecast is a great product, I definitely see uses for Miracast as a technology. For example, on our upcoming trip to Greece, I know we'll have access to TVs with HDMI. I wouldn't expect Chromecast to work in those situations, because I'm sure the clients connecting to those WiFi networks are isolated (at least I hope they are). But Miracast is a peer connection so I don't have to worry about networking.

Has anyone tried it or know of a device that's any good?

I do own this dongle, but I have never used it. The reviews are terrible, as with most of these products. I think a lot of it has to do with user error or the underlying technology just sucks.

If I hook it up within the next few days, I will post here.

Thanks, Rob. I'm curious to hear your impressions. It sounds like these things are almost all terrible. I think it says a lot that since Google announced Miracast support as a part of 4.2, I haven't heard a single thing about it. Not from Google, not from the tech podcasts I listen to, not anywhere. Strange...

For my trip, I ended up just buying this thing, which unlike the Miracast devices gets good reviews. It's not as convenient because you have to plug it in, but that's okay. It'll work with my Nexus 4 and with the Nexus 7 2nd gen that I'm hoping to pick up before we leave. I'm not sure what's different about this from the MHL adapters, but it looks good.

New from T-Mobile: sane international roaming charges -- free SMS, free 2G data, $0.20/min phone calls, and in 100 countries. You can pay additional dollars for blocks of higher-bandwidth data, which falls back to 2G speed when the block is used up.

When I'm on a typical international business trip, I only really need the local phone network while I'm in transit. The destination hotel or university typically has perfectly functional WiFi, and I'll typically not bother with local service, for all the pain of dealing with getting a local SIM card, keeping it charged up, etc. This new T-Mobile thing seals the deal for me. The only missing feature is T-Mobile's WiFi calling, which is only supported on devices you get from them. There's no app or whatnot to enable it in general on devices you bring yourself.

Yeah, this is a pretty amazing offering. Wish they'd announced it *before* I just got my 5S from AT&T, as I probably would have switched just for that. Being able to use a smartphone with data roaming enabled when traveling is very liberating...

(Apple used to have the old "unlimited data anywhere in the world, pretty much" AT&T data plan, which was $20/month extra, but unsurprisingly it was never promoted, and didn't work with tethering. I picked up tethering and dropped that plan, then they stopped offering it. Grrrr).

Wifi calling is built-into the Google Nexus handsets. Do they block that somehow?

My understanding is that T-Mobile does a proprietary GSM-voice-over-IP protocol. Every Android phone you get from T-Mobile has this baked in, but I don't believe it's available on stock Nexus phones. Typical discussion thread. The standard workaround seems to be to install a third-party VoIP client. If you're using a VoIP client that connects to Google Voice and your friends are calling you on that number, then everything seems to work, except you can't roam seamlessly from WiFi to cellular and back like the proper T-Mobile WiFi calling stuff.

Edit: It's not actually proprietary. It's a standard. T-Mobile apparently licenses the relevant code from Kineto.

See also, detailed Verge article.

I bought a Nexus 5 today. That is all.

I bought two: one for me and one for my wife.

The most interesting hardware feature of the Nexus 5 is the amazing list of frequency bands and standards that it supports.

Really, what's not to like about that? I suppose I could find odd things to complain about ("what, only 9 different LTE bands?"), but really, this is very impressive.

One thing I'm wondering about KitKat is that they've apparently gotten rid of the grey/blue transition on the signal strength meters, which previously indicated that your phone was successfully connected to Google's backend servers. I don't know if they've found some other way to indicate this or not.

Oh, is that what the grey/blue means.

Hm, it turns out we actually do have T-Mobile LTE here in Pittsburgh, though I can't vouch for how good the speeds are. Still, there's really nothing about my N4 that needs a spec bump, and I'm a bit disappointed they didn't upgrade the camera sensors in the N5, so I'll probably skip this generation and wait for the next one.

The wireless charging setup does look nice, though -- yay, magnets!

Oh, good question. I wasn't aware they'd done that. I find that extremely useful at the moment. Oh well, it's something I could live with.


Though the camera at least has OIS now, which is nice for my shaky hands. I'm hearing completely mixed things about the camera so far, though. Google really doesn't have a good track record with the cameras in their phones, so I'm not holding out much hope that this one will blow me away. As long as it isn't worse than the N4 I can live with it.


One thing I haven't been able to suss out from the news about the phone: does it have the same always listening that the Moto X has? It appears that the Nexus 5 has auto-listening when the phone is turned on and unlocked, but I haven't seen anyone mention whether it can listen for your keyword when the phone is off...

Anyone know what the deal is with T-Mobile's plan changes and teterhing? I've read conflicting stories about prepaid plans having a limited amount of tethering. I've had no problems tethering on my $30 plan until today, when I got the walled garden "please pay $15 to tether" page. I also can't find anywhere in the T-mo site to see how much tethering my plan has or how much I've used.

On the plus side, I flashed the Nexus 4 LTE enabler, and it seems to be working, so if I do get tethering working, it should be pretty speedy.

Postpaid plans all include tethering (though the unlimited data plan will cap the tethering at some point). Not sure what happened on the prepaid side.

Postpaid, I see my data usage right on the My T-Mobile portal after logging in (https://my.t-mobile.com/). Does prepaid also work to sign into that page?

I can sign in, but I think I get a stripped-down version of the page. I can see minutes and data usage on the front page, but can't find anything for more detailed usage. There is an Android app that shows usage, but it doesn't break out tethering usage separately.

I emailed a Google buddy. Apparently there's a setting, buried in there, to make the signal indicators turn orange when you're *not* connected to the Google mothership. It's just not on by default.

That's interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about that as a design. I feel like the orange would look like the "good" state, but I haven't seen the effect for myself. I guess I don't see my phone doing this a lot anyway. It's usually when it gets back into a good signal area and is re-establishing a connection.

I haven't seen the phone, so this is purely a guess on my part. Orange is pretty close to red, which is used to stand out and let you know 'something isn't right'. That would be my guess why they used orange, to draw your attention to it, as an alert.

I don't see this setting. Not even in the hidden developer menu.

I did notice the signal bars were orange in the "quick settings" toggles when connection with Google was lost. Hopefully this isn't all we get.

Re-reading the email, that looks like it's indeed all we get. I wouldn't be surprised if the CyanogenMod people come up with something more configurable and such, but Google has apparently decided to keep it simple.