unmesh

I've been looking for a phone for travel and this would be perfect.

Is it possible to tell whether the phone is a US or International version by looking at the unopened box? I'm thinking of ordering one with local store pickup and returning it on the spot if it is the US one.

Thanks.

IsleOfMan

I think on Slickdeals they've reported some occasional disparity between the model number on the box and what's inside, but physical Sears stores will take returns even if opened.

AnalogMan

Not sure how easily achievable $100 is, but I have one suggestion that will make the search much easier: Forget LTE. There are too many bands, and it is not practical to have a phone that works on every band (and thus everywhere), certainly not for a budget phone.

If you are willing to step down to a phone with penta-band HSPA (which is still plenty fast), you should have high speed data connection everywhere a network exists. A good sample phone is the Nexus 4. You can buy a good refurbished one $150. Probably can buy one for $100 off the big auction site, but may not be the most pristine sample.

Moto G LTE fixes a few of the deficiencies of the original Moto G. It is penta-band HSPA, plus it does have some LTE bands (consider that as a bonus). The addition of a microSD slot is also quite helpful. But you need to be careful and buy the one that is straight from Motorola. The ones from the carriers (AT&T, Cricket, US Cellular) may not have the exact same specifications. New $219 from Motorola, $150 or less resale on the big auction site.

Nexus 4 is older than Moto G LTE, but is a higher performance phone (at the expense of battery life).

I have both a Nexus 4, was my daily phone until yesterday when I decided to switch to my Amazon Fire Phone full-time, and a Cricket branded Moto G LTE. I will probably sell the Moto G LTE and keep my Nexus 4 as my travel phone (so following my own advice ). I also find it's easier to have a travel phone that uses micro sim than a nano sim. I can always punch a micro sim from a mini sim, but using non-factory cut nano sim is much more dicey.

Blu phones are not bad, but support is pretty much non-existent. Accessory availability and replacement parts availability is quite low (or very expensive). You should assume no Android OS updates. I have a Blu Vivo 4.3 that I used as my travel phone until last year. I broke one of the sim slots (dual sim phone - and a stern warning about using sim adapters), and Blu was no help. I ended up kludging a fix myself. It's running Android 4.1.1, thankfully is not vulnerable to Heartbleed, and I am quite sure there is no chance of update. In fact, it shipped with Android 4.0 and I had to upgrade it to 4.1.1 myself, there was no OTA update.

If the price target is the highest priority, then some compromise will have to be made. I am not aware of a widely available phone that has penta-band HSPA and good vendor OS support at $100.

PS: You can get a Cricket branded Moto G LTE for $25 after rebate, but there are some hoops you have to jump through, and as a Canadian resident, that would be hard. The Cricket Moto G LTE is de-featured vs. the one straight from Motorola, but I haven't been able to confirm the details (I suspect dropping 900MHz HSPA and ROM disables hotspot feature are the big items). That phone is selling for ~100 unlocked (so will work on non-Cricket networks) on the big auction site, and might be worth a look.

PPS: For the purposes of my post UMTS = HSPA = HSDPA = Faux 4G = 3.5G. Bandwidth is enough to stream music and movies (but likely not full HD). Ping (latency) should be acceptable for VoIP, but might not be great. Of course, that assumes no network congestion, but in that case everyone phone on the network is probably crawling along.

AnalogMan

Actually, upon further consideration, I decided to put in a good word for the Amazon Fire Phone too, one a big caveat that you only buy it at the $199 or $189 (or lower if AMZN gets really desperate to unload them) price, with a year of Prime included. That gets the phone net down to $100.

It's unlocked, has penta-band HSPA, and decent number of LTE bands. The camera is quite good (and free photo storage in Amazon Cloud). Gorilla Glass 3 front and back, lots of RAM (2GB) and storage (32GB), with very fast processor.

App availability is as good as Google Play Store, but mostly solvable if you are willing to fiddle with it and sideload apps.

It also uses a Nano sim, and can be finicky about non-factory cut ones. I am quite good at cutting and sanding them down (nano sims are thinner than mini and micro sims), but my Fire Phone would not read one of them (it took three others). It's probably a small risk though as Apple is making Nano sim more prevalent in the world.

It's amazing how much a $250 discount ($449 vs. $199) improves my opinion of a phone

theshaun

Thank you all for the responses. It looks like my best bet is the moto e or g global gsm which seem to work in US or Europe just fine

Tizzette

On Amazon there is extensive information and discussion of whether to get US or Global versions of Moto G and what bands are supported. You can be sure of which version you need and which one you are ordering.