VM Android Venture for $29.99, keyboard phone

My daughter has this phone and likes it.
The keyboard is tiny and the screen is small but it does have a keyboard.
Don't forget to CashBack with fatwallet!
Virgin Mobile has 300 minute and unlimted web (2.5gig) and unlimited Text for $35 a month.

Available from VM. Linky

Pic not related.

As a Wi-Fi keyboard, this is a great deal. Yeah, this phone has epic shortcomings, but for single-use purposes, who cares? In for one.

pwdbyamd said:   Target had tons of these sitting on the endcap for a while at 70% off. Nobody seemed to be buying them.

YMMV as with all things Target, my Target(s) didn't/hasn't clearance them.

I'm surprised this isn't gaining more interest. There's a lot of things you can do with a $29 Gingerbread gadget with a QWERTY keyboard. From retro gaming to VNC keyboarding... this device can do it for a trip to the Olive Garden price.

Here's another point of view on this phone:

I find the keyboard to be absolutely awful, I can barely use it. Battery life is terrible. The headphone jack doesn't work with aux-in or an FM transmitter (it detects headphones electrically rather than by a physical switch operated by insertion of the plug). WiFi reception is weak. Storage space is minuscule; it's almost full with the OEM bloatware alone. It runs very slow, and sometimes that makes it unresponsive to input. The screen is small with low resolution. Volume is rarely loud enough.

However, this is the right phone for me when it's at a price like this. It's the Android smartphone that I can have, instead of dumbphone that I'd otherwise have. I bought 3 at Target when they were $24.xx.

I hate holsters; I carry my phone in my pocket. Sometimes it has to share my pocket with my keys. Sometimes I lift/carry heavy stuff and whatever is in my pocket is in danger. I can't risk an expensive phone, and most are physically larger too, so they'd be at even more risk. If this phone gets crushed in my pocket while I'm laying under my car working on it, I'm out $24.xx.

With three of them for less money than one of anything else, I have three batteries (so I can carry an extra battery or two if I expect to be away from chargers all day). I rooted mine; I was able to delete bloatware and use link2sd to 100% move most of my apps to the SD card, so the space issue is significantly improved. I use androidscreencast (when at a computer) or Google voice recognition for a lot of my typing (there's also a program that lets you use a computer as your input method over wifi). A $2 adapter from eBay activates the headphone jack AND has a microphone so I can use my aux-in to pipe conversations and music through my car stereo, which of course gets as loud as I need.

So there you have it...it's a piece of crap out of the box, but still worthwhile, and there are major improvements you can do too.

thrunner said:   Can you use this as an android device on wifi, without activating it with VM? Thanks.
Yes. It occasionally nags you about activating but it's not very annoying.

Hi everyone, I happened on one of Virgin Mobile's notorious Bait & Switch promotions recently, offering the VM-branded Venture for $19.99, which has got to be the cheapest no-contract Android phone ever.

It’s known variously as the Virgin Mobile TCT Venture, the ZTE Venture, the Alcatel Venture, the Juke 3, and the Juke 910c. That info is good to know, as it gives you a better selection when buying accessories online from, say, eBay or Amazon.

I decided to pick up a couple with an eye towards using them as spares/loaners/emergency phones. The idea was to set them up on a cheap Pay-As-You-Go account (similar to T-Mobile's on GSM), where you can get a year of service for around $150, extend it every year for about $10, and the unused minutes carry over. I figured that having web connectivity over wi-fi was better than nothing at all.

So far I haven't been able to find a cheap PAYG plan for CDMA, but seeing as there isn't a ton of info out there regarding using the Venture without activating it on VM, I thought I'd put together a mini-review for folks who bought (or received) them as Christmas presents and don't want to sign up for the cheapest available ($35.00 per month) from VM. Basically this is about using the Venture as a wi-fi only device.

This is a decent little phone. Performance-wise, it throws rocks at my old T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, which is odd because the specs are very similar.
Image quality is nothing to write home about, probably the worst I’ve seen in an Android phone. But swiping back and forth and navigating menus is relatively smooth. The included YouTube app works pretty well, although the audio is a little weak, even at full volume. There’s a built-in QWERTY keyboard, but it’s tiny and has oddly-beveled keys, so it takes some getting used to. There’s also a 2MB camera with flash and video capability, easy to use but middling quality.

There seem to be a lot of complaints on the web about the battery life. Even if you’re not using it as a phone, if you have GPS, Wi-Fi and background data enabled, even with a modest screen-brightness setting, it does run down pretty quickly. There’s a built-in Battery Saver program, but it’s bare-bones and doesn’t do much. If you’re not getting enough time between charges, you can try Juice Denfender, it’s feature-rich and free.

It's easy to set up for Wi-Fi use without activation. You'll need to either log into your Google account or create a new one. It ships with Gingerbread 2.3.5 and when you fire it up, you'll see the old "Android Market" icon. The first time you select it, it will migrate the phone to Google Play. Here's the problem you may run into: a selection of whether or not to accept the Google Terms of Service comes up briefly, and if you miss it, there's no intuitive way to get it back, and you won't be able to access Google Play.

If you find yourself in that situation, you can go into "Settings - Applications - Manage Applications - Market" and select "clear data". Then you can run Marketplace again (you'll have to log into Google again, since clearing the data also clears your login info). This time, watch for the "Terms and Conditions" box and be sure to select "Accept".

At some point during the migration to Google Play, you'll find a small box with a green check in it, asking if you want Google Play to send you notifications. These will appear in your phone's notification window and can be intrusive and annoying, so I'd suggest you uncheck that box. Don't worry if you miss it, though. You can log into Google Play from your PC, go into Settings, and uncheck it there.

Once you sort out Google Play, you can download whatever apps you like, just keep in mind that the Venture doesn't have much internal storage. I didn't find much bloatware, but even so, you’ll only have about 150 MB or so to install apps. I was able to install Angry Birds (the original), Cut the Rope, and Fruit Ninja with around 50 MB to spare, which isn't much. VM ships the Venture with a 2GB SD card, and you can upgrade that all the way to 32 GB if you want, so there’s plenty of space available there. If you want to load up on apps, you’ll need a utility like App 2 SD, which will allow you to move apps to your SD card.

Loading time is very slow, but gameplay on the titles I mentioned is surprisingly good for a phone with a pokey 600 mhz processor. I did try Angry Birds Seasons, where the graphics tend to be a little more complex, and it ran out of steam on the very first level. And more demanding games like Temple Run won’t even install.

This might be a good gadget to keep young kids from borrowing your phone to play games, and maybe teach them some Android basics. I certainly wouldn’t pay anything like $50 or $80 for it, particularly when Wallyworld has the ZTE Concord with a bigger, cleaner screen, an 832 mhz CPU and a SIM slot for $99. But for a double sawbuck I’m pretty happy with my purchase.

YMMV, Carl

hmak said:   can you help with the type of adapter that break up to stereo aux-in and mic
The headphone/mic jack isn't activated by physical insertion like most are. It activated by electrically detecting that headphones are plugged in. It will not activate for my car stereo aux-in (or, reportedly, for anyone else's) nor any of my FM transmitters.

I bought an adapter for $2 on eBay that gives me a mic and lets me plug in my own earphones and used that with my aux-in successfully, but the adapter was too cheaply made and its wire frayed after a month of usage. Now I use a splitter and earphones (both from the dollar store); the earphones allow it to activate the jack and the splitter allows my car stereo's aux-in to connect. It's hacky but I'm too poor to buy a bluetooth adapter for my car stereo.