I find that phones with antennas that actually extend beyond the phone usually give better reception than those that have the antenna completely inside the phone where you can't see it. You might ask the people at the Cingular store which phones they offer that tend to get the best reception. Often the people know which ones are best in weak signal areas. With Sprint, the phones do vary significantly in terms of signal quality. I know you can install an amplifier and an external antenna for a cell phone. I've seen these for use in cars. They boost the power and have a better antenna that you could also put higher up. Kind of defeats the purpose of a "mobile phone" though if you have to hook it to an amplifier to use it in your house. If it were me I'd just call SBC and get a regular phone. To me, cell phones still aren't reliable enough to replace wired phones, even though I know a lot of people do use them that way.

It's a feature you enable in your settings named "wi-fi calling." Your phone functions just like normally, making or receiving calls. But Instead of the calls occurring using the wireless signal of your cell phone carrier, they occur over your Internet connection. You need the right phone and you need to enable the feature in your settings. Other than that, you wouldn't know the difference since it's business as usual and there are no extra things to do when placing or receiving calls. When I am at home, my phone automatically picks up my router and all calls occur over the Internet. This is nice if you are limited to a certain number of minutes a month on your wireless plan, since calls over the Internet don't count against your plan. Not all phones can do this. For example, you need the newest iPhone (6 or 6s), or a pretty new Android model. And a few carriers do not yet make this available to their customers regardless of what phone they have. What phone do you have and who is your carrier?

I had to switch last year due to a medical device I use was not supported by the Samsung I really wanted at the time. I got an iPhone XR. It is fairly easy to use in some ways, but also there are lots of tricks that are not intuitive when you come from an android. It takes a little time to get used to. I came from a Samsung so I would say camera and other features are comparable between an iphone and a Samsung. The good part about either although iphone might be more is that there are plenty of youtube videos showing how to use the various features and to learn how to use the different swipes etc. I ended up with the iphone over another android device partly due to compatibility with my medical device, but also because I could get it and an apple watch which is compatible with my medical device for less than the phone I originally wanted as well. The watch for me is really worth it and is very useful and I used it when traveling to call for a ride when we went somewhere where phones were not allowed (taping of a TV show) and it displays the info I need from my medical app so I don't have to pull the phone out, shows and allows me to respond to texts and other messaging apps etc. The things that I still wish my iphone/watch did is allow me to set a quiet time over night so that my apple watch doesn't provide notifications. My samsung had this. The other thing is I wish the widgets would show on the lock screen like my Samsung did. These are minor and I can deal without them. We are a mixed household and have no issues sharing things, but I do have to say if all of us had iphones sharing would be much simplified and made super easy compared to when we were an all android household. The iphone and the cloud is also a feature that I like a lot better than the google account cloud. It works much better overall and especially once when my phone reset itself while we were at a waterpark. I needed it with me at all times for my medical device. It restored itself with no issues and like I'd never had it reset itself when it came back. Definitely never had that same perfect experience with my Samsung phones. Also to note iPhone 12 is the first iPhone with 5G support. The other mentioned above iphone 6 were for 4G support. 5G networks are currently being rolled out so no need for older phones to even having had to support that. It is one feature I would make sure is supported in a newer phone though. Oh one more plus with my iPhone - it's battery life is so much better than my Samsung and my husband's current S10.

You don't need Google Voice to use the WiFi in your home to boost your signal (in fact, you can connect your phone to any WiFi anywhere as long as either it is not password protected or you have the password- that's one attraction of places like McDonalds which offer free WiFi, you don't have to use the credit on your phone if you're using their WiFi :-) ). And if your WiFi goes out due to a power outage, you can still use your phone as normal. Connecting your phone to WiFi involves turning WiFi on in your phone's settings (and entering your WiFi password if you have one). If you're near your WiFi, your phone will automatically connect to it, if not, it will get the phone signal normally.