Well, I’ve got my Jolla Phone up and running here in the US. Just a few notes from a non expert’s point of view.
1: I have an AT&T SIM - the IMEI was not recognized by the AT&T website, but it is working in the phone after the data settings were updated. Connected at 4G. The auto network selection failed, I needed to manually select ATT (US 410)
2: MMS is still not working for me. This could be user error, I’ve tried a few different settings but nothing so far. Regular texts work.
3: I’ve been unable to get AT&T’s “Visual Voicemail” app to work. It needed to have SMS access enabled which required an override in the Android settings.But now it’s throwing up not having the voicemail number in the SIM (it is on the Sailfish side) I don’t know how to get this viewable to the app.
Please let me know if there’s anything you’d like to test and I’ll do my best. I’ll be running it as my daily driver this week, but next I’m travelling and will need to go back to my Oneplus.
That’s great that VoLTE works and that the phone is generally in a working state at least with one major US provider, even if the expeeience is less smooth as in Europe.
I have heard that MMS are still a thing in the US, but why exactly?
Interesting, I thought most people are nowadays using messengers for that. Maybe it is also just me, I always had issues with MMS, long before Sailfish.
Perhaps you could find on the operator support website some instruction how to configure the endpoint for them manually. Wouldn’t this be of help to you?
With SMS and MMS, you normally don’t have to know which service the other person is using, so I see some advantages to that.
I could imagine that, because SMS and MMS are almost always included in the plan, there was never much need to look for alternatives. Unlike in other places, where you traditionally had to pay for individual messages, this pushed people to adopt messaging apps early on. Even after SMS became free, those habits didn’t change.
i forgot that AT&T would be an option now that jolla made a world phone! previously, only T-Mobile USA has the LTE bands that Xperia phones like the 10 III supported. i’ve been daily driving the 10III with SFOS on T-Mobile USA in NY for about 5 years, and the network coverage is awful.
just to confirm VoLTE, in cellular network, does it say 4G Calling (VoLTE): Registered?
no 5G? the JP2 supposedly supports n5+n2, so this should finally work on at&t. (tmobile will have limited supported for 5g, but that’s a lot better than the zero support all other sfos phones have had)
regarding MMS: on T-Mobile, i have to disable wifi, set MMS IP protocol to dual, and use the legacy epc access point.
then when i get a message, i have to restart ofono, then start the mms download, then restart mms-engine.
regarding visual voicemail, are you using microG or opengapps? i got tmobile digits working, but it required cloud messaging and something else in microg. it sounds like your problem is sim access and i dont really understand how that works in appsupport, but just asking the easy questions.
USA uses MMS primarily for group messaging. RCS has not yet replaced MMS for this, its about 75% adoption, and the fallback is to MMS when even one member of the group does not support rtc.
group-messaging-over-MMS is EXTREMELY heavily used in the USA. most other countries do not use it at all, since the MMS protocol does not even support group messaging and it must be done with sneaky tricks in the headers.
believe me, everyone hates MMS, but in the USA, i receive way more MMS than SMS, and exactly zero people i know use whatsapp or signal.
MMS is the only option (except SMS) when sending messages between iPhone and Android.
There is no RCS for iPhone and iMessages in Norway. No operator has implemented that or announced a coming support for it.
IMessage is perhaps the most used messaging system for mobile phones in Norway, but there are plenty of Android phones around too, so MMS.
As for chat - none of my friends use Matrix, Mattermost or Signal. And I avoid FB Messenger and WhatsApp. So there we go…The fallbacks are SMS and MMS.
That’s like saying most people aren’t using SMS anymore. But they do. And since most phone contracts are flatrate with a pretty high cap, more people use SMS again because it effectively doesn’t cost anything (extra).
For me the mobile number is still the most important way to get in contact with friends. Maybe that’s different with younger people?
But since this post is about the USA I might be completely off point.
could you please confirm that you have VoLTE working, specifically that it says ‘registered’ in the cellular network screen?
also, can you switch off wifi and see what speeds you get on fast.com, especially the upload? i’m trying to figure out if i should switch to at&t when my JP2 arrives, or if i should stay on tmobile.
and thanks for offering to be our boots-on-the-ground in 'merica!
Just jumping in to say that I would also love to hear more about the VoLTE support. Were you able to make/receive phone calls on the 4G connection alone?
When you say MMS is not working: are you referring to being able to send/receive media like photos, or just MMS group chats are broken? Group chat support might continue to be an issue without input from Jolla. Last I heard, Commodore’s new SFOS phone also fails to support MMS group messages, although they claim to be working on it.
I just cancelled my pre-order because I had such a hard time getting unwhitelisted feature phones working on US carriers last week. Included a Bell Kyocera on US Mobile (Dark Star). I will happily hop back on the wagon if we can get some more confirmations of full service here.
