=== Introduction ====
Hello, my name is Mr Trizzle and I’ve owned the Teracube 2e for the last 3 years. So what’s my experience been like?
Well first off, it’s been an absolute nightmare. It is the worst phone I’ve ever owned in my entire life, and that says a lot. I’ve owned smartphones as early as the HTC Hero with the trackball thing, which mine broke after I put on hand sanitizer and rolled the ball, all the way to my current phone, the Teracube 2e. I would never recommend this phone to anybody. But why is it so horrible? Let’s find out.
=== Transparency ===
The current device I have now is actually the second Teracube 2e that I’ve owned. The first device was falling apart, and I mean literally from all the times I’ve dropped it, even inside the case. The phone was in two pieces with the glass display barely held onto the rest of the phone with a few ribbons. I contacted the manufacturer and after paying a deposit, they sent me out a new phone and I swapped out the phone and sent the old one back and got back the majority of the deposit, minus the repair fee.
But this is where it all went down hill from there.
=== Naked and Exposed ===
Even before this new replacement device, I never had any updates to the previous device. I would ask on the forums and the answer was the same, updates are coming. When I went to replace my phone, I asked for the device to have any available updates and they sent me one with the latest OS (at the time). Besides the new replacement phone having a new OS, there have been ZERO security updates on the old or the new phone. That’s very troubling.
=== Amnesia ===
When I went to transfer over my contacts, I used a few methods to back up my contacts so I wouldn’t lose them. Somehow, through all my backups, the new phone would not accept any of the contacts that I tried to transfer over for whatever reason. My last resort was to use google contacts to transfer over my contacts. However, the new phone deleted all my google contacts from the last 20 years and left me with 20 year old or older contacts. I to this day don’t understand how any of that happened and I’ve been slowly rebuilding my contacts.
=== Squatters ===
If you look at my old posts on here you’ll note that with my new replacement phone, half my homepage is unusable. This hasn’t ever been fixed and it’s something I still deal with. Oh and did I mention that there haven’t been any updates to my phone? Yeah, so until there’s an update, I’m stuck with it. I don’t want to do a factory reset in case I lose all my new contacts again. I don’t want to go through all of that again.
=== Slow and Sweet ===
My phone is slow. I can’t recall if my original phone was slow but this replacement has been slow for as long as I can recall. I didn’t realize how slow it was until I used my roommate’s old phone.
=== Wonderful World of Teracube’s Cameras ===
I and others have mentioned that the Teracube 2e cameras are garbage, and it’s still holds true to this day. Focus is the number one issue. It takes between 10 and 30 seconds for the camera to focus. The only exception to this is if I use the wide angle mode, which focuses very quickly. Even with it focused in, it’s not sharp, it’s very low resolution, and the colors are terrible. It’s all around a crappy experience.
=== Wake Me Up When It’s Over ===
Let’s talk about alarms. The default alarm app on this phone is the worst, and I seriously mean it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to do a restart on the phone just to get the alarms to stop. On a good day, the alarm will actually go off and turn off when you click on dismiss. I wish it were all good days but too many times the alarms won’t go off at all, or won’t dismiss even if you click on dismiss.
Here’s what sometimes happens - let’s say the alarm goes off and I click on dismiss when it comes up on the screen. Too often the prompt will go away and the alarm still blares. It won’t show up on the pull-down or anywhere. Sometimes it won’t even show up on the alarms page as going off. I either have to turn the alarm off and back on but most times I have to restart the phone because I’ll be in the middle of something, like driving where trying to go into the alarms app isn’t feasible.
Recently I had 5 different alarms set to go off one after reach other in 5 minute increments (long story). After the first one went off, I went into the alarm app and clicked on dismiss under each of the scheduled alarms. 5 minutes later, another alarm went off. It had totally ignored the fact that I had dismissed all of the alarms and I had to re-dismiss all the alarms all over again. Guess what? Did it again, I said no more and turned off the alarms.
=== The X-Files ===
You want to know what’s really bloody annoying? Sometimes I’ll turn off the phone when the alarm won’t stop blaring but I’ll keep the phone off. After a short period of time, my phone turns back on just so that the alarm can go off again!!! I thought I was going crazy the first time it happened so I turned it off, made sure it was off, and watched my phone. BAM, phone “boots” back up just so the alarm goes off. What’s the point in turning off the phone so it won’t bother me if it’s just going to turn back on and go off again? I guess this phone doesn’t actually turn off when the phone is “off”. Is Teracube spying on us? What’s going on here?
=== Helen Keller ===
Let’s talk about SMS messages for a moment. For the most part it works, except when I get a message. I get zero notifications that I got a text. There’s no audio, nothing on the screen, nothing. I have been through this phone and tried all kinds of fixes and solutions from the internet and nothing works. This is stupid. I have to remember to look at my phone every so often to check for messages. Sometimes I’ll go days before remembering to check for messages and I’ll have a ton of unread messages waiting for me.
=== The Loud, Obnoxious Guy Behind You ===
Lastly, I have no volume control during phone calls. Why? I click the volume up and down and nothing happens. I can only preset the call volume ahead of time through the settings or control the audio via bluetooth but not on the handset. Also, sometimes when I take my head away from the phone, the screen doesn’t come back on. I had this problem with the old device and it was because the screen was splitting away from the rest of the phone but that isn’t the case here. I’ll click the power button to turn the screen back on but sometimes that does nothing. I have to click it several times to get the stupid screen to turn back on. I miss the days where you could end a call with a physical dedicated button that wasn’t also the button to turn the screen on and off. I miss those days.
=== Conclusion ===
So you’re probably asking yourself why I haven’t bought a new or different phone. Simply put, I can’t afford it at the moment and until this phone takes a dump completely, I’ll use it until it dies. For those of you who have made it to the end, I appreciate your time in reading this. I wrote this up as a way for me to vent and warn others away. I’m probably unique in my experiences with this phone. Feel free to ask questions or make suggestions, etc. I’ll periodically visit this thread from time to time.
Cheers,
Mister Trizzle