Jitterbug Flip Reviews

For a senior who is trying to hang on to the cell phone when pushing numbers, they have to have a pretty firm grip on the lower (numbers pad) portion of the phone. That puts the right hand thumb directly over the volume control. What we discovered is that it is very easy for our mom to push the volume control lower button inadvertently, and pretty quickly the ring volume has been turned to "Silent"! Or worse, when talking, the sound of the person talking to her goes way down, so it becomes very hard to hear. That volume control lever/button is definitely in a very poor place!

One solution would be to allow for LOCKING the sound (and basically disabling the volume buttons on the side), or possibly making a "left-handed" phone which might have the volume control on the left side, which might work for a right handed person. My mother in law inadvertently kept turning off the ringer volume with her right thumb so she never heard any incoming calls - very frustrating to her daughters. Ultimately she is not able to always check this volume to make sure it is always up, not on "silent". Admittedly this sounds like an easy problem to solve, and is for most people, but it doesn't work for the elderly.

I’m returning the Lively flip phone because making calls is NOT a simple process. You select > Phone > arrow down to the person you want to call > and then select OK! If you have many contacts, the process is not simple. With the jitterbug, my father used speed dial! Lively does NOT have this feature. I had to pay return shipping plus a restocking fee...UGH I wish I had paid more attention to the other reviewer who stated the process was more steps compared to the jitterbug phone. I hope this review helps someone else avoid the added hassle and expense.

We opened the box together me and my uncle and activated the phone and I immediately noticed that after charging the phone which took almost 4 hours which is not normal that as the phone was charging the phone became really hot and that definitely did cause an alert and a safety alert because I got nervous and it almost felt like putting your hand on a hot tea kettle and you know how you yank your hand away from that hot stinging feeling to get away from the heat and that is how hot that phone got. I went to get a pot holder to rest the Jitterbug Flip phone on because I most definitely did not trust a phone that was getting super hot while charging. I never ever had a phone that got that hot while charging and I most definitely find this jitterbug flip phone to be a safety hazard. This phone is unsafe and you worry about the hazards that this could potentially cause.

Also when my uncle and I did a test call the first thing that my uncle said was that the jitterbug flip phone was a cheap piece of junk and he said he would not want it if it was free. There is no sound quality at all as even my uncle noticed that all you could barely make out was some muffled sound like someone talking while wearing about 20 coronavirus masks all at one time. It is really bad like two 10 year old kids taking two styrofoam cups and putting a hole in the middle of the bottom of the cups and then feeding a cheap piece of string through the holes of the bottom of the styrofoam cups and standing about a foot away from each other playing the game of telephone.

Seriously not only is this phone unsafe with the scorching hot temperatures that this phone can reach but this also is ridiculous in that it appears to look like a kids toy but do not even let your kids play with this phone if you have any or else you and whoever may have to find a new place for housing and if you plug this phone in too long then you may have to call a rescue squad for immediate medical assistance as I find this phone can lead elderly people into danger or worse.

Now for another interesting observation as I checked this phone out and on Google it definitely does say that this jitterbug flip phone is a prepaid service with no contract. I know many people who have prepaid phones but definitely not with jitterbug and the whole concept of prepaid is that you pay before your service starts and that is how prepaid works. If people do not want to continue service with whatever phone company they are with then they simply do not continue contributing any more money and the phone service automatically stops with no more money owed.

All prepaid works like that where if people do not pay upfront for the phone service then the phone company stops charging people and then they walk away quietly and leave people alone. But this clearly is not the case with the Great Call company as my uncle received a past due bill of $75.28 saying that he must send in immediately. WHAT?! Great Call mentioned that my uncle owes that money for some phony overdue past due amount. RIGHT THERE! DING! DING! GOTCHA GREAT CALL!! HA!! Now hold on here a minute as now I have noticed EXACTLY what is going on here. Now right there if anybody is going to say that you have to call to cancel service then that is definitely NOT prepaid with no contract.

Great Call is a skeevy company and here my question is this to Great Call “WHAT ARE PEOPLE CANCELING?!” NO NEED TO CANCEL IF YOU SAY YOU ARE A COMPANY THAT IS PREPAID WITH NO CONTRACT! AHA! This Great Call company has shown who they really are by creating a product such as a phone with features that clearly target the elderly people and then when they don’t pay the Great Call company gets them back by punishing them for not staying with their company. Everyone knows how prepaid works.

Great Call should be ashamed of themselves for taking advantage of the elderly but they unfortunately could care less. That is absolutely disturbing and unfair that the elderly people are being cheated and lied to and scammed out of their money and sadly enough the elderly people will be scared of these people who say that they owe money and I betcha the Great Call company threatens these poor elderly people by telling them that they will put them in collections if these elderly people do not pay.

That company is that type of people who are controlling and do not give a flip about elderly people being drained out of their money. Now what they wanted from my uncle may not seem like a lot of money but when you really think about it all this Great Call company has to do is consistently scam the elderly people out of their money by charging them phony past due overdue charges and the Great Call company are automatic millionaires. Just think that if they are charging hundreds of thousands of elderly people these phony past due charges then think of how filthy rich the Great Call company is.

Hey people think about this. Can you ever imagine these people who work at the Great Call company doing this kind of scam on the much younger generation like teenagers or young people in their early 20’s or early 30’s or millennials? NEVER would these people who work at the Great Call company would ever try to scam over college students who are studying pre med or engineering or a young person going for a master’s degree at a high end college because the people who work at the Great Call company know that the YOUNG and sharply INTELLIGENT people would have the people who work at the Great Call company arrested and jailed for messing around with phony past due charges if the Great Call ever tried and pulled that game with a much younger audience.

Great Call obviously knew when they first started their skeevy business that they wanted to target an elderly weak wimpy and vulnerable crowd of people for their audience so they tried to come up with a product that would sensationalize the elderly folks. I bet you that when they came up with this horrible phone which is as phony as a 3 dollar bill the Great Call people (excuse me.. more like Bad Call) I bet you they all sat (probably all those stuffy business fraudulent guys with only 2 women out of 25 people) they all sat at a long mahogany wood table and sat for weeks figuring out every which way till Sunday on how to scam the elderly people over with past due charges and I bet you that all those people who work at Great Call were laughing so hard at scamming over the elderly that they could barely speak.

That is their main objective where seriously they have made it more than obvious that they are hoping that the elderly people will forget to pay or just not pay at all so the people who work at the Great Call company can overcharge the elderly bogus past due charges so they can buy their expensive yachts and have a lavishly great time and have steak and lobster and buy homes that are millions of dollars.

All of the money that these poor elderly people are fraudulently being charged for are going to the workers at Great Call so they can have a lavish rich lifestyle. Elderly people do not have money to waste as the people who work at Great Call do not care and they are treating these poor elderly people as if they have either dementia or Alzheimers or both or they feel that these elderly people are slipping in the mind and that the elderly people are falling apart mentally and physically and the people who work at Great Call are hoping that these poor elderly people will never notice that they are being scammed.

What’s really sad is that I bet some of the elderly people who had Great call probably passed away not even knowing that they even had a phony past due bill where a person’s family most probably had to pay Great Call where here an elderly person never owed any money but their remaining family members probably felt that the person who is no longer around owed money when here they did not and never did.

I’m living in a world I don’t understand and I have no idea how that Great Call company gets away with scamming the elderly. I have read these other negative reviews here and I give the thumbs up to all the people who noticed that the Great Call company is nothing but a horrible company who has absolutely no respect for the elderly and for those people who are staying with Great Call I would say that it’s obvious that the people who are staying with the Great Call company are obviously not affected by anything because those people are probably paying religiously and will keep paying them to where they are in a robotic state of just paying the Great Call company and do not care because they have consistently paid them to where they do not notice anything.

Trust me people I can think of a million other things that I rather be doing right now and I definitely did not say to myself that I’m bored so I think I will go put in a complaint about the Great Call company. I am really disgusted in noticing the elderly people getting scammed out of their money by being charged bogus past overdue charges and I want to get the word out that the Great Call company is a skeevy dishonest lying shady and bogus company that by no means should any elderly person get involved with.

If you are reading this and you decide to stay with them then that is fine if you want an unsafe phone with severe overheating issues and then later on you find out that you are suddenly unexpectedly owed some fake past due charge. All I can say right about now is that if you stuck long enough with me to read what I have wrote here then I’d like to say thanks for taking the time to read this as I know it would be time consuming for anybody to read this but I did not know how else to get the word out about the most horrible worst company ever which is the Great Bad Call company. The only thing anyone can say is that I hope that when the people who work at the Great Call company become elderly themselves I hope that some company scams all of them over out of their money telling them that they all have a past due balance of a gazillion dollars. Well it’s like that one saying my grandfather always use to say is “What Goes Around Comes Around”.

Original Review: Purchased this phone thinking it would be simple to use and it was for my wife who has dementia..Anyway signed up on line and also called and talked with a representative of Great Call and thought everything was ok until I got a call saying there was a problem and to call them. This was after having the phone for 2 weeks and using it for local calls only and a couple of texts.

When I called the person informed me we had exceeded our allotted minutes from 100 minutes to 450 or so and that it would cost us $150.00 over and above the $30.00 a month I signed up for. I told the person I thought I had signed up for the alert call which was $5.00 and the phone unlimited which was $20.00. Obviously that was a total screw up...Anyway I said feel free to charge me for your bogus call rate for local calls and cancel the phone....I suggest for anyone thinking about these folks check it out completely and make sure you know what the charges are for each..I did not even see were 100 minutes was listed...Anyway be careful...

I called them and told them I had previously cancelled the plan and was told it wasn’t complete on their end. They never once reached out to tell me about the issue or to inform me it was not cancelled. They did not have my permission to take my money. I explained the situation, told them that I had believed the plan cancelled and that they had taken my grocery money. I was basically told “too bad” and that the plan was now cancelled and we were squared. Except today I received ANOTHER bill for $170 for a flip phone with no plan after being promised I was paid in full. Consumer beware!

If I take the phone 5 minutes away from our home the service returns??? I am in a typical colonial private home, no aluminum siding, no brick, no metal roof. I did nothing to my home, no construction, no nothing! The phone just stopped working in my immediate area! I called many many times. No one can figure it out, they sent me 2 phones and all have the same issues. I kept telling them it wasn't the phone because it works fine 5 minutes away from my home. Did an upgrade to the network knock out service in my immediate area? All other Verizon and Sprint phones are working fine, only the Jitterbug has "No Service" when will this problem be resolved? I do not have any other option since my mom does not have the mentality to use any other phone. I cannot leave my mom alone without a way for her to contact me. PLEASE SOMEONE HELP!!!

Original Review: My husband's Jitterbug Flip Phone with vital 5 star service suddenly stopped getting service. I have called three times to the Service Department and each time was assured that service would be restored by them "pushing" a new program to the "dead" phone. Now, I'm not a technological genius, but how do you send (push) a program to a phone with no service? Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me three times and I'm just a flamin' idiot.

I want a refund for the flip phone and please stop charging us the monthly charge. This is just insane. These phones don't require 5g, so just let them run at the lower setting. Either way, my husband can't go on without his emergency 5 star. What if he really NEEDS help? I also have a Jitterbug but mine is the Smart 2. Battery life is not good, but I deal with it by having chargers in every vehicle. Come on, Jitterbug, have a heart! These are older people and if you can't take care of them SAY SO. Or are you waiting for the class action lawsuit to come on TV?

My sister told them that she wanted a credit applied to my mom's account because the phone did not work at all. They did give us a credit, but now Jitterbug is using that as a solution to our problem. How can you possibly think that by giving us a credit for a phone that did not work, that, that is all that would need to be done. Not only was the replacement phone a used refurbished phone, but it also had the same issues as the new phone I purchased on 2-29-2020. So I am out my $100.00 that I paid for the phone because they told my sister that 4 months was too long for them to refund my money. How can 4 months be too long when the phone never did work properly, and now it is of no use. I will have to find something else for her, so that we will know that she is able to contact us if she has a problem and needs help. She wouldn't even be able to call 911 at this. So sad.

Original Review: I purchased a Jitterbug flip phone for my 86 year mom on February 29, 2020. From day one we have had nothing but problems with this phone. The reception is terrible, her voice is all muffled and she fades in and out when you talk to her. About a month ago, my sister tried to call her and she didn't answer, so of course she was concerned, and went home to make sure she was ok and she was sitting there. She asked her why she didn't answer the phone and she said that it never rang. So we tested it and surprise, surprise, it did not ring. She could call out, but incoming calls did not ring through.

Now today as my sister was leaving to go to the store we tried her phone to make sure that she would be able to call if she needed help and surprise, surprise, now you can not even call out on the phone. This phone that I paid $100.00 for just 4 months ago is now useless. My sister and I both called great call on Friday and explained what was going on and asked them if the smart phone was having the same issues as the flip phone and they said no, they were only having problems with the flip phone. She asked them if since I have only had the phone since February 29, 2020, if I would be able to apply the $100.00 that I paid for the flip phone to upgrade to a smart phone and they told me no. I would have to pay the full $129.00 plus shipping fees to get the new smart phone plus pay addition fees each month. This is ridiculous.

This phone is suppose to be designed for seniors to make it easier for them to use and in an emergency they would have the 5 star button to use, but if you can not receive calls or make outgoing calls what good is this phone. Great Call is sending a replacement flip phone, but what good is that going to be if we will have the same issues with the new phone. Very disappointed not only in the actual phone, but with the company as well. Everyone is on a fixed income right now so this is very upsetting to me. I would not recommend this phone to anyone that is purchasing it to have peace of mind for one of your elderly loved ones.

6. It is not a user friendly phone. The technology is almost archaic - I know it isn't a smartphone by any means, but it could be MUCH easier to use. Every aspect is cumbersome multisteps (yes to listen, yes to confirm, no to hang up, etc. etc).

As soon as I can fix my old iPhone for him to use we are switching to that. A ten year old iPhone would be an improvement over this piece of junk.

Got the phone home and started playing with it and was aghast to find out there was no Speaker phone button. To get to the loud speaker you have to be on a call and then press three different buttons! Since this was a deal breaker, I returned the phone (and got a full refund) and went to Best Buy at the other end of the mall and purchased the Jitterbug flip phone. Best Buy sold me the phone. Period. No set up. Phone cost $75 to the Doro's $50.

Went home, saw I could save $10 if I activated the phone online instead of on the phone. However, as soon as I said I wanted to use an old number, they said I had to call. They charged $35 to activate! (** charged $0.) They said the switch over to the old number could take anywhere from a few hours to several business days. Since I was doing all of this over the holidays, I gave it extra time. When I called Great Call today I was told that I gave the wrong PIN for the Verizon account. So they were just going to let it sit there and not notify me. Ridiculous. I gave them a corrected PIN and they said it could take a few hours or 2 days.

Then I asked about their Voice Call feature where instead of having to dial a number, you can say the name of someone in your phone book. The instruction book says it's in the menu, but it wasn't on my phone's menu! Well, apparently, you have to ask customer service for this feature! So they said they would send me a software update, and so far that doesn't seem to have worked. Twice.

Oh, and all I want is the 250 minute plan, no text, no data. ** and Great Call both appeared to cost $15/month. But no, Great Call charges an additional $3/month for Voice Mail. I got excited when I saw they have a feature that would be great for my mom where you can dial 0 for one of their operators to help with making a call or adding to the phone book or whatever help you need. But the fine print notes that it costs $.99 every time you call them if you are on the plan I'm on. Oh well.

So here it is a week since I purchased the phone, and I'm still trying to get the phone number moved over and the features I need. I have a feeling I'm going to wind up having to return this phone, and based on my experience so far, I'm probably going to at least be out the $35 activation fee plus the week or two of service when I was not using the phone. Disappointing to say the least.

The jitterbug company needs to truly evaluate their research and development team and make some changes. People with a visual impairment need a good voice recognition software.... They need a physical button they can find and push (your upgraded smartphone is useless as well for this reason). DIGITAL BUTTONS ARE USELESS TO THOSE WHO CANT SEE THEM! Until you make drastic changes to your product you have no business marketing yourself for the elderly or those visually impaired.

We had them send us the 3rd phone, which was broken when we received it. So it was replaced with the 4th phone, which had the same " no to poor service" messages. So we got rid of it, as why pay $ for a product that doesn't work? I can only assume the antennas are of poor quality or there is a manufacturing problem. As I can get my phone to work at his place. Avoid this phone unless you have 4 bars of cell service where it will be used.