Jitterbug Flip Reviews

Why did we spend money for something that doesn't work and where they don't respond to their customer service emails. I see the Lively response to these reviews is to contact their 1-800 number which I have as stated above...Multiple times. The common theme to these reviews are the phone doesn't always work and they don't know how to fix it. Do NOT waste your money.

People who depend on their Lively phone in case of an emergency are told to use another phone. That is an inadequate and unacceptable retort for apparent incompetence. I have had a Jitterbug phone for several years. I found the original company offered great service. Then Great Call took over that became Lively and the service has gone from great to despicable. Forget about calling their customer service to wait and wait to finally be connected to someone who can only read you their prepared word salad non-responsive text. While traveling across country this past fall on I-40 I encountered three occasions where I had no service. The Bluetooth won't connect in my car. Perhaps they should change their name from Lively to Deadly. The customers deserve better. Time for a new phone.

Original Review: My partner and I both purchased the Jitterbug flip phone for seniors. It is the WORST experience we both have had with cell phones EVER. Phone screen freezes up all the time and can't make calls or texts. Bad for emergencies and nerve wracking. Customer service real bad and cost MORE than they say it is.

Lively is a scam company at best. I’m sure many elderly people’s accounts are managed by a trust and just let this go by. My dad has been on my T-Mobile account for months and months, at half the price of this scam company. I finally got Lively’s email address by emailing one of their subsidiaries, who provided me with it. They try not to have any way you can write to them. I wrote to them and canceled (for the @fifth time), told them I’d been canceled and I would continue to be canceled. They ignored this, too. Never ever ever get hooked up with this company. I anticipate getting bills five years after my father is dead.

I am now answering bogus phone calls waiting for my ridiculous anonymous credit card company to call me back from my advanced complaint (Fidelity 529 investment card). I’ve had this card for close to 30 years but it’s going to get cut in half as soon as this current dispute is once again paid back. I never would use Lively/Lively flip/Great Call, even if there were no other phone plans on the planet Earth.

When I called to complain about being billed for texting we did not use some foreign female kept talking over me and telling me she was right and I was wrong and would not listen or help. Transferred to supervisor who at least was English-speaking and it was the same lies and run around, though he did finally say he would delete the text charges but insisted there is no way to block text calls like the phone calls can be blocked and there is nothing they can do, supposedly because the Feds will not allow them to do so. Lies and more lies.

I'm too sick to even leave the house except by ambulance and my husband is afraid to not have cell phones so he can get hold of me when he has to go shopping, etc. If anybody can tell me about an actually good and honest affordable cell phone provider, please let me know. Two months has been too long with these cheats.

Call #3 - Activated new phone. Rep said to wait 30 minutes and then call back, once activated they can port the # over. Call #4 - Again 20 min wait time. RUDE rep - said nothing she can do, we would have to wait 1-3 days, etc. I asked to speak to supervisor, she told me supervisor will tell me the same thing and REFUSED TO LET ME SPEAK TO SUPERVISOR. Ultimately she said Supervisor R. ** is walking over to customer service to make sure this is handled but I would still have to call back 2/15. 2/15 - Call #5 - 20 minute wait, lady was very nice, showed my mom's # back to her phone so it had been corrected. Now - we need to port my dad's # from Verizon to the new phone. She works on it a bit and said she made an error - apologized, she ported my dad's # OVER my mom's # again!! OMG - exact same thing as yesterday.

She was very apologetic and assured me she was submitting everything to correct. I was on the call a long time while she was going this and she again assured me that someone would call me back within 4 hours. Call #6 -4 hours go by and no one calls me so I call back. 20 min wait, rep answers and I explain I'd like a Supervisor to ensure this is handled correct, wait another 15 min for Supervisor who hears me out, said he documented account but could not help me, he has to refer me to acct service where again I wait for 20 minutes to speak to another rep. Rep answers, I explain AGAIN... I told her PRIORITY #1 - We cannot lose my mom's number # as that is their primary # with all doctors, etc. She cannot tell me where that # is and cannot assure we will get it back, she asks to put me on hold while she contacts another team and disconnects.

Call #7 - 15 minute hold. Rep reads notes, I explain RIORITY #1 - WE CANNOT LOSE MY MOM'S NUMBER # as that is their primary # with all doctors, etc. Rep is talking to her Supervisor, we get disconnected. Call #8 20 minute hold. Rep reads notes, I explain RIORITY #1 - We cannot lose my mom's number # as that is their primary # with all doctors, etc. Rep is talking to her Supervisor, we get disconnected.

Call #9 20 minute hold. Rep reads notes, I explain PRIORITY #1 - We cannot lose my mom's number # as that is their primary # with all doctors, etc. Rep is talking to her Supervisor, said she sees previous notes and they are working to correct, give it 2-4 hours and if not corrected to call back. NO ABSOLUTELY NOT - please let me speak to a supervisor who can actually help me, we get disconnected - imagine that. Call #10 - I've been on hold for 33 minutes so far and still waiting! Truly been on the phone today 4 1/2 hours w/ Lively overall trying to get their error corrected!! UNACCEPTABLE! I've also filed a complaint with the FCC Ticket No. ** regarding porting problem.

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?