All right, hey everyone. T-Mobile just released a brand new app that consolidates several of them. This is the end of January 2024, and really the point of this is to try to make the user experience better.
And there are some interesting things I want to show you in regards to the T-Mobile Home Internet part especially. But if you aren't aware of T-Mobile Tuesday deals, then you really should also be aware of those because you can get some really good discounts or freebies even if you follow along with their app. Okay so right here I have one of T-Mobile's home internet gateways.
This one is the Sajamcom 5688W but they have a few others as well and the app works pretty much the same for all of them and that's what we'll show you here. Now what you want to do is go in and download the app if it's not automatically updated for you. Now I do have to give a shout out to the mobile report online that actually tracks a lot of this type of news and that is a place I go to to get some information. So that's where I first found out about this new T-Life.
app. So in the app store or the play store, whichever device you have for Android or Apple, you can go in here and you can search for T-Life app. Now your devices should automatically update if you have that set as automatic update for your devices.
But in here, we can look, it tells you a few things. One is that this app does not replace just one app. It's trying to replace all the little extra apps that T-Mobile has, which I was a little bit annoyed that I had a T-Mobile.
app and then I had a T-Mobile home internet app and there's a T-Mobile Tuesdays app and looks like there's even a few other apps that they had and this tried to combine all of them other than the T-Mobile. So the main T-Mobile app that you use for your account to look at your billing and your data and to change devices that appears to still be part of a separate T-Mobile app and then this T-Life app is all the other ones stuck together. So there are some things in here that I thought was interesting because it called out T-Mobile home internet.
And it had the standard list of very limited things that you could change, but then it also said more settings to come. So I want to kind of dive in there and see if there's any hints of what else is coming up. So it says already 10 million plus downloads. I wonder if that is the case or if that is counting the other apps prior to it.
So I already installed it on this tablet. This is my first time actually loading it up. So I'm going to see what it shows me here.
Alright so do we want notifications and here it's showing you that it's combining all this stuff together. Alright so now here's another thing if you are a T-Mobile home internet user you might get stuck here especially if you tried T-Mobile Tuesdays app before because you might have trouble setting up your T-Mobile ID. Often times they want to text you information. There is ways to use the email address and you can get your phone number either off of the device itself. Or if you have a bill, you can also get the phone number off that.
Or even the email confirmation that you got when you signed up for it. If you signed up for it online, then it will have the phone number on there as well. So you can use that.
And worst case, you can call T-Mobile and ask for an ID to set up. So I'm going to go ahead and log in. So do review the data policies.
You do not have to check these tick marks to share data. You can just leave them unchecked and skip through. All right, you will have to give it precise location though for the home internet app to help it find signal as well as for some of the T-Mobile Tuesday deals that they have. All right, so here's just kind of the introduction. It shows you that it's these different apps that they've thrown together here.
All right, so here in the app, now you can see the main top piece is the T-Mobile Tuesdays ones. And then you scroll down a little bit, you see the 5G internet because, you know, we have a 5G home internet. And then you can see other offers in there. So I can go in here to manage my home internet and we can try to connect. All right so you do need to be connected to the wi-fi of this device or plugged in through the ethernet and then you can go in and you can manage now because this is the first time I use it I do have to type in the admin password to this device.
It will remember that in the future though. Alright, so the admin password is what is on the back of it. There are two passwords and there are little periods between the words.
So if you haven't changed it, it would be that. If you don't remember what it is, you can press and hold the reset button on the gateway and it will clear back to that default one, but it will also wipe off any Wi-Fi settings that you have if you did that. Alright so this is what it looks like.
It definitely does look different than before with the T-Mobile Home Internet app. But here we can see my networks, we can see what I'm connected to, we can see my phone number. You can click here on devices similar to before and you can look at what device it is.
What is nice is at least it does give you the text name. Sometimes before it just gives you the MAC address. I think they updated that over time. But you can block the device. You can click on it and also get some more information as far as blocking internet access for it or set a schedule for it.
So it gives you the ability to basically do a little bit of parental controls in here with the scheduling type. And then if we go back here to the... network itself we can see this is where i can add my wi-fi networks something like adding a separate 2.4 gigahertz or 5 gigahertz frequency band and i do recommend you split them i won't get into that on this video but this is how you would do it. You would say, I want it to be just 2.4 gigahertz or 5 gigahertz, and you name them differently, and then you can change your devices to only connect to one of them if you have trouble with the connection. WPA is the same way.
You might want to make it WPA slash WPA2 to make it more compatible with some older devices, and those are the same settings that you could do before in the T-Mobile home internet there. But if we go to more, we can see that there are some other features here. One One is the Gateway Placement app. This is the same thing as before, which really is just looking to see where you are.
I'm going to skip the video here. I have to share my location with it. And so here it's showing me where I'm at.
And that circle there on the right of my screen is where it's saying that's the direction of my tower. Now, if I zoom out or something, that doesn't move with you. So it doesn't give you exactly where the tower is. It could be a mile. It could be six miles away.
Mine's about a mile away that way. But this is... designed to help get you placing this device closer to where your tower is on that side of the house at the very least is the best and then higher up is also better all right so that placement app you know it's a little bit helpful at least it gives you the direction that your device is in but i wouldn't call it perfect by any means so here we can also go into advanced cellular metrics this is a good one for understanding your signals and this looks like is a big change because now you actually get all of your different bands.
And this was a real struggle I had before was you could not see all your different bands because it would only have one LTE and one 5G. But we all know that T-Mobile does carrier aggregation, so you can have many of them. Now, down here in my basement, I barely get any signal.
I mean, it says I get a good LTE signal, excellent, but I don't get any 5G down here. So I need to move this back up into the third floor loft or use one of my external antennas so I can get better signal. all right um what else we add remove gateways that's kind of interesting i have not seen this one before um i wonder if that is just adding a gateway to this app in case you have multiples i don't think it's adding um a new gateway with that sim card or something so that's probably what that is now that i think about it i got a little excited for a second though all right and then what else uh gateway information i guess this is just going to give you the model number firmware and some other information there So I think I did hear that they did push out a firmware and that one does look like a unique number. So I wonder if that firmware was to help it send out all of the cell metrics and not just the main two. Because I believe even with the third party apps like the hint control app, you couldn't get the additional bands in there either.
So that might be a new thing. Okay, and then there's a user guide and support. If you really want to dive into more there, you can see that. But I saw in one of the screens. screenshots that it did reference that there are more features to come.
So I'm very excited to see what else comes out if they improve this app, if they give you more control of these, that would be really a big change and improvement if they could do that. So thanks for watching. If you enjoyed the video, hit that like button, subscribe to my channel so you can see more like this.