I currently have an HTC Evo 3D through Sprint, but it's been acting up and since I'm due for a renewal, I'm gonna get me a new phone. So I'm sure that you've been faced with this question before, but what are your personal opinions and experiences on the new Iphone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S3? Those are the two that I'm leaning towards, but if there are other phones out there just as good, fill me in on those too.
Wait a month (or so) for the Galaxy S4. *edit* Tran beat me to it! Now is actually a bad time to buy a phone. New product is right around the corner and discounts on last year's model are not good enough yet.
I have an evo3d, I'm waiting for the GalaxyS3 to go on discount. I found that the best part about the Android phone is that after the carrier and the manufacturer have abandoned the phone, the developer community will continue to support, update and add new features to it. The one thing about my Evo3D that I'm going to miss is that it still does everything I ask of it. The screen bezel is starting to fall apart (I have butterfingers when it comes to phones), but should last me till my upgrade timeframe comes in August/September. If you absolutely have to have the latest and greatest, I'd say wait for the Galaxy S4. If you aren't set on something now, wait. The upgrade will still apply, so you can hold out to see if the GS4 is worth the upgrade price, and if it isn't, you can get the GS3 at a discount.
Also, how is your Evo3D acting up? I have been able to fix most of my phone's issues without too much drama.
Exactly. iOS has been standing still while Android has sped by it. Even Windows Phone is a better product than iOS, it just lacks ecosystem at this point.
Just read a little about the rumors of the S4 and it sounds pretty badass. Maybe I'll just wait for it or like readymix, just wait until the S3 goes on discount.
My bezel is also coming apart like yours and it seems like whenever I touch a certain area of the phone, it doesn't respond. Or like an app won't open and I would have to turn the screen off and back on.
That is literally the first "compliment"(?) I've heard of a windows phone. The 10 or so friends that I know tried it and they ALL had something else within 2 weeks.
LOL. It does get some hate. I'm speaking of Windows Phone 8, mind you, not 7. It's a really elegant design and very user friendly. Logically laid out and VERY smooth. I have not owned a WP device, but played with it in store for a good 45 minutes and saw not one hiccup. If WP came on something like a Galaxy Note piece of hardware, I'd be very tempted to give it a shot. Admittedly, the app selection sucks right now. That's the main reason people dump it. That, and the Lumia 920 has had some hardware quirks and battery life issues. It had a rough launch. Too bad because the OS itself is pretty nice.
I'm running a Galaxy Note 2 and love it. My wife went from her Android to an iPhone 5 and hated it. I got my Note 2 a month later, after playing with that she traded the iPhone for an S3 and she hasn't looked back.
This is 100% spot on. I picked up this phone when my contract was up. I played with it like a kid for about 48 hours and was excited until I realized there was nothing I could with it to expand, nothing good for apps, and yes the battery sucked. I actually loved the OS for the Windows 8 mobile over iOS 5 or 6 or whatever.
This. I would love to see WP8 succeed but they have to aggressively get developers on board and drive an ecosystem or nothing will come of the platform's potential. Apple would already have moved on to merchandising and made-for-tv movies about WP8 by now if it were their product. The whole windows 8 concept is really, really interesting from a developer's perspective. It's on the marketing department to make it work. I'm looking at android something or other for my next phone. WP7 was just too wimpy and/or frustrating where it counts. I'll probably get some beater WP8 mobile device for dev purposes. I'm not going to carry one for daily use until I see some proven adoption and real utility above what I write for myself.
I'm in Minneapolis and I have been getting 4G coverage, at least that's what the phone is telling me.
http://www.redmondpie.com/htc-one-a...-camera-android-with-sense-5-blinkfeed-video/ Might wanna check this thing out as well.
After dealing with the HTC lockdown on the EVO3D, I would probably wait on the EVO one. That's me personally. If you like Sense and all the clutter-ware that HTC and Sprint shovel onto their phones, go for it. I would rather wait till the xda hackers have had their way with the bootloader, acquired root, and then developed a clean Rom for it with none of the junk. HTC makes great hardware, but they love to fill it with useless junk.
That's awesome - Has the TV remote feature been included on any phones in the past? This is the first I'm hearing of the capability, but it seems stupid that it took this long to add it to smartphones.
Don't get me wrong, I am certain the HTC EVO one will be awesome. But until I can wipe it of all the shovelware, I won't touch it. I LOVE my evo3d. But I hated it till they hacked the bootloader. Once you've had pure android with no filler, its almost impossible to go back. Proprietary interfaces suck balls...I'm looking at you HTC sense and motoblur.
Yeah, bloatware is awful, and I'm too terrified of bricking my phone to root / mod it and get rid of it. I think the last time I counted, mine has ~20 apps that I can't remove without rooting the phone. ugh.
Most android rooting procedures are pretty reliable. The evo3d bootloader downgrade however was absolutely nerve racking when it initially hit the scene. You essentially broke the bootloader partition, which bricked the device. Once bricked, when the power switch was pressed, you had a 2 second window to dump a line of code into the partition that would allow you to flash a different bootloader. Once you accomplished that, you had to sideload the superuser app. It sucked, and I remember thinking I had perma-borked my phone. Now I can load whatever I want on it.
after dealing with HTC Sense's UI, Samsungs, and tinkering with a few others, I rooted my older Hero, improved the phone tenfold. Pure Android is the reason I went out of my way to wait for and acquire the Nexus 4g LTE once it hit Sprint. I will likely keep buying the Nexus series, unless they stop putting their bloatware and crappy boot-loaders on phones, a native running pure Android phone is far more enjoyable, even if it's slightly under-spec'd, IMO.
No scientific evidence of this but 9/10 when I hear of a rooted phone bricking, the phone tends to brick regardless. Ie: the S3 issue that Samsung had. Pretty sure they fixed it by now.
The other thing to think about is a warranty. Each phone will have a 1 year manufacturers warranty but after that one year is up, which phone would cost you more to replace? Apples apple care I think is great, covers everything but lost or stolen and is only $50 to replace if broken/water dmg. It does cost $99 up front but $150 beats out $200 plus 7-10 a month. Otherwise if its a defect they'll replace it for free. I'm not sure how sprints insurance plan works but I know at AT&T it was $7 a month and a $200 deductible. It didn't matter if it was stolen or the screen stopped working. After that one year is where customers get screwed.
The other big thing to remember is that tmo and at&t are getting rid of contract phones. So you will be paying the real 4-5-600 for the phone, but your monthly costs will go way down. I know that I will never buy another phone on contract. **** that ****. I can save over $100 a month by going with straight talk and it still uses at&t or tmo towers. I was even getting better DL speeds using their APN's. Also this is another good reason to go android, you can mix and match phones and service plans without much issue. Russ
Have you gone with straight talk yet? The Mrs. and I were talking about that last week. We're both out of contract as of this month and I"m having a real hard time justifying why we should enter into a contract with anyone. The only thing that might be a holdup is feature loss, if there is any, which I don't believe is the case...
No contract plans are the way to go, especially with the Nexus 4 being so darn cheap without a contract and so friggin awesome! I you dont need the latest and greatest hardware (because that changes every quarter) and would rather have the latest and greatest software, (and thats not even to say its got crappy hardware.. its a sexy phone) Nexus 4 is the way to go. Always the first one to get the newest updates. No bloat. Pure android. If going to a contact.. i would probably swing the HTC one. That is one sexy beast and i hate the amoled screens on galaxies.. way to saturated.
I used a sim for 2 months while doing some testing. I was waiting till next month when my EFT drops $50 per phone and then I will make the cut over. at $45 a month for unlimited everything, you can't beat it. Even on my corporate cummins account, I am still getting close to $200 a month. I head that straight talk gets a bit pissy when you are going over 2GB a month or 300MB a day, but we are no where close to that, so that is a non-issue for us. I am still rocking the Samsung GS2 with cm10.1 nightlies which has just updated to Android 4.2.2 that dropped about 2 weeks ago. Phone runs fine and I don't have any issues (even running nightlies). Once I get the real urge to purchase a new phone, it will not be a branded phone, thats for sure. Either I am getting a international phone or one of the nexus phones. Russ
I'm concerned with basic "enterprise" features. So long as coverage is reliable and the data plan allows me to deal with corporate email and messaging I'm happy. I'm not a huge media consumer on my phone.
There very well may be another player coming soon to the phone industry. From what ive been reading Ubuntu isn't far off from being released.
I wouldn't call them a player in the game till they've had some pre-game warm up and practice. The last thing I would ever do is jump on an emerging ecosystem on an unproven OS. And with my current Ubuntu experiences, I don't find the idea of them bloating up a phone all that attractive. I guess I'd need to see what they have to offer. They aren't known for consistent UIs.
Another reason for a nexus 4. It will be one of the first phones to be able to use Ubuntu. Ill probably install it when it comes out tomorrow
I really like ubuntu on my desktop. Unix is a more familiar environment to me than DOS. I wish it had better game compatibility - that's the only thing holding me back from nerding it up and becoming a linux fanboy. I wouldn't mind seeing what Ubuntu would be like on a tablet before using it as my primary phone OS, though. If it's anything like desktop ubuntu, the scalability would be pretty cool... I had it running on my parents' super old computer (I forget the specs, but it has a 20 gig hard drive that was a deadly high capacity assault drive when it came out if that's any frame of reference... and it ran flawlessly, whereas it didn't run Win 7 at anything faster than a crawl.
True enough. However if you know how to load roms and what not it makes the lure of a android phone that much more as the odds of you being able to eaisly replace android with the new ubuntu rom and switch back if you dont like it are high. Chance of that using a iphone. not possible lol.
Definitely. Firefox is coming out with an OS soon as well. Ill prob try that when it comes out too. Once your phone is rooted, its pretty easy to flash most anything on an Android phone
ubuntu has been ported to alot of Android devices IIRC. Not sure how streamlined that is though. Steam is on Linux, I believe all of Valve developed games now run on it. Team Fortress 2 gives you a toy penguin item in game for installing it on Linux. That depends entirely on how your phone handles the boot partition. Android is based heavily on Linux, but the way the system loads the OS doesn't play nice with other operating systems sometimes. I know this was a concern in the past with loading plane jane linux onto Android devices. It's hard to go back to Android because I believe it causes issue with the way the bootloader gets the ball rolling. Might want to read up on that. Because Ubuntu isn't going to program a 'go back to Android without fail' option for every phone since each phone handles the bootloading function differently.
I was booting into ubuntu and running it ontop of android on my tf101 and it was really slow. Yea I will be doing some more reading on it when the rom becomes available for my gnexus.
I'm so burned out on everything Source-related... TF2 specifically, and multiplayer FPSs in general. Most TF2 games I join are people either spouting tired internet catchphrases or trading hats, neither of which really interest me. BF3 is much the same, but without the hats.
True, I haven't played TF2 in over a year. I used to play it all the time. But the hats got tiresome, and the balance of the game is waaaaaaay off now with the flood of weapons. Borderlands 2 consumes all my time now, that and the occasional minecraft binge. Though I don't think BL2 is available on Linux.
Yes desktop Ubuntu has, but not ubuntu phone. Heck I ran ubuntu on my old HD2 http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone
perfect timing for this thread, i will be in the market for a new android phone next month! Thanks for all the information thus far guys.
