Well, I made the decision to go with the iPhone 4S on Verizon. It was delivered on Friday and so far I am impressed with the device and the network. No network is perfect, but in the little testing I have done this weekend in spots that were dead or almost dead on my Nexus One on T-Mobile had usable signal on Verizon. There are locations where the signal is weaker, but that is also to be expected. Only time will tell.
Category: Cell Phones
What mobile phone to get on which carrier?
Well, I think that I have made up my mind that it is time for a new phone and probably time to leave T-Mobile since they ended their roaming agreements with AT&T in some of the areas that I tend to spend sometime in. Yes, they have service in most of these areas, but it is poor at best in most locations. I can see that there is service form AT&T, but I am only able to use it for emergency calls, which is nice to know that it is available, but still not ideal. With that being said I am leaning toward making the jump to Verizon, yes it will be more every month for the same features, yes their are data caps. If my data usage stays the same I am not too concerned as I use no where near the cap. So am I missing something in deciding to switch carriers?
The next decision is what phone to get, as you can probably guess based on the timing of this I am thinking about the iPhone 4S, as I seem to be more and more Apple centric in what I use and do with technology in the past couple years. I have an iPad, Mac and iPod Touch. Currently my personal phone is a Nexus One on T-Mobile and that is the phone that I would be replacing, I also have a work phone that is an EVO 4G on Sprint, so I will still have an Android phone. I am also open to getting an Android phone on Verizon also, but the real question is which mobile OS to go with? What features that I have come to love on my Nexus One am I going to miss if I make the move to iOS. What are the pluses to moving to iOS. I am a Google Voice and Google Latitude user so how well do these apps function or not on iOS compared to Android? I enjoy photography and the camera on the iPhone’s in the past seem to be far superior to anything on any of the Android phones.
The bottom line is should I switch carriers and/or mobile phone OS? If I do what are good and bad of each?
G1 Update
Well, I have had my G1 for almost six months now and I must say that I am enjoying the device. Yes, it is a bit of an odd design and it is a bit bulky, but nothing that I am not already familiar with having own and many Windows Mobile phones.
Well, as I stated in another post I have made it to over six hundred hours of uptime, heck the other day I was just shy of six hundred and fifty hours when I was forced to reboot the phone to get the radios working again. I had just landed at the airport after returning for being out of town for work and the phone worked for a few minutes and then just refused to communicate with the outside world at all. Oh, well, I would not have made it much past seven hundred hours since I just received the Android 1.6 update for my phone. The odd thing this time is that it did not come overnight, it was right in the middle of the day.
I have not been running the new version of Android for long on the phone, but the updates to Google Maps and the Market are very noticeable and seem to feel a more polished.
The other itme that I am noticing is that it appears that the T-Mobile site near my house has been upgraded to support 3G now, that is nice, but in turn since I am right on the edge, my location based services have a hard time deciding where I am based only on the cell radio. Some times it knows I am close to home and other times it puts me a few towns away and yet other times it has no idea where I am. If I force the phone to 2G it will find my location in no time. Also, if I am in an area that is covered very well by 3G it will locate me just fine. It must be because I am right on the edge. I must also say the the locations based on Wifi are amazing, It locates me on the correct block and within a few hundred feet of my house, a bit scary in some respects.
Over all, I am still very happy with the phone and the service, I am also glad to see T-Mobile expanding their 3G network.
G1 Uptime
Well, I got an alert that there was an update waiting to install on my G1 (HTC Dream) today, but before I let it install I took this picture showing the phones uptime. I am not aware of many smart phones that can come near an uptime of over 25 days. I know my Windows Mobile phone needs to be rebooted on a regular basis.
If you have a phone that will has a great uptime please comment. Also, I am shooting for 1000 hours next time.