Smartphones

As my nexus 4 has been shipped and will be arriving soon, I went to order a sim from straight talk and here's no option for buying an AT&T sim anymore. I do some searching around and it seems they stopped selling them online about a week ago. There have been conflicting reports on whether they will be selling them again or if they're going TMobile only, but on twitter they have said they will be selling them again once they become available. TMobile is complete crap where I live (upstate NY), with coverage being mostly 2G, 3G in some towns, and a lot of no coverage areas.

Apparently they are still honoring AT&T sims if you get them from Walmart, so I'll be checking out the local stores. Thankfully they're currently listed as in stock online but that may not last, as they were listed as out of stock recently.

LiquidDeath_sl said:

Have you checked eBay for AT&T sims? I seem to remember seeing them on there not too long ago.

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Well it turns out Walmart only sells sim cards online. They were listed as in stock, so I tried ordering a micro sim with 30 days of time and kept getting billing errors no matter what payment method I used. I tried ordering just the sim and it went right through and shipped last night. According to what I've read lately, Straight Talk is saying this is just a shortage of sims and they will start selling them again once they get more. I find it odd that they're completely removed from their website though, instead of simply listed as out of stock if that's the case.

Anyway, the Nexus 4 arrived yesterday afternoon and I'm pretty impressed with it so far. Build quality is excellent, far better than my Galaxy Nexus. Its display is also far superior when I put them side by side, especially at lower brightness levels. The colors on the Nexus 4 are definitely much cooler, almost too much so, but much more realistic that the Galaxy Nexus. I'm definitely interested on seeing what it looks like once I root it and try out Paranoid Android on it. They recently made some changes to their kernel that improve color accuracy by quite a bit.

Until I get my sim I can't test this out as a phone and see if I get the speaker buzz that some have reported, but overall this seems to be an excellent phone. Overall performance has been very good, though it does get a little warm when gaming, but not excessively so. The only real negative I see is the glass back, which while nice looking, is something that I worry about scratching all to hell. I'll just get a clear protector for it and probably one of those Poetic bumpers, now that they have fixed the peeling issue.

When I went from an EVO 4G to the Galaxy Nexus, I thought having the headphone jack on the bottom was really strange. Now that the Nexus 4 has it on the top again, I really miss it. Especially when listening to music while reading something on the phone.

As far as the Xperia Z goes, I agree that the power button looks pretty stupid. Otherwise the phone looks good to me. Shipping with Android 4.1, so that's not terrible, but it would be nice if more manufacturers would actually ship phones with the current version. Checking out the specs, it's funny to see the max standby time and talk time listed, but missing what I feel to be far more important: screen on time. Granted this can vary greatly depending on what you are doing when the screen is on, but it would be nice for manufacturers to start including this.