Smartphones

I've used a great many high-end smartphones over the years (since I can upgrade any time I want), and the HTC One is the best I've ever owned.

No good reason, really.

Yeah, I dunno why it's been stalled at 8-64 GB for so long. I have a Touch that must be 5 years old that's 64GB. The marginal cost of flash ram now is negligible. Even quality SSD's are under a dollar a GB now.

That's the nice thing about Tmobile, you can use it for any amount of time then hop onto a different carrier if you want to.

Araxen_sl said:

Note 2 or an Galaxy S4 would be my recommendations off the top of my head. I would lean more towards the Note 2 because of the screen size of it and it runs Android which is an open platform. I'm sure it could be rooted and you can flash roms on it which might give you more flexibility. I don't own a Note 2 so I'm not sure how good the rooting community is on it.

Click to expand...

I own a Note 2 and I love my laptop. *cough * sorry I meant my tablet, no whoops again that's Phablet. Seriously it has a huge screen so I just bought a wallet phone case for it and ditched my wallet. It may seem too big a screen and for many people it is but here is fair warning if you use it and get use to it, it will make it harder to go back to a smaller screen.

Mine is still running stock Android and with it my battery life on heavy usage (4G browsing on and off all day and 8+ hours audio book listening) I might get as low as 30% if I noticed. On wifi I just count battery usage in days. Seriously exaggerations aside the Note 2 battery will surprise you.

Some small notables. Can add wireless charging (I did, it works), removable battery, removable/upgradeable storage, the Spen is addictive.

Tuco_sl said:

I didn't even know devices could have as low as 8GB of storage space anyway. What is this the 90s?

Click to expand...

That's pretty much everyone nowadays in the phone/tablet market. If the memory isn't expandable, they rape you on the price for more. iPads cost $100 more to go from 16GB to 32GB.

This is also why I don't like this trend of not putting micro SD slots in phones. Apple obviously started it, but now Android phones are starting to shift that way too with the Nexus 4 and HTC One.

Shit's sake, I bought a class 10 32GB MicroSD card for like 20 bucks last Christmas. I really want to be able to use that in my next phone, so I'm probably staying with the Samsung Galaxy line of phones.

=

On my phone, I only have used ~5gb of storage total including the OS. And most of that 5gb are pictures I have never blown off my phone. Everything else I do these days is cloud-based and/or streaming. Even then I rarely even sniff a gig of data usage per month even though I on unlimited data. I don't do a lot of video but I do stream music and/or podcasts quite a bit. I will note though that whether it is home, work or friends house I am very rarely far away from Wi-Fi.

As far as prepaid plans, I have done a lot of digging into them because I am trying to move my 5 phones (business related) away from Verizon. For GMS, I would recommend eitherPTelorSolavei.Both use T-Mobiles network so ymmv based on coverage in your area. Also while both threaten to throttle your data after you hit a "cap" generally the caps aren't enforced unless they catch you tethering (my understanding based on customer reviews).

I have also usedGo Smart, but I would not recommend them. Their $45 plan is only 3g and for the life of me I can't get MMS working despite following their instructions to the letter and several calls to their terrible customer service.

This is probably wishful thinking, but does a device exist that you could purchase that will read the signal level of various cell carriers? My cell signal varies wildly at various friends houses, and while I've considered switching services before, mine works perfectly at my home, even in my basement, and I'm worried that another carrier might not. I have several friends who can't get a signal in their own basement, or even at their jobs sometime inside an office building.

I don't want to go to the trouble of converting over my phone number, setting up new phones and all that hassle only to find out the signal from my new carrier blows in the spots where I most frequently use it.

Just ordered my Black HTC One from Sprint. Unfortunately they don't have it in black in store yet, just online. So I should have it by the end of the week. I'm excited. A Friend who buys basically every phone ever has it and says it's as close to perfect in a phone as he's ever seen, so there's that as well as Wolfen's stamp of approval.

joeboo_sl said:

This is probably wishful thinking, but does a device exist that you could purchase that will read the signal level of various cell carriers? My cell signal varies wildly at various friends houses,

Click to expand...

I don't know about a device that does what you are looking for, but I have found many of the coverage maps on various carriers websites to actually be fairly accurate. For example, I live about 1/2 mile from my parents, but I go from full bars-to-none when I go to their place. Looking at both Verizon's and some of the prepaid plan's (Tmobile) coverage maps, sure enough they show a big hole in the service right in my parents neighborhood.

Something else to consider is many models of T-Mobile phones have built-in Wi-Fi calling (not the Nexus 4 unfortunately though).

What the fuck Samsung.