Please keep firing questions as you think of them!
God, what an offer! Thanks! History: I bought the initial iPhone 2G, first by trying ATT, which failed due to lack of coverage (and poor service reports) so I bought one on-line and use pwnage tool to jailbreak/unlock for TMo and european travel. It just died (after 4 years!). I rather like the iDevice ecology, having macbooks, macmini, ipad, ipod etc, and have an app that is not yet on android but has a poor replacement on android. I like that the apps span ipad/pod/phone too. I'm not a power user, but use phone, web, mail, music, apps, maps, angry birds, ... at least once a day, no more than an hour, I'd say. I like TMo quite a bit, but am willing to try Vzn, less so ATT .. they still have poor coverage where I live (Santa Fe). I find that the plans my friends have are impossibly expensive, > $90/mo, .. while I pay $58/mo. There are some interesting alternatives such as buy unlocked and use prepaid plans, but this mainly makes sense on GSM, which here means TMo. Even with Vzn, I would prefer a "world phone", thus GSM (Italy 1-2 months/yr). Main negative for TMo is AWS rather than the more standard 3G etc, and would eliminate iPhone unless Edge was good enough, which I haven't found to be the case. I've looked at a lot of alternatives: MVNOs, WiFi "carriers", prepaid, Senior plans (I'm 69) and even cheaper phones + iPod. If I had my choice, I'd buy an unlocked iPhone, 4 or 4s, and use it on ... hmm, ATT, no, lousy coverage, TMo, no, uses non-compatible broadband. Well what's left? 1 - See if the Vzn iPhone 4s is OK, get the european SIM unlock, and see if I can avoid $90/mo bills. 2 - Suck it up, embrace android, and go with TMo. They seem to have OK phones. They have brilliant plans, both contract and pre-payed. And are way less than $90/mo. They've saved my skin more than once with problems traveling. 3 - Buy a prepaid GoPhone ATT SIM and try it on unlocked phone to see if coverage has improved. Then try ATT + iPhone and see if I can avoid $90/mo bills. I also prefer their more standard broadband, but not a big deal. That sounds like Pogue's great "I Want An IPhone" video, but I really am open to change. The difficulty is the "gotchas": plans that are really expensive, having duplicate apps for android and iOS (pad/pod/phone), phones that I don't trust (yet), mobility (I really find it hard to understand folks leaving europe out of their plans, but then...), batteries that die if I forget to turn off x,y,z and kill app a,b,c ... and billions of cellular issues that I don't really understand as well as I'd like (TMo about to die? Why do plans cost so much?, WTF w/ AWS?) So that's it! And I really thank you for your clear explanation of some of the android world that I didn't "get". -- Owen On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 4:12 PM, Chris Feola <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Owen, > > Yes, Android phones are open. There are two paths for this: > > 1. Download updates yourself. Lots of places to do this, the best of > which is generally regarded to be CyanogenMod http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ > 2. Wait for your manufacturer to stream you updates. > Plenty of good reasons to do both. The best manufacturers -- I like HTC > -- are consistently tweaking and adding features. CyanogenMod tends to be > faster to the big updates. Use what you like. > There has been some controversy about locked bootloaders, but everyone has > pretty much backed off of that now. > > As to battery life, I'm sorry if I was unclear. The Sensation is as good > or better for battery life when you use it the same way. But you won't. If > you keep that quarterHD screen lit for four hours non-stop reading Heinlein > on your Kindle app while streaming Pandora...yeah, you're going to need to > recharge. If you only flick the screen on when you hear a text come in, not > so much. > > Please keep firing questions as you think of them! > > cjf >
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