SWMich4G

Anyone actually thinking about doing this, please consider the actual math. Koi did some calculations, but forgot something: you still owe $27 * 12 when you end your service since you haven't paid off your last phone yet. Alternatively you can NOT use your 12 month upgrade the last year, but then it's an unfair comparison since that cost is factored into the current way of upgrading every 12 months. I find it easiest to break it down monthly, so I take any cost and divide it by how often you pay it to get the true long-term monthly payment. To make it fair, for both options I'll assume you get a new, $650 phone every 12 months, you will sell off any phone you have when you end your service (makes the math neater), and that you can get $350 for your 1-year old phones. I'll use $80/month for service, but that's irrelevant since it is a constant between both methods. Option 1 - One Up: You pay an $80 service fee every 1 month -> $80/mo. You pay $27 in phone payment every 1 month -> $27/mo You get a $15 bill credit every 1 month -> -$15/mo You pay a $36 activation fee every 12 months -> $3/mo At the end of your Sprint service, you still owe $324, but you sell your phone for $350. This gives $95/mo plus you net $26 at the end of your service. Staying for 2 years this comes out to about $94/mo. Staying for 10 comes out to about $95/mo. Option 2 - Traditional: You pay an $80 service fee every 1 month -> $80/mo You pay $200 to upgrade with subsidy every 24 months -> $8.33/mo You pay a $36 activation fee every 24 months -> $1.50/mo You pay $650 to buy a phone without subsidy every 24 months -> $27/mo You make $350 selling your old phone every 12 months -> -$29.17/mo At the end of your Sprint service you owe nothing. Selling phone was already factored in above. This gives $87.66/mo Basically, you're paying about $7 a month on One Up to only have to deal with selling your old phone one time instead of every year. It also stabilizes the payments. A bonus with the traditional way is you can actually upgrade every 10 months and the price only goes up to $89.30/mo. So One Up may be convenient for some people, but don't kid yourself into thinking they'd introduce a program that would save you money. You'll spend more.

I'm not really surprised but if I was an iphone guy I'd definitely upgrade. 800 by itself might be worth it, but with the processor upgrade you don't have to worry about it getting sluggish before your next upgrade. I live in an area that you NEED 800 to not have dead spots though. In an urban location (especially one getting TD-LTE before 1900 LTE) I'd be very disappointed with it not being tri-band. And I wish people wouldn't call the 5c a "mid-priced" phone. It's 85% the cost of the 5s. $550 compared to $650. A $300 would be mid-priced (free on contract). You pay back that subsidy a little each month. The $100 initial savings is so insignificant compared to the ~$2500 you're paying over the life of the phone.

Which backs up my point. I cannot connect to any antennas beyond 2 miles away. Most of the time I do not connect until I'm less than a mile away. I can occasionally hold an already established connection beyond 2 miles (driving away from tower), but it is rare and almost never usable. If you were complaining about a panel 1/2 mile away that you can see clear as day and still not connect to I would have sympathy, since that's what I have in some places. You should be bragging about connecting to a tower 3 miles away. I'll have to wait for 800 MHz LTE before I can even hope for that to happen to me.

LTE almost 4 miles from a tower and you're complaining? That's far better than any tower around here. Most get about 1 to 1 1/2 miles before the signal disappears. Some get about 1/2 a mile. Only the narrow bandwidth panels ever go beyond 2 miles, and that's only on a straight stretch of highway.

Bored again. It's only been about 6 weeks since I did this but you can compare these pics to the old ones and see how both AT&T and Sprint have expanded over the past month and a half. Again keep in mind each square is about 10 miles by 10 miles so if there's LTE anywhere in that 100 square mile block there's gonna be color on the map. This also ignores signal strength because I don't know how to extract the tile layers from the sensorly maps. Of course if I could do that, I couldn't waste 2 hours every time I do this. Mid-July version is here. Here's an animated .gif so you can better see how they compare: Uploaded with ImageShack.us

No you won't get everything you'll ever need. You'll become addicted and then have to donate more to access the premier sponsor section!

Why'd you edit it out? Maybe some of us want to know what your phone has to say!

It's ok...I still haven't moved on to mp3s! I'm still in the stone age, buying cds and converting to lossless formats. And worse yet, I listen to the actual cds themselves sometimes!

Hmm..maybe Samsung markets are different. When they turned on 800 MHz here they also updated the BSLs (or at least SignalCheck Pro started displaying different addresses/coordinates). While they used to be off by 1-2 miles and different for every sector, they changed them to exact locations (within feet), and they show up the same for each sector on the same site. Unless it's Mike putting this data in, this is how close the location being broadcast by Sprint is from the location given to sponsors here (coordinates blurred to keep private): They both lie within the site fence, and the one given by Sprint is probably a few inches closer to the actual tower itself. My phone is also always listing the closest or second closest site to my location, so it seems like it's pretty exact to me. What am I missing?

Wait...so can I post screenshots from Signal Check Pro of the 1x800 BSL address and the map that it links to and Rickie/Robert will update those towers to 800 on the map? I thought everything other than "in progress" was determined by official Sprint acceptances.

For the first week or so of 800 Mhz in my area, I was connected to 800 all the time. This was anywhere in the county, I would just hand off from tower to tower on 800. Now I almost never connect to 800 Mhz, even at times when I have a very weak 1x signal. Is this normal, and why is this happening? EDIT: If it's relevant, there are still several towers that were broadcasting 800 MHz the first week that are still not 800 MHz accepted. Is it possible they've stopped broadcasting, even on the accepted towers, for a short period of time (maybe until they're all accepted)?

I have 2 apps that supposedly measure charging current. Galaxy Charging Current tells me it's 1200 mA when plugged into the wall. CurrentWidget tells me it's 1 mA when plugged into the wall. The charger is rated 2 A.

Some do specify an amperage rating, but you have no way of knowing how accurate their claims besides reading the reviews. I had to replace my car's battery when my alternator went out, so I doubt that's an issue. I had read stuff about the shielding on the cable significantly affecting the charging rate for the S4, and I'm sure my current one isn't shielded at all. I just don't want to spend $20 on a charger for it to be no better than the one I have. I was already looking at the motorola one bill linked to, so I'll probably try that. I was just concerned that a 950mA charger might be notably slower than a 2A charger.

I'm having trouble finding a definitive answer to getting a car charger that will actually charge my phone. I just have an old iGo charger, but even with the screen off and every application stopped, my phone actually loses charge while plugged in. I have a GS4 and every app I've tried that measures charging rate tells me it's getting the same charging current as when it's plugged into the wall (it clearly is not). So I have a couple questions: 1) Has anyone found a car charger that actually charges their Galaxy device about as fast as the Samsung wall charger? Anything notably cheaper than the official Samsung one? 2) Has anyone found a charge monitoring app that works on the GS4 and reports the ACTUAL charging current, or an accurate charging time estimation? Any researched or anecdotal findings would be appreciated. Thanks.

It makes you think that?!? Wow it doesn't make me think that at all! Maybe that's cause I actually understand it's 100% marketing and you don't...

Hey Rukin, where'd you get the idea for this thread? Speaking of which, would people have interest in me doing those comparison maps (ATT only/Sprint only) every week or two? That post seemed to get a lot of likes so I could keep doing it if people want. Also let me know if you want any other carriers compared. No, no, and no! Why do people keep saying this? Gray is NO SIGNAL. Sprint probably has better highway coverage than AT&T. You can drive from Kalamazoo to Traverse City, MI and have LTE 95% of the trip on Sprint. You can go from Salina, KA to Corpus Christi, TX and have the same result (850 miles btw). These are obviously cherry-picked examples, but AT&T doesn't have anything like that. Look at a map WITHOUT the gray and tell me where do you see highway coverage for AT&T? I can count maybe a dozen highway-only towers in the country that provide rural highway coverage for AT&T. They do have a couple more thin lines on sensorly, simply because Sprint's highway coverage also extends (or is simply better mapped) AROUND the highway, making the thin line into a blob instead. Gray removed: ATT Sprint Uploaded with ImageShack.us EDIT: And on a related note, in my interpretation the sheer amount of gray on the AT&T map suggests a lot more people are mapping for AT&T than most of you assume. Certainly Sprint has more mappers, and especially within cities mapping the entire coverage of individual towers, but you can't deny AT&T must have some very avid mappers to turn that much highway gray.

Can google index the restricted forums? Because then they wouldn't really be restricted. So it doesn't help with that. EDIT: I should add I do get better results from google for the public forums for many searches.

It seems you cannot search for 3 character terms using the search function here. Since we use a lot of acronyms, it makes it very difficult to search for topics on such things as LTE, PRL, COW, RRU, GSM, PCS, GMO, 800 Mhz, etc. Most of these terms rarely appear as anything other than the acronym/abbreviation, so searching for the full term doesn't help. Is there any way to change the 4 character minimum at the very least when only searching in thread titles? I can't imagine searching titles of the around 3000 or so threads we have here would put that much strain on the server even when only using a 3-character term. If this can't be changed, at the very least could we get a notice saying something like, "the following search terms were ignored for being too short." I'd much rather see it allowed if possible, since combing through all the forums for a topic like GMO or PRL can be very inefficient, and encourages duplicate threads when one doesn't find what they are looking for.

I have 6.14.4. The standard google markers like on the maps here look fine, even though they are technically only around 36 or so pixels tall. My icons display about 1/4 the size of the google markers in the app, but almost twice the size of the google markers on the website.

Which version are you running?

So I'm making a kml in google maps relevant to this site and am having issues with using my own icons instead of the default markers. I only have about 80 markers but they are all custom icons instead of the default google markers (only 6 unique images among the 80 though). When I load the map on my phone (GS4), it will only load about 75 of the markers with the correct icon, and then the rest will be the default blue google marker. I thought it might be that particular image timing out from the server (google drive) but when I kept editing the incorrect markers they would become correct but other markers would change to the wrong marker so that wasn't it. Does anyone know what is causing this? Is there a timeout for loading the entire map at which point everything that hasn't been rendered defaults to the blue google marker, is there a hard limit in the number of custom icons in the phone app, or is it something else? Also, I was wondering if there is a way to resize the markers at various zoom levels? Having a different marker for each zoom level would also work. The 64x64 size works great on my pc, but in the phone app they are teeny tiny. You can barely make out the color, let alone the text on them. It looks great if I go to google maps in a browser on my phone, but it's unbelievably slow to scroll or zoom. The default google markers automatically resize in the phone app to be way bigger than my icons. I know you can do this with the API, but is it possible with just a kml file viewed in google maps? If not, what's a good maps API tutorial?

The "Active Apps Manager" is a different color. And the first time I got the lock screen it didn't say "Life Companion" or show the time. I also got an error telling me my sim card had been removed that didn't go away until I reset the phone. Other than that, I haven't noticed anything.

I was wondering why I couldn't find my post in the West Michigan thread! It's cause it's here! I swear I know which side of the state I'm on, but I follow both threads so I guess I had a blonde moment. I have family on the east side of the state but I rarely get over to that side.

I just remembered a question I've been meaning to ask. Sometimes when I hit "start" under the map trip screen, the data count immediately jumps as if it's already collected a bunch of points (e.g. one second after I hit start it says 47 points). Is this a bug or a feature? I don't like to map areas that have already been mapped since 800 LTE will eventually strengthen the signal, but I like to have sensorly ready to start once I drive into an unmapped area. The way the number of points jumps makes me think it's been collecting points from the second I opened the app, which is not what I want. Now I have to resort to not even launching the app until I'm out of a previously mapped area. I'm not certain it does that 100% of the time, but after noticing it several times I was really wondering whether it's supposed to do that and if not, can it be fixed?

Gray is no coverage. When you map in "LTE only" mode, it maps gray when you aren't finding LTE. Normal mapping doesn't do this because your phone just switches to 3G and starts mapping on the 2G/3G map. I really wish people wouldn't map in LTE-only.