iansltx

Getting back on topic...MY PHONE HAS ARRIVED! Okay, no more caps, I promise. It came about an hour ago. Have it activated on my SERO Premium account...took a ten minute call including the virtually nonexistent hold time...and have been installing apps and playing with features since I also took some unboxing photos, which I will share later. One thing I noticed is that this hits higher upload speeds over EvDO than my Epic. Roughly a megabit per second to be exact. The tower I'm off of is not eHRPD enabled. Anyway, I should get ForumRunner or TapTalk...posting this from Android Chrome is doable but not ideal

My tracking number posted sometime last night. My Choice (the basic version) says that I'll get the phone sometime between 9:45a and 1:45p. Yeah, I'm excited. Quick note re: flights: your shipping carriers (UPS and FedEx included) operate banks of flights out of their hubs in the wee hours of the morning (around midnight to 4am) to get next-day air packages loser to their destinations. For example, the UPS flight that my phone was on departed Louisville (SDF) at 2:40a and arrived in Denver around two hours later. If my phone had missed that shipment, it would have probably gone on a plane to the same place an hour later. Your phone was probably on 5X (UPS) 896, which didn't take off until 4:36a, and consequently didn't arrive into ABQ until just after 5a. But hey, your phone is probably out for delivery at this point, which is exciting EDIT: As I said, out for delivery, lol. The wonders of modern air-based shipping systems.

The same could sort of be said for Palm OS. Prior to my excursion into smartphone territory, I had a Palm VII, a Handspring Visor Pro, a Palm IIIx and a Palm TX (in that order; the IIIx could actually be updated to OS 4.1 so it could do things the Visor couldn't). For PIM functions (calendar, ToDo, contacts) they were awesome devices. However I wanted more functionality when I moved to a smartphone than the Centro (or something like it) could provide, so I switched to WinMo. Since then, nothing Palm built ever got me to come back. Now Bb isn't in quite as bad of a state as Palm is (Palm no longer sells any hardware, the OS has effectively been discarded, etc.) however RIM could learn a lesson from the former division of US Robotics: keep innovating, do your innovations correctly and execute on things at full bore. Otherwise you'll end up as the fourth horse in a three-horse race.

Re: the button, the point of PTT is its immediacy, seems to me. If you have to wade through menus to get to PTT, it's much less likely to be used/be efficient when used. Particularly since you have to hold /something/ down (touch-screen button or hardware button) to grab the channel for your lovely half-duplex conversation. As for actual usage, I guarantee that the segments who still have Nextel phones still use them a lot. If everyone has PTT handsets in the company and you need to request something quickly/give a quick status update, it's way quicker than trying to type out a text message or waiting for a call to be answered. In my industry there's no need for PTT. For the home repair stuff my dad does, it might be nice, though not nice enough to get him to switch to a contract plan from his beat up old Nokia 2126i on Tracfone (which will probably last him another four years!).

Add the Epic 4G to the list of phones that will have side-by-side RF testing vs. the SGSIII; that's what I'm upgrading from

My guess is that ARPU is low because corporate clients are giving their employees a Nextel phone for PTT, plus a BlackBerry or other smartphone on another wireless carrier for everything else. Nextel PTT-only plans are cheap. If Sprint takes PTT over CDMA and promotes the heck out of it, combined with 4G, they may not only be able to keep iDEN customers, but also transition them to smartphones, saving money for the company (one line, not two, to pay for) and increasing ARPU for themselves (though, of this ARPU, only $5 per month will be due to PTT, a radical departure from Nextel days). As for PTT lineups, now that Sprint has stopped selling iDEN phones they're comparable to Verizon, with four PTT-capable handsets, one of which is a smartphone. AT&T will probably end up with more PTT-compatible phones in the short term, though I'd be surprised if they had sub-second call setup times like iDEN/SDC over non-1x.

A couple quick notes: I was in Chapel Hill May 18-20. I hit speeds of 20+ mbps down and 10+ up on VZW. That said, I was using the third-gen iPad, so it's going to be able to pull in better speeds than a smartphone 99% of the time, all else equal. As for incompetent administrations and Cellular A+B licenses, there are a number of areas in Texas where AT&T holds both A and B CLR blocks, leaving Verizon (and everyone else) with only PCS. So spectral incompetency goes both ways. The largest city example of this: San Antonio. AT&T owns 24MHz of paired 700 spectrum there in addition to 6MHz of unpaired 700 (all contiguous), 50MHz of cellular and 10MHz each of PCS and AWS. Granted, AT&T's PCS and AWS holdings are tiny, and no one in the area would be interested in swapping more PCS for the cellular block (Verizon only has 30MHz of PCS there as well, plus its upper-C 700MHz license and an A block 6x6 license). But in San Antonio Verizon has to do just as much complex cell planning (700 vs. 1900) as AT&T has to do in the Triangle area. As an aside, AT&T Wireless in San Antonio sold a lot of PCS spectrum to what is now Leap. Okay, not a lot, but Leap has 20MHz of (non-contiguous) PCS and 10MHz of AWS in San Antonio. Definitely could be worse (though SpectrumCo and some outfit named Aloha Partners are each tying up 20MHz of AWS...definitely doesn't help things).

LTE and WiMAX are actually quite a bit closer tech-wise than, say, CDMA and GSM, or even WCDMA and CDMA. However they aren't close enough, as far as I can tell, to allow for interoperability with any reasonable amount of effort.

I too hope that AWS LTE roaming will happen. There's nothing technically preventing it...everyone will be deploying LTE-FD there.

Uh...Super AMOLED is OLED. Super Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Display, if you want to unpack the acronym.

Ah, SunCom. I used to have a T-Mobile prepaid phone (unlocked Cingular Nokia 6010). When I was in NC, pre-Suncom-purchase, I could use my choice of AT&T or SunCom, since T-Mobile had no native network in the area. it was kinda cool.

I'll be sure to do signal tests (including phone calls to *2) when I get my SIII, comparing it to my Epic. Between my apartment (a few hundred yards away from a rooftop cell site) and the Coors tasting room (a near-dead zone for at least Sprint and T-Mobile), I should be able to get a few nice data points

From a technical standpoint, it's also silly to only allow your citywide WiFi network to be used by one cellular carrier, when such networks tend to take up a huge chunk of the available spectrum for WiFi. Its not like any of the cablecos would want someone else to set up their own WiFi offloading network in those areas...it would interfere with the cable companies' own network! But it might take the FCC forcing them to keep from doing something boneheaded like only allowing VZW to use their network. If it's there, cable companies should wholesale it to whoever wants it, at prices proportional to volume of data transferred or whatever. The backhaul side of things is a bigger deal though, I think. If Verizon (or AT&T)) locks up an exclusive contract with a backhaul provider for a certain tower that also has Sprint equipment on it, that artificially raises prices for everyone, including Sprint, due to the lack of economies of scale that result (Sprint would either have to bring in another BH vendor, or use microwave). It also slows deployments on those towers way down.

Eric @ PhoneScoop seems to be really happy with the SIII (albeit the AT&T / T-Mobile versions): http://www.phonescoop.com/articles/article.php?a=10640 One thing he noticed though was low upload speeds (<1 Mbps) while on the cell network. Hopefully Samsung patches that quickly, because even T-Mobile HSPA+ can hit 2.5 Mbps.

As I've said before, 32GB Blue I kinda wish they sold the phone in gunmetal grey, for what that's worth. Heck, I'd pay $50 for a case mod so it would look cool like that.

Got an email this morning from Sprint telling me what I already knew: Samsung is having issues getting enough SGIII's and mine will be arriving sometime next week. Hey, at least they sent me an email, though I think that should've come yesterday, in case I hadn't been watching the news

I wonder what all will be added feature-wise. Maybe Do Not Disturb?

Maybe, maybe not. I think T-Mobile has 30MHz in some areas right now, and could hit 40MHz with the AT&T divestitures. Remember, the AT&T spectrum package was part of the "breakup fee", and was not imposed by the government.

Hence my disclaimer about needing to go through it I thought I had grabbed only paired spectrum when I looked those up though. Maybe I didn't...

I buy enough stuff that gets shipped UPS (Amazon Prime + Newegg w\ShopRunner) that UPS is quite familiar with my apartment. Since either a roommate or I tend to be around most of the time, UPS will arrive around 10-11am many times. Then again, a college campus is right next door, and I think the bookstore gets shipments via UPS (I'll bet they even have Retina MacBook Pros in stock) so they might as well deliver to me while they're in that part of town But alas, I bought a 32GB...

Dish + Sprint would make sense since Sprint's netowrk is already set up to allow "hosting" of someone else's spectrum, thanks to the failed LightSquared deal. Adding Dish's 2GHz spectrum to the mix wouldn't be difficult at all. What would be really awesome is if Sprint was able to get that hosting contract...and Dish was able to keep all 40MHz of its spectrum. You'd be able to deploy a full 20x20 LTE channel (tons of capacity) nationwide, at a frequency that's lower than Clearwire's (so the network could actually be a full overlay instead of just a hot zone style net). Granted, this network would be marketed by Dish, but I wouldn't put it past Sprint to integrate the band into their devices down the road since it would represent a very nice capacity bump for them.

Forcing Verizon to sell its own AWS holdings, at least in areas where they don't overlap with SPectrumCo, seems like a stupid idea. What Verizon is trying to do is get as close to nationwide on their AWS license (at 20MHz or so) as possible so they have economies of scale when building out their network. They can't be faulted for this...Sprint's got it with the G Block and ESMR, and Verizon's doing quite well with upper C block. OTOH the conditions that Sprint wants imposed on Verizon with the SpectrumCo purchase are actually pretty reasonable. The first big condition in the LR article is that Sprint (or anyone else) is able to WiFi offload to CableWifi at a cost that is reasonable on the wholesale side, and with an experience that's easy for customers. Put a different way, Sprint wants to make sure that cable companies don't give Verizon what amounts to a free WiFi-offloading ride that they would normally reserve only for other cable company customers...and leave any other carrier hanging when that carrier asks for access to the network. With everyone talking about spectrum and efficient use thereof, this seems like a perfectly reasonable request, since these WiFi networks have tons of capacity behind them and would make for an excellend offloading experience in areas (like NYC) that do actually need it. Sprint's backhaul request is also reasonable, though I'm not quite sure how much they're asking for there. The gist I'm getting is that SPrint wants to be able to get comparable rates on backhaul to Verizon or anyone else, given of course quantity discounts, comparable speeds and similar endpoints. Again, the temptation here for the cablecos is to bend over backwards to give Verizon a good deal, since Verizon just bought a few billion in spectrum from them, and the money they save VZW on backhaul would probably come right back to them n the form of either lower wholesale rates on bundled services or better customer experiences due to a quicker LTE rollout. Not that these are bad things, but giving VZW a sweetheart deal on backhaul while inflating prices to Sprint, T-Mobile, etc. (perhaps to make up for lower VZW pricing) puts Verizon at an unfair advantage in a time where they're the most expensive wireless carrier anyway. As a VZW customer paying $20-$50 per month for LTE iPad access, I understand why VZW and cable companies might want to work out something advantageous for both parties, but there comes a point (like with the AT&T&T failed merger) where antitrust is the bigger issue. I certainly don't want to be stuck paying $8-$20 per GB on this iPad for the next five years, and those rates are just as much, if not more so, about competition as they are about Verizon's own costs. I love me some Verizon LTE coverage (300+ markets now!) but if they are in cahoots with cable companies to make sure that they're the only provider that can get the pieces needed to ensure a fast LTE rollout, that's just a little too fishy.