iansltx

Heh, I kind of want to throw my OG Epic into the cellular comparison ring. So you have all three Evo generations, all three Galaxy S generations and the GNex...

Whew, steep upgrade fees for not very many months left in your contract. Glad I bought up when I did.

Trust me, I know. There's no way I'm running windows off of a flash drive, and I don't want to replace my optical drive. When I get the money, I'll get a Crucial m4 256GB, but it's a lower priority behind the SIIi

The two magic words I used were "Buy Up". The support rep, at the beginning of the call, kept telling me that I couldn't move up my upgrade date, but once I made it clear that I was asking to buy the quicker upgrade (rather than getting it for free), he was able to check my account and put the early upgrade request through.

I won't miss the lack of a 64GB phone. 32GB + a 64GB microSDXC is plenty...if I need more storage, there's always the 48GB of Dropbox storage that comes with the phone, plus my 25GB on Google Drive. I count cloud services in here because, with LTE, accessing them will be fast enough that not being on-device really won't matter much. Oh, and 96GB is WAY bigger than the highest-capacity iPhone, which would be nearly $100 more than the card + GSIII combo.

Multiple bands? Sure, we've got multiple bands! A, B, C, D, E, F, G

I love the river walk as well. Been awhile since I've gotten down there though. Looking forward to the point when the Fredericksburg cell site shown goes live with 3G (and, of course, 4G). Should make my immediate family, two of whom use Virgin Mobile (LG Optimus V), happy.

My eligibility was 8/1/12 as well. $45 moved it to 6/1/12. All it took was a call to customer service; the Sprint corp store I stopped by in Austin couldn't do it. @JohnHovah, my guess is that the fee is priced per line, based on the number of months between now and your upgrade eligibility as it stands, rounded up to the nearest month. The cost appears to be lower than the prorated ETF per-line, but higher than the number of months between now and upgrade eligibility, multiplied by the ETF proration amount per month (someone correct me if I'm wrong here; I haven't looked into ETF calculations). As for insurance, if you've got five lines, self-insure! At $55 per month for insurance, what's the chance that you'll need to replace two of the five phones in a two-year period with $550 models? Or, in reality, would you need to replace three with $00 phones (I guarantee you the Evo and the GSIII will be aorund that price in a few months off of eBay).

I'm in a similar boat as bigsnake49; my dual monitor desktop is where I get hard work done, unless I'm away from it, in which case my MacBook works just fine (especially now with 8GB of RAM!). But for lighter tasks, my iPad gets used heavily. The proptortion of time spent between my workstation, my notebook and my tablet varies depending on the day, but unless I'm on the road the notebook goes pretty much unused, primarily due to the iPad. I was very close to getting the Transformer Prime, but the third-gen iPad is actually superior to the Prime tech-wise, and I could get the iPad with built-in VZW LTE. The LTE, paired with a built in GPS, proved to be incredibly useful over the past few weeks when travelling and apartment-searching. I could have done similar things with my Epic, plus a tethering app and a Prime or other WiFi-only tablet, but for my purposes the additional $130 I spent to get the cellular-enabled model has been money well spent. One thing I wouldn't consider at this point is using the iPad as my only computer. Nor does it negate the need to bring a laptop on trips longer than a day or two. There's just too much it still can't do at this point...and an Android tablet would be in a similar boat, at least for now. Same reason I have at multiple points carried two laptops around when going on trips. Laptop #1 was my MacBook most of the time. Laptop #2 was either a Windows machine (for light-ish gaming; my MacBook's HDD isn't big enough to dual boot) or a Chromebook (for excellent battery life while doing web stuff).

Let me rephrase: can Sprint use a G-block 5x5 carrier nationwide, even near border areas (sounds like that's a question mark at this point)? If not, does this agreement change that? I'm aware of the ESMR issues.

WiWavelength, is that in the G Block or in ESMR that they would otherwise be limited to 3x3?

Good to hear, for areas where Sprint can deploy a full 5x5 LTE carrier anyway. My bet is that the 3% also accounts for the more robust properties of a narrower carrier (see my previous post re: iDEN). All that said, I'd be surprised to see an LTE signal making it more than six or seven miles from the tower in decent condition, barring a high-gain antenna on the subscriber side. But since Sprint isn't trying (yet anyway) to do its own take on Verizon HomeFusion, that's fine...the point is to increase mobile coverage, particularly when it comes to in-building signals. Having the signal reach another mile or two in a rural area is an awesome bonus, but my bet is that that's gravy for Sprint.

Hmm...I understand the whole 16QAM vs. QPSK side of things, but from what I've seen iDEN does actually propagate quite a bit farther than PCS CDMA. You have to remember that lower channel widths also translate into less susceptibility to noise, as well as higher power density for transmission (these are reasons why a 40MHz 802.11n channel will tend to have less coverage than a 20MHz one). Another data point: LTE uses QPSK, 16QAM or 64QAM (respectively 2, 4 or 6 bits per symbol). My guess is that, with RRUs etc., 64QAM will still net similarly usable signals (so a few db higher SNR) on PCS to what QPSK CDMA was before. Could be wrong though...

I received a similar "out of stock/preorder" email to what Robert got yesterday. Just another data point. I didn't pay for expedited shipping...interestingly, when I bought my Mogul way back in 2007, Sprint shipped it overnight.

Interesting...they'll be allowing Mobile Hotspot for not-too-much-extra per month. if the data allotment is addtive with the standard 2.5GB, then you could get 6GB of data, plus 300 minutes, for $45, less than the cost of a 6GB Sprint mobile broadband package (albeit with no chance of ever using 4G). Sad to see that the iPhone won't show up in Sprint stores, nor will it be usable internationally (despite the HSPA radio inside the 4S).

Aww, so the iPhone can't do SVDO? Sad panda.

...and of course the GSIII-32GB is in the more expensive bin (but not the most expensive one...that's reserved for the iPhone 4S). Re: repairs, what am I hearing about a $35 repair fee? Does that cover any repair that wouldn't result in an insurance claim? Then again, both times I've dropped my Epic by a Sprint store to get it repaired, they've ended up handing me a replacement phone. Both times were more than a year after I bought the first Epic (one ~14 months in, one ~20 months in). I've never needed to file an insurance claim...the only phone I've ever gotten wet was my Touch Pro, which continued functioning perfectly afterwards and never required a repair or replacement (I actually bought that phone outright, but it was during a period where Sprint insurance could be applied to such a phone). So with all that in mind, I wonder what I should do here. I want to make sure I can get my phone repaired/replaced if the problem is the fault of the phone (every single one of my problems have been). I don't, on the other hand, need strictly-speaking insurance because if it's my fault that the phone is broken (has never happened) I'll just suck it up, get a cheap, unsubsidized Android phone and go from there. Any suggestions, interwebs?

I noticed and made the association with the C64, though I never owned one. I did play Lemonade Stand on an Apple ][c though.

Depends on where you are. My mom keeps a Tracfone active in case she runs out of minutes or needs to roam on Virgin Mobile...$7 or so per month and solves the roaming issue completely. All that said, I've roamed very, very little in the ~5 years I've used Sprint (it's all about where you live).

On the plus side, Sprint can afford to offer cheap rate plans on the VMo iPhone because 1. They aren't subsidizing the phone. At all. Probably making money on it, in fact. 2. They don't have to pay anyone for roaming charges, since VMo phones don't roam. So they're willing to offer a $30 plan of some sort (which has a reasonable amount of minutes if you mostly use messaging/data), and have unlimited available for $50, $5 more than T-Mobile or AT&T unlimited via Straight Talk. The plus of Virgin Mobile here is that you don't have to find an Apple store and order the SIM-only kit to get your prepaid iPhone; it's all sold in one (well, many...Sprint stores everywhere) place. The plus against CricKet? More coverage, a slightly cheaper, slightly more generous-with-data-before-throttling unlimited plan, and a 1200-minute plan that's a full $15 per month less expensive than CricKet's only iPhone plan. If you only talk around a thousand minutes per month (which is way above where I sit on my Sprint account, even counting every single minute), the $40 plan plus the non-subsidized iPhone would end up saving you money vs. CricKet after month 10 or so. Heck, if you don't mind not being able to roam, you could compare the 1200 minute plan to Sprint's 450-minute Everything Data plan. Total cost: $80 per month. Despite a steep $450 subsidy on the device, you'd come out ahead on Virgin Mobile after 12 months, assuming again that you're averaging 40 minutes or fewer on the phone each day, and use less than 2.5GB of data in a month. I bet Sprint sells more of these phones than they think they will...

Ordered my SIII (32GB blue) a few minutes ago, as an (early, see my thread on the topic) upgrade. Didn't get the e-mail Robert did, but did get an upgrade confirmation email with the phone purchase info etc. One thing I'm curious about is whether the phone will come with a 32GB microSDHC card preinstalled, for a whopping 64GB of total storage. The phone description page seems to indicate this...and then you see a 32GB card being hawked (for a disgustingly expensive $99.99) on the accessory purchase page. Speaking of which, I didn't buy any accessories. I've got plenty of stuff that runs on microUSB, and I like my cheapie Skullcandy wired stereo headset more than, say, some Bluetool product.