strung

"I believe that the debt is manageable and I also feel that the execution risks have reduced (not increased, as maintained by Sanford) over the past year. Among other positive developments for Sprint over the past year, the company has refinanced their medium-term maturities, progressed with their "network vision" initiatives, and secured the iPhone (which also brings additional risks, but is a considerable overall positive for the company, in my opinion).

I also see the asset value of Sprint's network, spectrum, subscriber base, and operational infrastructure, as substantially above the levels of Sprint's net debt. As a result, I believe that if Sprint stumbles in its turnaround, and its equity value falls too far, another company will step in and acquire this valuable business (in an industry for which the barriers to entry by other means are massive). For these reasons, I see the likelihood of a Sprint bankruptcy as small and overstated by current debt and equity prices."

(I was thinking along the same lines myself.)

Where does one trade on the credit default swap markets?

I'm pretty mad at Craig Moffett right now. I'm still trying to earn all my trading fees right now, and he just ruined it for me.

how many shares are you in for

Just a guess, but I would suspect that Apple would release a Sprint model banded for Sprint's LTE sometime later on as updated LTE chipsets come out what not.

I can play virtual piano, drums and virtual DJ on my iPad/iPhone. I can't do that on my Android tablet or phones :P (due to Android's high audio latency)

OTOH, I have usable Google Maps navigation, tethering, and can block calls/SMS on my Nexus S. Can't do that on my iPhone Oh and drain the battery with wimax.

Android ICS launcher is much easier and prettier than the iPhone launcher, but overall i prefer the iPhone 4s...for now.

I owned the E4GT for about 3 weeks and own a 4S. I don't own a Galaxy Nexus though but have compared it side by side and seen some of its pictures online. So not really scientific comparison; I could be well off base. Zero shutter lag is cool though. Forgot about that. The 4S also low zero shutter lag maybe not as fast as the Galaxy Nexus though, but the GN 4 out of 5 pics will be lag free, but out of focus. The Galaxy Nexus takes good pictures in good light - I don't think I was fair saying its extremely disappointing. Sorry, I was probably still pissed about the absolutely abysmal audio quality on the E4GT. Samsung switched from the amazing Wolfson codec used in the original Epic Touch to a cheaper Yahama codec with high noise.

How are u upgrading that often? Less ur paying full price for each of them....and in that case u lose $ a ton on resale...

 

Sent from my PG86100 using Tapatalk

Online you can get android phones often for free ... e.g. on http://wireless.amazon.com/ usually a few months after release.

Then just buying/selling on ebay.

I'd say go for it. You can always ebay it. Though I tend to upgrade my phone every 3 or 6 months :-) The nice thing is good phones hold most of their resale value. The camera alone is worth it. Though if you listen to music on your phone, I'd wait or get the iPhone as the DAC on the Epic Touch 4G is garbage. The camera on the Galaxy Nexus is extremely disappointing (unless or course they choose a different part for the Sprint version). I'd rather have a good camera than LTE.

Either OS is going to have to come out with some feature that iOS and Android do not have. It would have to be earthshaking to overcome this:

 

RIM actually owns a quite advanced technology with the QNX operating system and kernel that they bought. The QNX microkernel is a realtime microkernel (unlike the Linux kernel which has some real-time capabilities but have to be patched in separately). It could be argued that the QNX kernel and perhaps Windows CE kernel that drives Windows Phone are the most advanced kernel out of all the operating systems since they have real-time capabilities. Though for LInux they can be patched in. I'm not sure about iOS.

Most phones run an operating system and then additional real-time operating systems (RTOS) for the baseband processors (radios). This is just an educated guess, but I would think the QNX OS, being a real-time OS, could run the entire system including the radios. What advantage would that have? Tighter integration between the operating system and radio, leading to higher performance, perhaps better battery life, cost savings, etc. Reduction of baseband chip(s) with processing handled through the real-time OS on the main core(s), allowing for either smaller phones, more room for other components, cheaper manufacturing, etc. If RIM or Microsoft somehow pulled something like this off, it could be a pretty big play.

Low latency problems are quite apparent in Android. See for example http://code.google.c.../detail?id=3434 . Real-time sound applications like voice transformation apps, synthesizers, virtual pianos, garageband, guitar amps, are simply not possible on Android, yet have been possible on iPhone OS since the original iPhone. So the importance of real-time capabilities, e.g. hard or soft performance guarantees, shouldn't be understated. This type of app may not be important to most people, but to a musician, lack of it is a deal-breaker. Also this type of app is possible on Linux through some kernel patches and the jackd process, so this may not depend so much on a real-time kernel.

That said the programming difficulty of real-time systems is quite complicated especially system wide, and the slower layers like Dalvik VM (Android) and Silverlight (what Windows Phone non-system apps must be written in) are much higher bottlenecks in terms of performance. Also, having the baseband processor in a separate chip allows for easier certification process by the FCC as the chip doesn't have to be re-certified. If it were integrated, presumably the entire phone OS would have to be re-certified each OS update.

This is just an educated guess on my part. I don't know that much about real-time operating systems and baseband so it would be nice if someone more knowledgeable could comment.

The carrier bloatware is some of the most uninspired engineering ever. IMO it's mainly just put on there so that people who don't know where to get the good apps can still have some functionality of a smartphone. Verizon uses it to nickel and dime you to death. Sprint uses it to fill up your internal memory...

At least from what I've experienced, bloatware is usually installed into the /System/app partition. Technically, I wouldn't say that it is quite fair to say that that fills up your internal memory. The phone memory when manufactured is partitioned into a few partitions: boot, recovery, user, system, radio (real time os for the CDMA), wimax (real time os for the wimax chip) and data partitions. System is usually 256 or 512 MB or something like that. An AOSP Gingerbread Android build is about 90 MB and about 120 to 180 MB for Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0). And HTC Sense/Gingerbread takes at least 200 MB, I think. But this software is installed into the /System partition which has already been partitioned. So any extra space in the /System area could be loaded with bloatware applications. And then because user-installed apps are installed on the /Data partition, extra bloatware installed into /System has no effect on the free space on the /Data partition.

A small nitpick I know, but I feel it deserves to be mentioned. Of course, the extra icons shown in the launcher for bloatware is a valid concern as that can be bothersome; however, in ICS you can disable those applications.

I'm sure you guys have already thought of this

Just thinking with the next iPad having LTE and rumored to be released on March or April, and then if the next iPhone is released in June which would be 2 years from the iphone 4 release (so as to keep the 4 buyers who are coming off their 2 year commitments). That would be a good reason to accelerated LTE and have it lit up a lot of places by mid year. It seems like they really want to light up LTE even faster than planned.

Yes, you are incorrectly quoting. He said that they can remove users who roam too much.

I can confirm this; I was on the conference call and heard it firsthand. Hesse was talking about roaming costs and the cost of roaming data, e.g. data usage not on the Sprint network.

On the investor conference calls, Dan Hesse repeatedly emphasizes the Sprint brand being about value and unlimited data, and that unlimited data is the primary differentiator between Sprint and other carriers. Sprint has been building itself up as the #1 value carrier. Its marketing is based around the simplicity and value of an unlimited (talk, text, data) plan. For them to do a 180 on unlimited would make little make sense. Of course anything can happen, but it would be a complete reversal of the past few years of marketing and brand building.

This is spot on. You have all these Android devices using all these chiips...the qualcomm chips, the Nvidia chips, the TI chips, and so on. Each component therein (the CDMA baseband, bluetooth, wifi, gps, accelerometer, 3-D acceleration chip, proximity sensor, gyroscope, barometer, sound codecs, 4G chip, ambient light sensor, USB, HDMI, battery driver, and cameras) requires a module (similar to a device driver) in the Linux kernel to operate it and also additional firmware in the case of CDMA baseband and Wimax/LTE real-time operating system on the chips. That's quite a lot of devices packed into a phone, more than a typical PC! When a new Android drops they typically use a newer kernel with a variety of patches. Getting all these device drivers to work with the latest kernel requires time and engineering.

Because all these modules operate in kernel space, where program code is not isolated from each other, a bug in one driver or device hardware can crash the whole system. And there has been a long history of issues with certain phones, particularly GPS problems.

Then there is negative incentives for manufacturers and carriers to update. Each flash update potentially can brick the device or lose the customer's data, cause apps not to work, change the experience so that customers complain about the software changes, etc. While the phone is updating people lose ability to make calls (such as to 911). I'm actually amazed devices are updated at all.

Then there is also the time and effort needed for merging and testing manufacturer's modifications to the stock Android codebase and testing built-in applications.

I was surprised by all the additional band-aid capex they are spending just months in advance of Network Vision. Especially in markets where NV is already under way. But I guess they figure they have to do something about the network, especially with all these new iPhone users staring at them, asking "WTH???"

 

I was definitely shocked about the thought of forced WiMax offload. If I hadn't seen the Sprint documentation with my own eyes, I never would have believed it.

Why can't they use Wimax as backhaul for 3G? Especially since their contract with Clear allows for unlimited Wimax?

Thanks for the info.

 

And welcome to S4GRU. Thanks for joining.

 

- Robert, S4GRU

Thanks for the site and forum! It's fun to keep up on all the news!

Migrated from Original Forum. Originally Posted 9 January 2012

 

Would it be possible to modify the existing EVDO radios as they are already on the correct frequencies in order to achieve this? Im just throwing darts. I knew the WiMax radio couldn't recieve the data correctly, but what if the 800Mhz and 1900Mhz radios were used? I wonder if that might improve the chances of this succeeding.

This is a great question. Both the CDMA and wimax chips run real-time operating systems to handle themselves (CDMA is often called the baseband) so your smartphone actually runs 3 OS's at the same time, in a way.

However reprogramming is unlikely. The CDMA chip probably wouldn't have the computational ability to do the OFDM multiplexing (a CPU-intensive process) needed for LTE/Wimax. OFDM basically allows radios to jam more bits into their transmission, enabling higher speeds.

Politically, any changes to radio configuration in devices requires re-certification from the FCC, a costly process that there is little incentive for carriers or device manufacturers to undertake.

It's more likely that the Wimax radio could be reprogrammed to "speak" LTE, but again that I'm fairly certain would require FCC approval.