themuffinman

If you really believe that something may be wrong with the device then by all means try to swap it out. All I can say is that when it comes to RF performance my evo 3d performed better than my OG Evo when it came to 3g(not by much), my evo lte definitely performed better than my evo 3d and my One defintely performs better than my evo lte in every way. But again I can only speak for myself based on what I have experience over the last few years and of course individual miles will vary. Now being that I live in atlanta and I don't live in the sticks, I usually have full bars where ever I go but when I travel to the Virgin Islands for work, there are dead spots all over because of the terrain in addition to significant drops in signal strength when I walk into any building. So its pretty easy for me to determine how a phone will handle, thats how I figured out that the gnex was total garbage in the RF department(at least for 3g). I say go for it, and if for whatever reason your dad doesn't like it, you could always exchange it for something else. But for the most part, I have no complaints other than the arrangements of the capacitive buttons.

You can read what I said a page or two back. I bought the htc one on release day, a week later I also bought the gs4(which I ended up returning a few days later). Now compared to the evo lte the htc one is light years ahead of it as far as 4g connectivity, I have tested this extensively over the last 3 weeks and its as clear as day. Now some may say differently when it comes to 3g(cough digiblur cough) but my evo lte performed exceptionally well when it came to 3g performance and the htc one is even better especially with the dual antenna setup.

Vieques? That's awesome, next stop St. Thomas.

Actually you can be connected to three towers at a time, one for 1x, another for 3g and a third for lte.

This has happened to me a few random times as well.

I got to say that the gnex, pound for pound, turned out to be one of the worst smartphones I have every owned. Now don't get me wrong when I first got it I thought it was pretty cool but after that new car smell wore off things started to change for me. Like what Josh said though, the battery life turned out to be horrible. Using the extended battery rated at 2100mah I could barely make it till noon without having to recharge the thing not to mention it use to get hot as hell most of the times for no apparent reason. I do agree that a used evo(being a lot cheaper) offers more value than a used gs3 but I would also consider getting the lg optimus g. That phone has better specs than both the gs3 and the evo with a quadcore processor and the screen is pretty awesome and you can get it cheaper than the evo on ebay. Edit: Also if you are interested I have an evo sitting around the house not doing anything so I can save you the trouble of having to deal with ebay or anyone else with a good deal. PM me if you are interested

Just a recap of my own personal experience with using both devices at the same time at the same locations. With that being said, I think the photon like most other motorola devices are RF beasts and I don't think the One or S4 will be as good when compared to the photon. But the only way to make any kind of determination is going by your own personal experience with either device and making your own real world judgement.

Damn, I am impressed unless an new OTA is right around the corner but nevertheless, still impressive.

Well I won't be back in St. thomas for another few weeks so I don't know about that but I do know that it started doing that right before I left for atlanta a couple weeks ago.

I just spent the last 48+ hours spending quality time with both the One and GS4 and as far as rf performance I really didn't see any noticeable real world differences between the two. Yesterday I was at my girlfriends dads house and both phones stayed connected to a very weak but usuable lte connection and they both disconnected once I went down into the basement and both phones reconnected once I came back upstairs. I also previously posted about my experience going into walmart. I know some people are experiencing issues with this whole "antenna gate aka holding it wrong issue" but its not enough for me to get frustrated with the device. Yes it does happen to me as well when the phone is not in a case while covering the entire back of the phone with both hands but its not as bad as some of the videos I have seen on youtube, also keep in mind that all phones have some sort of death grip. Anyway, just using the device as intended hasn't yielded any issues at all. I did notice that my GS4 was running slightly warmer than my One when the signal was low.

LOL!!!!!

Well for me the most important factor is screen quality, screen size, build quality/design of device. Benchmarks are just not reliable enough and has absolutely no baring on real world performance. Prime example, I have both the gs4 and the one and for the most part the gs4 scores slightly higher on most benchmarks which is understandable being that its clocked at a slightly higher speed but in real world use the one simply does everything faster.

Ok just left walmart and basically performance was the same on both devices. As we headed to the back of the store both phones dropped to 3g but once we got back to within a few feet of the registers both phones connected right back to 4g just fine. We are on our way to my girlfriends dads house now, he lives in an area where the signal isn't quite the best so this should give me a decent idea of how both phones will perform under below average conditions.

Ok, same here. WIth my tpu case on, nothing noticeable seems to happen but without the case I do notice about a 10 to 15 dbm change but like y'all said it only happens if I cover the entire back of the phone, but in normal use I will never hold it that way anyway.

Since no one wants to open a gs4 user thread, I decided to go ahead and open one myself. I went to sprint this morning and the phone whore in me held a gun to my head and forced me to get a gs4. So right now I have two One's on my account and one gs4. The screen is actually a lot better than I thought it was gonna be and even though I have always hated samsungs pentile garbage screens this screen is pretty amazing, at 1080p you definitely can't tell that it has a pentile layout. I am not gonna do to many comparisons other than signal strength because truth be told, these are two totally different devices with two totally different approaches to wowing the consumer. I will say this though, which has been stated already around the web. The daytime performance of the camera is amazing and its definitely better than the one but the one really does own it in mid to lower light scenarios so I will have to call it a wash. Video recording performance though as far as quality goes, I would say that they are both about the same but again the one excels in lower lighting conditions. As far as features, its no contest, the gs4 is leaps and bounds ahead of the One and beyond anything else I have ever used as far as features go. Its almost intimidating and the learning curve I think is pretty high for someone that has never used a touch wiz device. This also means though, that a lot of these very same features will go unused by the average consumer which brings me to my next point. In my opinion I think samsung should focus on fewer great and polished features rather than a bunch of average to good features. For a device to have better specs than the One, the One does everything faster with zero lag where as I am noticing little hiccups here and there with the gs4. With both phones sitting side by side the Once is simply just faster, opening the same apps at the same time, running the same tasks etc.......the One just seems so much more responsive. Now this doesn't mean that the gs4 is slow but you can really see how htc optimized sense 5 where as touch wiz doesn't seem that way. Anyway, I am about to go out with my girl, I will make her do all the driving so I can do some signal strength comparisons because at the end of the day I think that's the most important thing especially coming from the evo and the gnex.

Well, the phone whore in me forced me to get a gs4 this morning. So I have an HTC One on one line and a GS4 on the other, will run as many comparative tests as I can.

By chance, what hardware version do you have?

Me and my girl aren't having any issues with our Ones's, I will probably go to sprint tomorrow to check the gs4 anyway but a lot of people over on xda are complaining(and admitting) that its not anywhere as snappy as the One.

That is a very nice looking case, I may have to reconsider. Its funny though, I can easily go and spend full retail on a phone but never want to spend no more than $10 on a case. I have a clear tpu case on my One right now since I didn't want to hide the design of the phone but this double dip flip is very attractive. I left mine on, guess I should probably take it off.

I am really liking that double dip flip case and how professional it looks but I did here a few complaints that it doesn't fit quite right and if you take it off the wrong way it could potentially scratch the device. Anyway, if possible you should post some pics.

I think the silver is the better looking option but its good that we have a choice.

Looks like the One in black is available on the sprint website: http://shop.sprint.com/mysprint/shop/phone_details.jsp?prodId=dvc7260004prd&deviceSKUId=72600105&flow=AAL&planSKUId=null&tabId=dt_phones&ptn=

I basically have my One set up the same as you do with the exception of the brightness which I would say is around 40% to 45%, but yeah battery life is amazing. I haven't used the power save function at all. Some say that its makes a notable difference but being that I have been getting through the whole day just fine, I see no need to use it.

I just flew through miami last thursday on my way back to atlanta from st thomas and I had pretty decent lte performance on both my evo and my gnex. I came in on gate D10 and left on D20, just to give an idea of what part of the airport I was on.

I hope the delay isn't too bad with the gs4, I am anxious to get my hands on one.