The Dave

I had TMobile for a small blip of time when my family moved to Iowa and we didn't get Sprint service. When I went back to school here in Florida, it was so slow that I couldn't use data and was lucky to get an emergency only signal inside any buildings. Even legacy Sprint 3G was better, so much so that I left my family's plan and got my own Sprint account. But to return to the original discussion, this shows how aggressive both Verizon and Sprint have been to push LTE. Verizon pushed so aggressively that they aren't even bothering to touch their 3G side of things. The future is LTE in this country and the CDMA operators here knew what had to be done.

I say it is good press to see Sprint listed #2 overall in LTE traffic use. Sprint can't be that terrible if it's customers are able to use the network that much.

Does the G2 mini also help solve biblical mysteries as well?

For anyone who has had terrible battery life lately due to Google Play Services, this morning at around 4 am I deleted the cache for Google Play Services and today my battery life is back to this. No more Google Play Services taking 60% of my battery usage.

I agree with the last few posts. I spent way too much time getting deep into the technicalities of lenses, features, etc. It can be extremely overwhelming. The best thing to do is just use the camera and have fun.

The Ballistic Maxx is nice and my wife likes her Otterbox Commuter.

I bought my wife a Canon 7D a few years back along with a 50mm prime, a sigma 17-55 zoom and a Tamron 70-300. She loves the camera. She didn't have any idea how to use it, either. Really, once she went to the park and shot about 1000 pictures, she learned a lot about how to use it. I recommend getting Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, too. Also, there are a lot of web courses, videos and even courses at local colleges that teach basic and advanced photography skills. If you are really into learning to shoot like a pro, I would say that is a worthy investment.

I may go to the Sprint store at the Town Center and see about switching to Framily and asking if they could pass my ID around. It is a busy store. I didn't even think about that possibility until Rocket brought it up. I appreciate the idea.

I think it is only mobile right now. I wish that you could see speed results and signal while zooming further out. It'd be easier to see how the whole area is doing instead of just a small section.

I've connected to and performed speed tests on 3 band 41 towers and usually have a mediocre signal around -100ish and usually see 20-36 Mbps and the highest upload has been just around 13 Mbps. I am not sure if that is a better backhaul situation or regular WiMAX level backhaul. It is pretty decent. I still haven't seen the 50-70 Mbps speeds that some have posted, though.

Lately I've seen pings as low as 20 ms with Sprint band 25 LTE. The only time I've ever seen 100 ms or more is if I do a speedtest with a -120 signal just for shits and giggles. It's kind of amazing how fast your connection can be at levels considered "unusable". Sure, I've seen some 200-300 ms pings, but pulling a couple mbps on a fringe signal is impressive.

Band 41 while driving down I-295 by Bay Meadows near the Jax CJD dealership.

If this did result in a partnership between wireless providers and the likes of Dish, just think how this will play out in the cable industry. It would be great to finally provide a true alternative to big cable and help bring the industry down to a more down to earth business model for everyone. I would love to jump on a Sprint-Dish solution if this new pCell technology can deliver.

I had a feeling that Jacksonville would be launched really soon considering all of the TD-LTE equipment going up over the past several months.

Has anyone else been noticing a higher than normal battery drain from Google Play Services? Ever since maybe Friday I've been seeing Google play Services taking up between 40-70% of my battery use and my phone has been lasting for between 15-20 hours now instead of 30-40 hours like I normally see. I figured I must have been using my phone more without thinking about it but today I have been on standby most of the morning and now 58% of my battery is gone in only 7 hours.

Meaning you can finance it through Easy Pay instead of purely purchasing it up front.

I am also a SwiftKey user. I had the opportunity to pick it up for only 10 cents during a winter sale on Google Play. I recommend if there are apps you want, there are insane deals around Thanksgiving and Christmas time. SwiftKey is easy to use and you can adjust the size and location of the keyboard to match the natural way you hold your phone.

I was on Atlantic yesterday at Arlington Toyota and got LTE for the first time out there. It was weak but usable.

Those poor Sprint execs who came up with that count are probably just bitter since they always got poor grades on their arithmetic tests.

When I worked for a car dealership, if you didn't produce sales and profit on a daily and weekly basis, you got shamed in front of everyone with big charts showing how poorly you stack up against the other salesmen and quickly after that you will be at the curb looking for another job. Sometimes you have to have a hard line. If the management hasn't shown positive results and forward momentum, then Son definitely should bring out the iron fist.

In St Augustine we are still using the same caveman-esque gray Motorola boxes that they have been using 10 years ago. They also charge $10 a month to use each box. If you want DVR, you can record up to 15 hours before you are out of space. No multi-room, no fancy features. That is $17 a month. If you want a DVR, 1 HD box and if you want just basic cable on say 2 bedrooms, you are paying $31 a month just for that before even getting to the $139 they charge for cable and internet with the slowest tier and no premium channels or phone service. It was because of this I wanted to get rid of the boxes. When I signed a contract, Comcast gave 1 box for free and two digital boxes for free as part of the service. They told me if I brought my own TiVo boxes, it would be 1 cablecard for free and each additional card for $1.50 each. I bought 2 Tivos that had multi room, iPad streaming, 300 hours of space, built in VOD and can record 6 things at one time (can't do any of that with Xfinity here) and lifetime service on each. I get signed up for Comcast with my old modem (to waive the $11 rental fee) two of my own Tivos, 1 free cablecard, 2 free digital boxes and just pay for 1 cablecard at $1.50. The service is discounted for a year to only $79 a month. The installer put in a faulty splitter and my cable card wasn't the right one. I call Comcast and they come out 5 days later to fix it. I get my bill the next month. I got charged $60 for two visits to fix the splitter and exchange of a box. I got charged for 3 cards because instead of swapping the card, they just added a 3rd card to my account. Since I didn't rent two boxes because I owned them, they charged me $10 per "outlet service" to the boxes. And my cable card was charged $7.10 rental. I call to complain. They can't figure out the price for the cable card since it depends on region and apparently when they signed me up they "didn't realize my region costs $7.10 for a cablecard". Plus, the first one isn't free because it is a HD card and only non HD cable cards are free for the first one. They waived the tech call fees. The next month I got charged $15 because I changed my service to remove HD. I call to complain. They offer me free HBO for a month to "make up for it". After my free month is up I cancel HBO. Next bill I get charged $15 because I changed my service to downgrade. 6 months later my cable stops working. They had to restring the line. It took a couple of months to do that. Still had to pay. They missed 4 appts to bury the cable. They offer me Comcast Voice for free for 3 months. I say no thanks since I am not paying to downgrade it later. Now they decided they will charge $1.99 for each of their free digital boxes but it isn't a breach of their contract since apparently equipment isn't a part of the cost of service they guarantee when you sign a contract. They then mess up my bill and the promotion that went to $99 the second year went to $129. They admit it was a billing error on their end. They say they cannot fix it. After multiple complaints, they finally "fix" it by basically redoing the contract from scratch. My bill is fixed but now I am in another 2 year contract. This isn't even all the issues I have had with Comcast, but a brief overview.. Now, I do not get DSL service here, I do not get U Verse here and I do not get FioS here. I can get Dish, but if I want internet I am still stuck with Comcast. Without cable, it is nearly $90 a month for basic cable internet. It would cost more to get rid of Comcast than to continue to be subject to them. I looked into the Satellite option, but it would also be expensive, slow and capped and still leave me paying more than with Comcast. If there were more competition, I would think that Comcast would have to either step up their customer service or lower prices. Unfortunately they know they can get away with doing as they please. Now that Comcast wants to merge and become twice as big...that is scary.

Whenever the topic of Comcast comes up, it just brings it out of me. I'm convinced that they have the worst customer service of any company since the history of mankind and probably going forth.

If Sprint doesn't cover an area, then it probably isn't worth going to. Besides, it gives him more of an excuse to come to Florida to spend some time golfing, swimming and playing tennis. Not that bad, if you ask me. Isn't it snowing up there? It's pretty much 70 and sunny here.

My dad has Mediacom in Iowa. It's actually pretty decent service and much better prices than Comcast here in Florida. He pays nearly half what I pay and I even bought my own cable modem and Tivo boxes to try to cut my bill. Now if Sprint would just bring service back there (used to be Nextel coverage), I could go visit him again...

So I am not sure if it is because of the Spark update or not, but this morning my GPS went all bonky. It just bounced back and forth in the middle of a field and couldn't figure out where I was. I never had that happen before. The odd thing about it, though, is that for the past few days LTE has been really spotty or somehow offline in places it used to be a strong signal so this is probably the first time I used GPS with a 3G data connection. Once I finally picked up LTE, the GPS suddenly locked on and was fine.