pyroscott

I agree Ben, it would probably make me upgrade a lot more often though if I wasn't waiting out my 20 months...

Howard, depending on the cost and terms of the lease I might.

The Best Buy buyback program would be a lot more useful if I had to buy my phones full price. I'd get a new phone every year because they buy it back for half the purchase price.

In Sprint LTE FIT reports, they specifically mention that the GNex, Viper and HTC "Jet" all support SVLTE, and they were tested and passed. It will be a significant marketing disadvantage for Apple and their carriers if they do not support SVLTE. That's my two cents, for what it's worth!Robert

I would have to agree. AT&T has marketed simultaneous voice and data for some time now, and for a high end handset like the iPhone to not support that now that the CDMA carriers finally have SVLTE would be a huge step backwards for the iPhone. Apple would be wise to find a way to fit it in there.

I'm jealous twospirits... that is awesome, hope you hook S4GRU.com up with a write up

Found another article regarding Sprint's financial situation:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/454901-why-a-sprint-bankruptcy-is-unlikely

No one is on LTE right now so it won't be that bad. But... if the same people who used their 2 GB plan in 3 days with their iPad 3 bought a Sprint LTE iPhone that could be a MAJOR problem.If Sprint were to launch LTE on 800 MHz, the iPhone would have to support 800 MHz so Sprint can offload some devices to relieve network congestion.

The problem is, Sprint is not ready to support LTE on 800MHz, and if I have noticed anything about Apple, it's that they don't include anything that isn't ready to be used out of the box. Look at Sprint's exclusion from the "new iPad". There is also the question of how would Apple cram all the equipment in the iPhone to support 2 different bands of LTE. I really can't see the iPhone supporting LTE over anything but 1900 MHz

I actually bought the new iPad, and it is my first tablet. The name "retina" display is marketing, but the screen is still very impressive. Even my friend, who has an ipad two, was impressed. You can tell the difference, and it is not like ATT changing their 3g logo to 4g on the 4s.I have to disagree with you on your first three points of what you dislike about it. I have a 4s, and siri is very gimmicky. I wish it was able to open apps and be better integrated into nonapple apps, plus it seems to be down a lot. If they improved it, then I would like to see it on the iPad, but I doubt that will happen until we see it lose the beta tag. Great concept, but poor delivery so far. I believe a LED flash would be useless on the iPad. I feel like if you need flash it would be smarter to use your phone. It would be easier to take pictures, and I believe the quality would be a heck of a lot better. Plus you look silly taking pictures on an iPad. I think the camera boost was more for video chat than actually taking pictures.

I'm going to have to disagree with you on these two points.

Siri is supposed to be a "personal assistant" that is synonymous with Apple's high-end image. Why wouldn't you want this on a tablet? Especially their "New iPad"

As far as the camera, the rear facing camera is absolutely there for taking pictures. The camera has the same MP rating as the Galaxy Nexus, and it is higher quality than a lot of older or low end smartphones. There should have been a flash on there. Plus the flash could act as a flashlight with an app.

You say that you look funny taking pictures with the iPad, how funny would you look video chatting "walkie talkie style" with the camera on the back of the iPad. That's why there is the front facing "face time camera".

0.3 MP camera on the iphone 2? Why even put that on there when I can draw a picture of higher quality with a crayon.

All joking aside, nice writeup. I still can't see myself buying one, but it's nice to see they raised the bar a bit for the next generation of tablet screens, processors and GPUs.

I don't disagree with you. Your point is correct. Not the best ad campaign, perhaps. But I have to continue to give their marketing dept. props. They are definitely doing something right.Robert

The iPhone craze kind of started with the iPhone 3G. I think there is something in the 3G signal waves that brainwashes people. Good thing my head is too thick to be affected. Or maybe it is that I lack the required equipment for a brainwashing?

Sometimes it pains me to admit the things they do right. But any objective person has to agree with this. They obviously understand the human psyche.Robert

I don't know. That whole ad campaign about "if you don't have an iPhone, well, you don't have an iPhone" felt insulting and made me dizzy. Really? My Android phone isn't an iPhone? Good!

I guess they could have been going for the parrot technique. Get me to repeat it with incredulous anger and maybe it will stick.

Matthias, you're going all in with the windows phone huh?

Windows Phone stepping up their game... This definately won't be a sleeper like the Arrive. Microsoft is positioning themselves to take a serious bite out of someone's market share.

Technology can't support putting 800 LTE in it right now. Too bad. It would be nice to have support for 2500 and 800.

Also, wimax is said to be supported until 2015 but is the consensus really that it will remain at the same level as today? I just don't think once that chart drops to minimal subscribers to wimax that they'll start pulling back one way or another. It just doesn't make sense to support a network that three people are on - even if those three people are happy with their awesome wimax data speeds. lol

There are also a lot of people using Clear's WiMax for their home internet. I actually heard someone complaining about their Clearwire speeds getting worse today. This is the 3G Clearwire service. He was saying that he doesn't really have much else of a choice, but he wished that his service would stay the same as it was. Clear might keep good support to keep people using WiMax, or once they roll out LTE in all their markets, they might leave WiMax to rust away, effectively forcing all the current customers to switch to LTE. I would think that it is 20 months down the road before you see that happen though, so it might be fine.

There is also the fact that when mass amounts of LTE devices are sold to owners of the Evo, Evo 3D, E4GT, Photon, Nexus S, E4G, etc you will see craigslist/ebay saturated with WiMax handsets, and supply and demand will push the price down. It is possible that someone who can't "upgrade" to a new phone can buy a used WiMax phone that is an upgrade from their current device to wait it out until LTE hits their market or until phones are released with multiple band LTE support and maybe even LTE advanced. I picked up an Evo 3D off craigslist the day before the iPhone was released from someone who was upgrading her 3 month old phone to an iPhone.

If someone travels internationally, the Photon would still be an excellent buy. It might be some time before there is an international phone offered by Sprint that also has LTE, but I can't be sure. I wouldn't think there would be room for all the antennas.

It does look like a space heater! Or a wall mount A/C unit! - Robert

It does look like that in the picture, but it is pretty small. It's about the size of a router or cable/DSL modem.

I called last year because I was having a lot of dropped calls at work. They responded by insisting that they send me an Airrave to plug in at work. Needless to say, the government will not allow me to plug it in, but my sister's place also had no coverage inside and weak coverage outside. You could stand by a window and make a call. I set it up in the house on her 700KbPS DSL connection and it worked really well. The whole house was covered and it had about similar range that you would get out of a good WiFi router. It even allowed you to use the internet connection as if it was 3G data. I don't know if faster internet connections would function perfectly or if it would slow it down to the 3G max speed.

I read extensively about it online before plugging it in and the only complaint I heard was that the handoff between Airrave and cell signal was not as smooth as desired and some people would lose their call when they left the house and went to cell coverage.

I think over the next 24 months, we are going to largely lose our external MicroSD support on new devices. It appears the trend is heading that way.

I do like large internal storage, but a SD card makes it so much easier to swap all your pictures, music and video from one phone to another. Then there is the whole bootloader/ODIN thing. Bootloader is way easier to load a ROM or recover from a boot cycle. ODIN isn't hard to use, but I like tossing a ROM on the SD card and plugging it into the phone. I guess everyone's desire to copy Apple's success is leading them to copy all the things that Android purists hate about the iPhone. Non-removable batteries, external storage, what's next? Are we going to lose our widgets, big screens and vast array of choices?

YOU GET THIS "ONE" MODEL TO CHOOSE FROM. LIKE IT LIKE IT LIKE IT...

I never was much of a fan of the "Evo" branding. They worked hard to build it though. No two Evos are the same, there is the original Evo, the slider Shift, a 3D version, and an international version in the Design. While the Shift and Design may not have been gamechangers, they didn't tarnish the brand. Now, I think Sprint's HTC fans will probably buy the next HTC flagship no matter what it happens to be called. I just find it hard to believe that they would ditch the Evo name. It could be a "One" with a different case and name. I do think it is rediculous that Sprint and Verizon expect phonemakers to make them a whole special model of phones. It just ends up taking the manufacturer longer to release updates when they have 12 different models of the same phone like the Samsung Galaxy SII. Maybe this will change when all the carriers are on VoLTE.

Spring housecleaning to get rid of all those extra WiMax handsets. Imagine the yelling, screaming, tantrums and limb flailing if they roll out the first LTE devices on 4/15 right after people upgrade.

Oh people are going to be angry!

That would be awesome for Sprint if they can land a nationwide swath of "H" spectrum. AT&T will probably outbid them just to keep them from getting it and then sit on the spectrum and complain that they don't have enough spectrum and their customers are ruining their network...

That would be be a match made in heaven. I wonder if both companies would be smart enough to go for it...

Then maybe once both companies move to VoLTE, and Sprint has paid off enough of NV to borrow more money, Deutsche Telekom can unload T-Mobile to Sprint.