4ringsnbr

Last charge was just over 45h 26m-- and that was down to 7% when I put it on the charger. This one I've been on is right at 18 hours and battery is at 71%. That's one other thing: you have to run circle widget to see your exact charge-- Moto shows only every 10% down until the warning at 20%-- but at 20%, I can still run my phone another 8 or 9 hours! It does take right at 4 hours to fully charge tho!

HMM-- I keep my volume mid-way-- like 5/7 and I don't have any issues hearing on the phone-- even with a good bit of background noise.

You must've been on the good channel-- that's the problem with most Sprint towers here-- the EVDO pilot doesn't change your channel. If you're stuck on channel 100 or 175 at Coursey / Sherwood, you're stuck at 5 - 50 kbps unless you reprovision and luck up to get on channel 75-- then you get 300 - 500--- LOL When you force roam on Verizon (or when I turn off my LTE and run on EHRPD), my phone jumps all over the place-- every session is usually on a different channel.

Pretty much all 850-- specifically, channel 242 is most often what I hit for 1x. 37, 78, 119, 160, & 201 are all EV carriers here. They also run Ev carriers in PCS-- more toward midcity areas of town that are more densely-populated. NOLA is still mostly PCS for Ev also.

The software is a little buggy-- but I've had no major issues-- the hardware is top notch and the battery is the best... as far as speakerphone usage, I've never met a decent cell phone speakerphone-- so I refrain from putting my callers through that.

True-- there are like 3 carriers on this tower and AT&T has been building new towers all over town like crazy (just about 3-4 years too late-- LOL!)-- just caught my eye when I saw it, and I know it is a Sprint tower and a fairly congested cell.

Then you live in a good signal area-- and most Verizon areas are; however, Sprint's signal is far weaker than Verizon's in most coverage areas, which is why it is a non-starter for them. A friend of mine is a performance engineer for Verizon-- I discussed this with him and he confirmed that their testing found the Nexus did have more trouble in marginal signal areas than the phones with Qualcomm basebands (Motos and HTCs). If you peruse various forums, you'll see many many posts related to the GNex's signal issues. The Via Telecom CBP 7.1 chip used by Samsung seems to have some issues in both the GNex and Droid Charge. I also listened to the difference in the CDMA/LTE GNex and RAZR voice recordings on the anandtech review (link below), which sealed the deal for me. I don't think I'll ever trust a non-Qualcomm baseband to handle my calls. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5310/samsung-galaxy-nexus-ice-cream-sandwich-review/12

The display is very good; however, the Galaxy Nexus and the Rezound have better displays. Unfortunately, the GNex is a non-starter with that horrible CDMA baseband-- I still talk on the phone!

I'm trying to upload a screen shot of my last charge cycle, but can't figure out how to do it...

Actually at my house, I'm very close to a Sprint tower and their signal is stronger here,, but I noted the difference because in this market, -86 is a good signal for Sprint, but Verizon doesn't really go below this here... At my office, VZW is -53 dBm in the morning-- and the cell breathes down to about -68 dBm late afternoons. One very, very interesting thing: my EVO (and every Sprint phone I've ever had) painted the signal bars based strictly upon the RSSI. This RAZR doesn't. I don't know if it's a moto thing or Verizon, but the bars are based upon the Ec/Io ratio as near as I can tell, which tell you that Sprint worries about you losing signal-- Verizon worries about you having too many signals-- carrier pollution.

Until the iPhone has LTE, adoption will probably be slow-- even with the double data promos (only double data with an LTE device). I will say this, their LTE coverage around my house and work is great-- I get a stronger LTE signal than CDMA/EHRPD here at my house. At the office, they're closer to the same, but the CDMA cell breathes there more.

I'm at a loss-- I can't upload anything to Member album-- I wanted to attach a picture to a post-- but no luck... am I missing something?

I thought I would share my impressions of the Droid RAZR MAXX. Overall, I have no regrets with this phone whatsoever. PROS: Battery Life- I've charged this phone only 4 times now in a week. I leave it on 4G all the time with Bluetooth and WiFi on (even in my office with no WiFi for 12 hours a day). I've been downloading apps and using it pretty heavily and average about 44 hours per charge. It's weird not charging the phone every night, but it's not an issue at all. I have a screen pic of the battery usage curve I'd like to post if I could figure out how to upload a JPG... Hardware - The build quality and materials are first rate. The Qualcomm CDMA baseband provides excellent voice calls even wondering around my house which strattles 3 Verizon sectors at the limit (-86 dBm) of their range-- at least that's Verizon's limit... LOL! Data Speed - see below. easily pull 20-30 mbps on LTE all day long. Even last week during the 2 hour LTE nationwide outage (EHRPD was down too), failover to EVDO gave me consistent speeds of 1.7 - 2.1 mbps, faster in the very same sectors that I could get force roaming on my old Evo. CONS: Software -- I honestly miss Sense. Blur is a little buggy and nowhere near as polished. It's not bad, but there are a few issues-- hopefully ICS updates coming soon will clear up some of the problems, which are VERY minor; if not, I can always root.

That's also a problem now-- BR needs way more towers from Sprint-- they're spaced too far out and a weak signal for one user will cause slower 3G speeds for everyone on the sector-- it takes more timeslices of EVDO to deliver the same data rate as the signal gets weaker-- so weaker signals means less throughput of the sector. I doubt they'll thicken the coverage in BR with NV-- at least in the initial deployment, but they need to badly. Verizon has towers closer together here and they run most carriers on 850.

1xAdvanced peak speeds are 507 kbps up and down. 1xRTT peaks at 153.4 kbps up and down. But it's highly likely there will be some EVDO on ESMR 800. In December, the Samsung SPH-D710 was retested specifically for EVDO operation in the ESMR 800 spectrum. In Sprint's waiver letter, sections were specific regarding the Atlanta market. I suspect that Sprint will deploy EVDO in ESMR in capacity contrainted markets like Atlanta, Houston, Memphis, and San Antonio where they don't have much PCS spectrum. It looks like virtually every Sprint ESMR phone has been tested for EVDO running there, but all have been tested from 817.9 - 824.1 MHz only-- like 10 different phones-- so ESMR channels 476-684 will be the only ones available for 1xA or EVDO carriers-- and each carrier will occupy 50 channels in this band class. Since ESMR power levels (under FCC rule 90S) will be lower than Cellular 850 (under FCC rule 22H) and the consent decree from the rebanding requires Sprint to lower the power even more as the channels drop closer to the public safety spectrum, the highest channels will likely be favored to give close to Cellular coverage (though not quite as good). This means I think the most likely place to search for 1xA or EV carriers is channel 670. A channel centered here would give you exactly a 625 kHz guard band between it and Cellular 850. This is the highest channel Sprint will likely use.

The LG Viper was FCC approved on January 9, and it is likely in production. It had to lose EVDO capabilities on ESMR to gain LTE on PCS (1900 MHz) capability, but it does do SVDO on 3G and SVLTE of course on 4G. If you want more details on it, check for the FCC ID with the model number LS840 under LG. The Samsung Galaxy Nexus LTE for Sprint hasn't been approved by the FCC yet, but they're probably reworking the Verizon model now. They'll have to change the pre-amp and LNA on the LTE chip to work in the PCS band rather than the 700 MHz band. They'll also have to redesign the receive antennas (they can be closer together) for proper 2x Rx diversity on LTE. They'll also need to add a pre-amp and LNA and antenna set to do ESMR CDMA and EVDO. Sprint will also probably force them to change to a Qualcomm CDMA baseband-- the cheap Chinese Via baseband they use works fine with Verizon's strong signal, but Sprint's PCS signal in most areas is too marginal to use it-- search the forums and you'll see why changing that baseband is a smart move...

I was driving over to Towne Center last night and noticed the tower at Jefferson & Old Hammond had what appeared to be RRUs attached to the antennas on the bottom rung of the tower. I was going to snap a pic, but the traffic was actually flowing (which is a rare blessing there), and I didn't have time. Any Folks in Baton Rouge, LA should go check it out.