greenbastard

Is it just me, or does Band 25 seem about -3 to -2 dBm weaker after the latest update?

I like how their graphic has a tower over Canada, but yet no roaming.

Or the Washington R******* of Landover, MD. Or the Dallas Cowboys of Arlington, TX. Or the San Francisco 49rs of San Clara, CA. Sad how the taxpayers have been screwed while the NFL continues to demand more from our idiot elected officials. Any town willing to build an NFL stadium for free can get themselves a team. I wouldn't put it past the NFL to start a franchise in Pyongyang, North Korea if Kim Jong-un offered them a 5 Billion dollar stadium.

There's just no way. It really is annoying that Sprint took valuable notification bar real estate with 2 icons for LTE, but your only bet will be a custom ROM. I wish they would just got back to the simple 4G with upload/download arrows that I had on my GS2. Or maybe a small LTE with arrows right below it. But probably not going to happen now that carriers are picking up gimmick names for carrier aggregation and deployment of new bands (XLTE, Spark) I've also wondered why Sprint has never put upload/download arrows on the WiFi notification.

Just experienced my first app crashes as well today. Maybe the update is finally settling down. (At least it isn't as constant as before though) Overall, this sucks. The wait for Android 5.1 begins now. I hope Sprint gets on Samsung to get their updates right. Just fixing the signal bars for LTE would be a good start.

Probably because making it into a repeater would defeat the whole purpose of having the router control the QoS.

First of all, sorry for the large pic, but if I shrink it, then you won't be able to see the panels on top of The Linq. Notice the small tower on the foreground. Anyone know what exactly this is? It looks like a small cell tower intended to cover the immediate area only, but for which provider? This was at the corner of The Mirage and The Shops at Caesar's

It's not yours yet...enough said. If you want to mess with the firmware, wait a year and then do it. Until then, this is Sprint property being leased to you for free.

OK, so I found a small inconvenience with the latest update. Before on all prior updates, all of my volume configurations were stored individually for each type of headset so every time I would plug them in, the prior volume setting was automatically adjusted (this included headsets w/ mic, headset w/ no mic, Bluetooth, etc). For example, if my Samsung headset w/mic was at a level 6 Volume, it would continue to be at 6 whenever I reconnected the headphones into the phone. For my Bluetooth, I usually left it at 14 (since it is for my car) and every time I would turn my car on, the phone would go back to 14. Now, it seems that the volume for bluetooth is the same for the last headset that was plugged in. If I leave my headphones at 6 and then take my phone to my car, the audio will be set at Volume 6 for Bluetooth. The weird thing is that if I turn it up and leave my car and plug in my headphones, the headphones wont go up to 14 and just go back to 6 like it was originally left. It's mildly annoying and it seems to only be affecting Bluetooth audio settings. Definitely something worth noting.

Sprint hit this out of the ballpark. Before on my old D-Link router, my phonecalls over WiFi used to start off great. But after 3 minutes, my phone call would start to lag due to amounting latency building up. Any call over 5 minutes would be useless as I would be speaking over people that are trying to make sure I was still on the line. With this Asus, all that is now gone. Only thing I haven't noticed is an improved coverage. Seems about the same to me.

I'll try to post some pics later, but my overall experience was great! B41 greeted me when I landed and was with me anytime I was outdoors or inside a building not located in the strip. The Imperial Pala...err....the Qua....err I mean The Link has several panels on the roof of its casino floor beaming towards the strip. I had B41 go as far up as -62 RSRP when standing right outside of The Mirage's garden (clear LOS of course). I'll post a picture later (if permitted?) of the towers. Speeds weren't great (15 Mbps), but I've never seen B41 with this great of a signal anywhere in Houston, even when standing next to a Clearwire tower with a clear line of sight. LTE is only available inside the casino floors of some MGM resorts, so I'm assuming its a work in progress. Ceasers Entertainment Resorts have yet to see LTE in any of their casinos. Old Vegas is still a dump and a dead spot inside many of their casinos (not surprised). I got hosed money wise and signal wise there. As far as inside the room, LTE 25 worked pretty well inside my entire room (it faced the airport, so that's why). B41 worked only near my window (~15 feet). Voice was fine for the most part. Texts were also fine unless a buddy of mine messaged me from his T-Mobile phone (maybe it was a nationwide issue since his messages were coming in late ever since a day before our trip) Overall, huge improvement. While waiting to take off, a buddy of mine sat on 3G on his Verizon iPhone 6 while mine was on Band 41. This basically summed up the entire trip for me. Can't wait for 8T8R radios to replace the local Clearwire equipment. I'll see you again in a year Vegas!

Its been fixed. I used to get crashes on Google Maps at least once a day. Now I don't.

Really?! I can say with absolute certainty that this has always been the case. I know because I used to get it every time I went for a run. Since some songs or radio streams sit at different levels, I would always go up and down the volume bar and never see the pop up after dismissing it the first time. Geez, I guess that last original Lollipop update was all over the place then.

What? Insomnia?! LOL! I've had this screen issue all the time since the Lollipop update, but just not when its charging. On the plus side, I haven't had memory issues so far so big props to Samsung for addressing that. I am a little disappointed that they decided to keep the Wi-Fi calling from not turning off if your WiFi signal degraded below a certain point. After the original 5.0 update, WiFi calling will stay on even if you're on the outskirts of your WiFi cell. On KitKat, it would automatically turn off if your WiFi was deemed unsuitable for phone calls. I miss that feature. As a matter of fact since 5.0, the S5 seems to hold on to WiFi for dear life. This causes a lot of issues for people like me who have dead spots at home or use a WiFi bridge. I'll see my phone stay on a very weak and unusable WiFi and nothing will work. I either have to manually switch networks or turn off WiFi.

None...... YET. But as I lay here with a mad case of insomnia, a strange light caught my attention... It was my damn phone turning the screen on and not turning back off automatically while charging (wired). This is absolutely absurd. I'm done with purchasing Samsung phones.

For the purposes of International Value Roaming, I don't think that the Sprint website is accurate. Here is what rawvega posted (which I haven't been able to find). Its pretty specific. The confusion on my end is that Sprint chat reps have told me that any carrier on the countries listed should work with unlimited data/text & .20¢ calls. So which one is it? I have no clue.

I have someone in my plan that recently visited 2 countries (1 listed in value roaming list and the other is not). Since this person is not tech savvy at all, I wasnt able to determine where the charged message was sent. Maybe it was sent in Mexico on a non Movistar network...maybe it wasn't. Who knows. What I can confirm is that the phone was not able to establish a data connection. But like I said earlier, it could very well be possible that roaming was off on the phone. But at least we know that messages with Telefonica are definitely free. We still need some boots in the ground in San Diego, El Paso, or anywhere near the border to get more answers.

After trying to find the text that rawvega found without success, I decided to ask Sprint Worldwide Chat and find out. What I was told was that any network in the countries listed could be used under the International Value Roaming rate plan. When I specifically asked if I could roam into Telcel or Iusacell, I was told yes. Same rates for Movistar/Iusacell/Telcel; unlimited texts/data and .20¢ phone calls. But of course, Sprint reps are known to be constantly wrong about a lot of things and this could very well be one of those instances since rawvega found the fine print text. I'm guessing that we won't be able to roam on any network other than Telefonica/SoftBank since a PRL/Profile update were sent to my phone right after I enabled the International Value plan. S4GRU needs a Guinea Pig near the border to go out and conduct tests.....NOT IT!

The fact that you have to state that it's not as good as the S5 tells a diiferent story. RF performance is a big issue to users like myself that have suffered for 2 years with a phone like the Evo LTE. I learned my lesson about purchasing a phone that is considered to be a bad RF performer. (Especially since this phone is supposed to be an overall improvement from its S5 predecessor. Its definitely not a good sign from Samsung)

If I had to guess, that's what they will probably do. Most of Mexico's households are built out of brick and cement, so you'd think they'd like some good building penetration into homes and businesses. I think that they, just like Sprint, will have to change some regulations to be able to use LTE in that band with the COFETEL (or whatever their version of the FCC is named now). With Sprint having this band on their phones, I don't think it would be too hard to have phone manufacturers add LTE Band 26 into At&t phones. I hope this, and the Canadian 2.5 GHz auction, will bring carriers to support multi-band LTE phones. One thing I am jealous about the iPhone is their amazing offering of LTE bands.

What I did notice back in the day was that even when Nextel had that rare highway coverage, it still had a lot of holes in it. Highway 57, which runs through the heart of Central Mexico and is a major corridor for NAFTA goods, had so many coverage gaps. AT&T will have their hands full here. I'm assuming Nextel will get shut down and its spectrum will move to existing Iusacell infrastructure (since they cover more are) Vaya con dios iDen.

No. My only contacts are those synced through Google. I have no contacts stored on my phone or linked to anything outside of Google. EDIT* I meant Google account, not Google+.

This is one issue I have NOT seen and many users have reported. For some reason, there are several different bugs plaguing this phone, but experience varies by user.

I did a factory reset following the update to lollipop, but I'm still seeing the screen go on (and staying on) and the annoying memory dump that plagued Lollipop 5.0. I haven't seen the phantom heart rate sensor going off like some users have reported. I also haven't seen a battery drop off as it was described by some people early on. Anytime I notice that my battery dies faster than usual, I suspect it is because of the screen coming on and staying on, not a lollipop problem. The next Samsung update will be critical when it comes to choosing my next phone. I value RF experience the most, but these little Samsung bugs are building up in annoyance

I was asked by a friend last weekend "What's wrong with your phone?". I looked at it and the screen was on and wouldn't turn off. This is getting damn ridiculous. I'm thinking that my next phone won't be a Samsung. RF seems to be getting worse with each generation (which is what's most important to me) and now software bugs are through the roof and killing my battery.