Trip

In SCP it's definitely a light gray, but I don't think it's white either. But it used to be black, and having it not black meant it kept drawing my attention when I had my phone in my car's holder with SCP open. At a stop, I set the bar to auto-hide just so it would stop distracting me from the road. (I keep my phones on such holders so the GPS works properly.) I'm not sure what was happening Saturday in Twitter, but it seems better now. I can't find another app that's doing it. - Trip

Okay, now I'm wondering if there isn't an additional bug of some sort. I realized that my G6 properly showed a black navigation bar when SCP was open, but my G8X on Pie shows a gray one. Similarly, in apps where the status bar turns white, on my G6, the SCP icons would turn gray so I could see them, while on my G8X they remain white and are illegible. - Trip

Okay, so I just tried actually comparing side-by-side with my G6, and this is really puzzling. I'm wondering if it's an SCP bug of some sort; my old phone actually had the same behavior of changing the colors of both the status bar and the navigation bar, but SCP had different colors for its icons depending on the status bar color and had black instead of gray navigation bar color. - Trip

I just tried Nova Launcher and it didn't seem to do anything about any of my complaints, unfortunately. Lots of options for the home screen, but did nothing when actually in apps, which is where the problems arise. - Trip

Not sure where you are, but the Sprint TACs have yet to change in this area. They did change in Shentel land, but the values don't appear to match T-Mobile values at all. - Trip

Whoa! Slow down! If you move those goalposts any faster, they'll fall over and you might hurt yourself. - Trip

When the merger closes and the network is opened, presumably every Sprint user will be able to use B12. - Trip

This morning, my phone roamed on T-Mobile via the 310260 PLMN instead of 311490. But it was still restricted to PCS and did not roam on 700. - Trip

Picked mine up Thursday, activated it Friday, and have some initial impressions. Good: PythonFanPA is 100% right, this is a much better RF performer. I would say it's probably 3-5 dB better, at least, than the G6 was. I see more LTE more often, including roaming. I'm currently out in the sticks once again, and where I used to see -106 dBm on Shentel 1X with LTE at -117 dBm or so from US Cellular LTE roaming that would frequently drop, this phone is currently at -102 dBm on Shentel 1X (from a different tower) and -110 dBm on LTE roaming. It's enough to make it usable for tethering in a stable manner, something that always gave me problems in the past. (Nicer to use my phone's unlimited data rather than eat up the 10GB on the hotspot here.) I've been using it for more than two hours now without issue. App performance is far and away faster and better than the G6. I don't think I realized just how sluggish the G6 really was until I had my G8X in-hand. It's pretty impressive. I like the screen a lot more than the old phone, though I can't quite put my finger on why. Perhaps better color gamut? I like the size a lot. It's somewhat taller, but only a touch wider, which makes for a fit in the hand that is consistent with my G6. It is, however, wide enough that it only barely fits in my phone holder in the car--but it fits, which is what's important. Disabling the extra button on the left side of the phone was painless. Shame it can't be remapped to something useful. Home screen now allows for more columns for apps, so I can fit more on a page. Very pleased about this. Much more internal storage. My G6 had like 10GB available or something, so even though I was offloading pictures and whatnot to my SD card, it was still almost always full. Now it has more than 100GB available, which is more breathing room than I should ever need. Bad: I'm missing the power button on the back a lot. I keep trying to press it and there's nothing there, then I have to go hunt for the button on the side. I assume I'll get used to this. The LG default keyboard no longer seems to allow you to long-press for symbols. Given that I use symbols in most of my passwords, this is unacceptable. I've now switched to SwiftKey, at least for now, though it seems less accurate than the LG keyboard it replaced. (If there's a way to turn it on in the LG keyboard, please let me know.) Ugly: I suspect everything else I absolutely abhor about this phone is not exclusive to the G8X and has more to do with general Android 9 having a number of very crappy design choices, which is nothing new for Google. It feels unfair to knock the G8X for them, except that LG does some amount of customization and should be able to fix these issues even if Google makes stupid choices. The notification bar, or whatever it's called, no longer stays a consistent color, so in most apps, it is impossible to see what SCP is doing at a glance. I've tried both the built-in setting to force the color, as well as apps that change the background color, but the former doesn't work most of the time, while with the letter, the color of all the other icons still change with the app in use, so I can't see the clock or anything--so if I use it on an app that would have turned the bar white, then ONLY SCP is visible. What a headache. Similarly, the navigation bar at the bottom used to be black, as it should be, but is now gray. This is certainly unpleasant to look at, but is made worse by the fact that the buttons seem to change color with the apps, so in Twitter, for example, the buttons are the same color as the background and thus cannot be seen. Someone failed to do any amount of testing on this, it would seem. Attempts to fix this have been similarly unsuccessful. The clock has moved to the left, which I knew about, but there is no option to move it back to the right, as far as I can tell. There's plenty of space there to do so, which leaves me puzzled about why it's not available as an option. Moreover, the notch looks ridiculous and there seems to be no option to simply make that entire row of the screen black and move the whole notification bar down to eliminate the notch entirely, which would solve the problem that I don't even have. Again, lousy UI choices and lack of options degrade the user experience. And, of course, still waiting for Mike to see my posts about not being able to import/export with SCP. Hopefully it's an easy fix. Conclusion: If I could have gotten this phone with Android 8, it would be a nearly perfect phone, as it would have fixed all of the "Ugly" items and one of the two "Bad" items. From a hardware and performance perspective, this is a great device, and I would very much recommend it. Unfortunately, as is typical these days of many software projects, each new version removes features, makes absurd and irrational design choices, and makes using the device more difficult and less pleasant, making for a degraded user experience. And, in order to use my RSA Token for work, I can't even root it to replace the OS and fix the issues. Very unfortunate. As I use it more, I may add additional comments. - Trip

https://www.t-mobile.com/news/tmobile-to-increase-network-capacity-and-expand-roaming-for-sprint-customers - Trip

I tried Helium and successfully copied my database over. Whew. I can at least collect data for the trip today and tomorrow. The larger problem of not being able to backup and import remains, but I'm not in the huge hurried panic I had been in before. Thank you so much. As far as database format is concerned, I'll send a PM. Mike, if you want to look at it, let me know. - Trip

I noticed that I'm sometimes seeing other files dumped out with db-shm and db-wal extensions. I wonder if this has anything to do with it? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54051322/database-import-and-export-not-working-in-android-pie/54056779 - Trip

Well, now I'm back to the behavior I had before. Things act like they import but they don't and they wipe out what's in the database already. I'm at a loss. - Trip

Well, on factory reset, I didn't even try importing my log, I went one simpler--I named my home site, exported my log, and then tried to reimport it. I then immediately tried to import it, saying "File corrupt or improperly structured." Must be something to do with the beta I'm on, I guess? - Trip

I really need this working by tomorrow... I'm going to go ahead and factory reset it. *sigh* Hope it works. - Trip

No, it's brand new out of the box. I suppose I could try that... now that I've set everything up. I'll see if Mike has any ideas first. - Trip

Mike, I just updated to the LG G8X and am trying to import my SCP log, and it's telling me it's imported successfully with the number of rows, but then the notes remain blank. Any ideas? EDIT: This is very strange. I named my home site and then tried to export. Though the label appears in the software, it's not dumping out. Attempting to then import my database again, now my note is gone. - Trip

I'm not going to have the second screen, so none of the things in that video really do much for me. - Trip

Really glad to hear it's a better RF performer. My G6 is very disappointingly bad in that department, and not being able to test that with the G8X, I had been concerned that I might have been locking myself back into another phone with poor RF performance. Any sense of how much better it is? Thankfully, your negatives don't sound deal-breaking to me. I don't use fingerprints, and I'm not sure that I've moved any apps onto my SD card. I basically use my SD card for pictures, however rare those are, and music. Still waiting for mine to arrive at Best Buy for in-store pick-up later this week. They wouldn't ship it directly to me for some inexplicable reason. ("Shipping is unavailable in your area." I've never heard something that made less sense.) Must be important to make sure to maximize customer chances of picking up COVID-19. - Trip

Looks like it's back in stock, but ship-to-store only. EDIT: Ordered mine! And one for my sister-in-law as an early b-day present. - Trip

In this area (DC), at least, the Massive MIMO gear has continued to go online. I can see it in the MLS data. - Trip

In this area, it's a bit of a mess on Sprint. Here are a few particularly egregious examples. Huntington: Base GCI is 0302FBxx. Had Clear across the street as 04EC81xx. The Clear gear was replaced by 8T8R on the original site as 03174Bxx. The 8T8R has since been removed in favor of Massive MIMO, which is 031D06xx/031D07xx/031D08xx. Lee High School: Base GCI is 0303A4xx. Added Mini Macros as 030AA4xx/030AA6xx/030AACxx. Those have since been replaced with Massive MIMO as 031DDExx/031DDFxx/031E00xx. - Trip

Unfortunately, this is untrue, depending on location. For every carrier, I've seen the use of separate GCI patterns for the same tower: Verizon sometimes offsets by 300000 for AWS. So I've seen a tower that might have 700 and PCS as 1ADB0xx and AWS as 64190xx. AT&T sometimes uses entirely different values. In some markets, it's pattern driven (offset by 6000, for instance), but in others, it's just random. I've seen it done for individual sectors or individual bands with no real pattern. T-Mobile sometimes uses entirely different values for 700 in places with certain legacy AWS or PCS gear, and different values for AWS in places where 600/700/PCS all match after 600 is added. US Cellular offsets by 2000 for 850 in places where they hold 700. Sprint is the worst offender in this regard; due to the 0x1450 offset of Band 41, any site that has Band 41 has at least two GCI patterns. Use of Mini Macros or Massive MIMO means every sector has a different GCI on Band 41. And if a site is or was shared with Clear gear, that's another GCI used or formerly used there. - Trip

It says sold out now. I didn't decide to order it in time; hoping it comes back in stock before the sale ends. - Trip

It is showing as $6.26/mo after bill credits (that's $150 total). - Trip