aliensporebomb

Gizmodo has a writeup here on all the features. They seemed underwhelmed some - they felt it was too similiar in appearance to the SIII (cue Apple and the iPhone similarity of appearance) and some of the features meant it "wasn't the droid you were looking for" (groan). http://gizmodo.com/5990644/samsung-galaxy-s-iv-hands-on-everything-new-is-old-again

It looks to be that either some folks have been mapping more south of Burnsville Minnesota or we have a new tower on down there either south of the one that's already on or one nearby. Anecdotally.

I'm hoping for that one they were working on at the end of february near me. It's a 5 minute drive and lunch hour is only 3 hours away.

Did anyone see this video? It purports to show some of the new features like the smart pause: http://gizmodo.com/5...ure-recognition Very interesting. Here's purported shots: http://gizmodo.com/5990481/here-are-the-clearest-pictures-of-whats-probably-the-samsung-galaxy-s-iv

It was amazing. I hit 394 heading into downtown and it was LTE all the way to Nor'deast.

Last night I met some friends and the second I got off the highway I saw Samsung RRUs up on the tower nearst the highway eit and I was in "LTE Land". Northeast Minneapolis. A place called Psycho Suzi's Motor Lounge is where they wanted to meet. I had LTE the entire time. Nice.

I know the way you feel here in Bloomington. It's all around me but not here yet. Patience....is a virtue.

They've sold the 128 gig model since February 5th. How do I know this - the rollout for it happened on my wife's birthday. No, she didn't get one. But she wanted one.

This is odd. I almost never check network.sprint.com since nothing ever seems to change for my area there but now it has: it claims: 14 voice upgrades, 30 data capacity upgrades, 41 data speed upgrades and 1 new tower. I wonder where the new tower would be? That's for Bloomington MN. I clicked on all the icons and none of them reflect "1 new tower".

Picture time: The tower on the left (to the left of the storage facility) is the one both myself and AA/FC posted. The tower on the right side of the screen (to the right of the storage facility) I believe is the Sprint tower for that area. Some interesting stuff there, it looks like there's both legacy cabinets and the LTE cabinets (it's hard to see due to the immense amount of brush against the fence keeping the facility secure). But there's no sign of any other LTE stuff happening there - the top antenna array is pure 3G and the bottom collar is weird - it looks EMPTY. You can see cables snaking out of the pole to the edge but it doesn't appear there's any elements in operation unless they are very thin or a type I'm in familiar with. Mophomanners will know. Don't try driving back there, it's literally slippierier than an ice rink and to get a closer look at cabinets on the ground you'd have to park in the middle of a driveway, cross snow covered railroad tracks and peek thru a fence that is mostly covered with foliage.

The one I posted pictures of I believe he's referring to. The Sprint site is a little bit further to the west of that tower near the Progressive Rail tracks.

I drove by the tower AA/FC posted pics on yesterday: By seeing what's going on here I have reason to believe it's the same crew that was working on a tower close to central-west Bloomington and I believe it may be AT&T not Sprint: Here you can see the guy working on the right side of the 3rd collar from the bottom. The objects that look like RRUs to be don't look like the RRUs from Samsung that all the local sites are getting. See: Here's an example of what a local Sprint LTE setup looks like:

I know that tower well - next to Groth Music and behind the McDonalds.

I'm seeing new Chaska targets in Sensorly as of a few minutes ago.

Sensorly is showing LTE snaking down Highway 100 all the way to 50th street now. Also seeing strong LTE near the Minnekahda Vista Park.

Work is happening right now on the tower closest to my home in Bloomington. Happiness abounds - they appear to be going from west to east in Bloomington of late.

One of the buildings I work in for our company has really serious metal shielding inside it since there used to be a dentists office on the ground floor to accommodate for the fact he had an x-ray machine and they didn't want to irradiate employees in the neighboring businesses. We've got wifi access points all over that building and that shielding for the radiation works great to block wifi send/receive I'll tell you. It's amazing what will block signals.

If that is a wide open space signals can travel rather far - that's why we're also seeing sensorly mapping out onto the ice of Lake Minnetonka from towers north of Chanhassen. Nothing to impede the signal. I also see LTE signal at 494 and 34th that is slop coming from St. Paul which is impressive as well.

Cool. My friend works near there, he will be happy as he's a SprintDude.

That's an apartment/condo next to Walgreens that has both Sprint panels as well as AT&T panels. I haven't seen any work there as yet.

More purple paint would be cool. "Have at it!"

Update: On my way home I swung by Highland Bank again and the technician was still there at 20 after 5 - no LTE yet but I believe he was still working on the installation process.

I just got an excited phone call from my friend who indicates he received LTE at highway 42 just east of Galaxie in Apple Valley.

I gassed up at the Holiday right across from Highland Bank heading back from lunch and sure enough there was a truck and trailer in the lot and a workman on the roof working on what sure looked like Sprint LTE RRUs to me. I have pictures of that as well as the guy working on the antenna arrays on the roof. I have pictures but will have to post them later and I want to make sure I obscure any features of said installer if there are any, haven't really gotten the ability to check the pics to see if they are usable.

RF performance has been excellent with the iPhone5. I went on a cross country trip in October with the iPhone 5, a friend who had an Android phone (also on Sprint) and his work Blackberry (on Verizon I believe). The phone that had the best "you're in the middle of nowhere, you should know better than to expect good phone performance out there" was the iPhone5. In spots where the android couldn't get anything at all the iPhone5 did fine. It was a slightly older Android though - it wasn't anything like an SIII. Running Gingerbread if I recall correctly. I have found that some iPhone5 cases have acted a little like a faraday cage though - I was in a restaurant and the signal strength was in a bad area for Sprint and I was consistently seeing -119 dBm signal on my phone with the case on but removing the case it popped up to -98 dBm and was noticeably better performer. My case is pretty thick so......