avb

Look at my tag - I'm a sponsor. This thread is about Sprint's coverage map on Sprint's website, and that is what I commented on.

It's the same here in Houston - it looks live Sprint's coverage maps just blanket an entire market where they have launched LTE instead of showing the actual coverage area.

I think the additional ram and the amoled screen on the GS3 makes the battery drain faster during usage vs the EVO LTE. Samsung claims amoled has power savings over traditional lcd screens, but it seems like that's only on black screens. For traditional web browsing and most apps battery usage seems worse with amoled.

Thanks for that - it shows my house being blanketed, hopefully that's true starting tomorrow.

I hope that's the case, but I'm doubtful. Looking at the completed map in the sponsor's section I'm not expecting my house to have LTE right away, but Sprint's map has me blanketed. I would love to be wrong.

I posted this in the main Galaxy S3 thread:

I don't think those maps show current coverage. Under the '4g LTE' section, the description reads '4g LTE will be arriving soon in select cities,' so it looks like they just colored in an entire market where LTE has been announced because it will be coming 'soon'.

I'm pretty happy with my battery life - it gets me through the day. Make sure you don't have any partial wake locks keeping the phone from sleeping. Something I noticed first few days when I got the phone - my standby battery life was great in the morning until about lunch time, then it drained much faster in the afternoon. Turns out the stock Gallery app would try to do a sync at around lunch time, and it stayed awake the rest of the day. So now after lunch, I'll go and manually close the program myself and battery has been better. I'll go home (about 10 hours off the charger) with 65-70% battery left, where previously I would have 45-50% battery left because of the Gallery app not allowing the phone to sleep. I don't use the phone much at work, maybe check facebook or Pulse newsreader here and there, but also at lunch time I'll probably check the internet or read news for about 30 minutes.

Thanks guys

Picked up the Galaxy S3 last week and was wondering if there's anything similar to *#debug# (33284) that I was able to do on HTC phone.

Robert - can you comment on battery life of all the phones you're testing? No need to get into detailed tests for each phone, but just general impressions as to how the phones compare to one another.

Mueller is a paid shill and hates everything google.

Just for reference sake, how many sites are there total in the Houston market? I want to get an idea of what percentage of towers have been completed.

Yes go with an LTE phone. Like Robert just said, tower to tower hand off is pretty much nonexistent.

WiMAX coverage is horrible. I'm in Houston which was one of the first WiMAX cities, and for the most part I left WiMAX off when I had the evo and the photon. It's only decent if you're stationary, when driving around it would always disconnect and take timei to reconnect.

Thanks for the responses. I've learned so much more about Sprint's network on this site than any other source.

With backhaul upgrades being a major component of Network Vision, I want to ask a few questions. 1. Prior to the upgrades Sprint is using T1/bundled T1. T1 can transmit 1.5Mb/s, so how many T1 lines does a typical tower have? If a tower has 10 T1's, that's about 15Mb/s. It doesn't take that many EVDO users to use up that capacity since EVDO rev A can transmit 3.1Mb/s. 2. With Network Vision switching to fiber, microwave, or aav for backhaul, how much of an improvement is Sprint expecting to implement? With the bundled T1 example above, an improvement 10 times that amount would be 150Mb/s. 3. Will only the new LTE phones see the enhanced backhaul? I'm not clear on eHRPD/EVDO, but it seems like the new LTE phones will use eHRPD when not in a 4g LTE area. Will that be separate from the existing EVDO network? It seems like all of Verizon's 4g outages are always blames on their eHRPD network. 4. What type of backhaul is/was Clear using for WiMAX? I'm in Houston, so I'm hoping to see backhaul relieve the 3G issues sooner rather than later.

With Network Vision towers having their radios(?) installed up high near the panels instead of on the ground in the cabinets, what does this mean to signal strength? I've read there should be a 20% increase in signal strength, but what exactly does that mean? If I currently get 90 dbm signal reading, what should I expect after Network Vision upgrades are complete?