Which cellphone contract does a roadie get?
December 9, 2010 8:01 AM Subscribe
Cellphone-Contract-Filter. 3 1/2 overpriced years w/T-Mobile is about to end (yay!). I have a gypsy-ish career and am clueless about where to get. Please advise! (special snowflake details inside)
Hi all-
I work as a roadie for theater shows. Right now, I'm the wardrobe supervisor for Cats : ) My cellphone is my work phone and I need it to work all the time.
Priorities are as follows:
-great coverage for the States (including middle of nowhere cities)
-not gut-wrenching plan for being in Canada
-cheap plan for calling Canada from the States (I call there all the time)
-unlimited daytime minutes
-GPS (my current one updates, maybe every two days)
-able to do email on phone
-not a horrible company which makes you want to gouge your eyes out every time you get a bill
I'm a total fool with these things. I've been using a G1 for the past two years, which, in theory - when it works, does all that I need it to do. I'd love to get an iPhone, but for all the wrong reasons.
Please guide me as to which plan and which phone I should go for.
Your response is greatly appreciated!!!!
Hi all-
I work as a roadie for theater shows. Right now, I'm the wardrobe supervisor for Cats : ) My cellphone is my work phone and I need it to work all the time.
Priorities are as follows:
-great coverage for the States (including middle of nowhere cities)
-not gut-wrenching plan for being in Canada
-cheap plan for calling Canada from the States (I call there all the time)
-unlimited daytime minutes
-GPS (my current one updates, maybe every two days)
-able to do email on phone
-not a horrible company which makes you want to gouge your eyes out every time you get a bill
I'm a total fool with these things. I've been using a G1 for the past two years, which, in theory - when it works, does all that I need it to do. I'd love to get an iPhone, but for all the wrong reasons.
Please guide me as to which plan and which phone I should go for.
Your response is greatly appreciated!!!!
Hi, fellow phone/plan researcher. Sorry you didn't get more answers to this question. I only just found it while searching for something else. If you're still looking, here's some info I've picked up while doing my own smartphone research. The short answer, given your experience and requirements, is that I recommend getting one of the newer Android phones on Verizon if you want a full, modern web phone. Or if you really only care about calls, email, and GPS, see if you can save some money by getting a Blackberry on Verizon with a cheaper/lesser data plan. If you call home from Canada a good bit, the case for Sprint gets stronger.
Coverage:
While every carrier has bad spots, which other carriers may do great in, Verizon's network is the largest one and I hear over and over that it's also the best, performance-wise. I read the various gadget blogs that obsess over smartphones and they have seemed the happiest with Verizon over time. For example in this April 2010 review of the Droid Incredible, the people at Engadget Mobile said, "As usual, Verizon's network was outstanding." You don't hear them say that about the others. It definitely beats T-Mobile, which has the smallest network and therefore the spottiest coverage. T-mobile can be tough on the fringes and away from major corridors. Here's more on that from deadzones.com. I'm in an out of the way spot and get crappy coverage and no 3G service, which I'm told means I will have frustratingly slow online functions like web page loading and internet video and whatnot. But in a major urban center in a 4g market, T-mobile can be the best and fastest, currently. For someone like you who travels all over and who can't afford crappy coverage even in out of the way places, and who needs it to work all the time, I'd say the safest bet is Verizon based on what I've read.
Canada:
I'd speak to the carriers directly about your options to make sure you understand what you're getting into. You've got costs to call there from here and costs to roam call from there.
Verizon: If I am reading this page correctly, you can either call Canada from the US for 49 cents a minute with no plan or 9 cents a minute with a $4 monthly plan. So if you call there for more than 10 minutes per month, you're saving money, increasingly so as the minutes add up. Seems cheap to me for someone who calls regularly. This page says you can do roaming inside Canada for 69 cents per minute. I'm not seeing any kind of plan/deal that would cut that down, but double check with them. That sounds like a lot to me, but I don't know how "gut-wrenching" it is compared to what you've got now.
Sprint: Same plan as Verizon for calling to Canada. But for calling from within Canada, "For only $2.99 per month all calls placed from Canada are only $0.20 per minute! Whether you place a local call in Canada, place a call back to the US, call another country, or receive a call with the Canada Roaming Option you pay only $0.20/minute (without the add-on calls are $0.59/minute)." So an hour's worth of calling home from Canada in one month on this plan would be $15 total, plan + minute charges. With no plan it would be $35. Two hours: $27 vs. $71
AT&T: Offers "Nation With Canada" plans for $20 more than the plain domestic calling plans at the two lowest minutes-per-month tiers. But while the only other domestic tier is unlimited minutes, there is no unlimited tier on Nation with Canada plans, only increasing numbers of minutes for increasing costs. And that's before adding data service. Careful with that data in Canada, by the way. It's $2/mb.
T-mobile: There appear to be a few variables and different costs in T-mobile's arrangement but I'm not all the way clear on it. Check it out here and call them.
Unlimited Calls:
Verizon and everybody else have unlimited calling plans, so that won't be a problem. It'll cost more though. If you can figure out how many minutes you average month to month right now, maybe you can consider one of the lower tier plans like 1500 minutes or something. Saves money if you don't exceed your cap. If you're not sure, you could always start off on a lower tier and bump it up to unlimited if you find you need it. The carriers don't do their packages entirely the same, so you'll see different combinations of voice, text, and data. Do a spreadsheet if you're having trouble comparing apples and oranges. I think it helps to calculate the total cost over 2 or 3 years to get apples to apples. Take the monthly cost of all of your voice and data services and the ~$10 of BS fees they tack on each month and multiply by 24 or 36 months. Then add on the fixed costs: the phone, tax on it, shipping, activation fee, etc. Now go head to head. It'll probably be close for comparable gear and services, but maybe you can save two or three hundred overall with one or another carrier.
GPS:
Verizon has a GPS service for $10/month, and I think the others have something similar, or sometimes it's included with some plans, but I'm in the process right now of figuring out why anyone would pay for it. I thought you could use things like Google Navigation for free turn-by-turn GPS. This is all based on a preliminary search I was just in the middle of doing when I found this post, so you'll want to confirm. I read that Vz was at least at one point blocking the built-in GPS function in some or all of their phones so that you had to buy their branded GPS service if you wanted anything at all. I read one thing that claimed they stopped doing that, but I can't tell for sure just yet if that's true. I'd try to confirm that yourself from some other source than Verizon.
Email:
You can do email on any modern smartphone if you have a data plan. If email is your priority and web surfing and modern iPhone/Android apps really aren't, you might consider a Blackberry. Easy to use, great at email, and don't necessarily need a full data plan. I never wanted a virtual keyboard and have found them very error-prone the handful of times I've tried them. But I see people out on the phone forums say that you not only get used to it after a while, you come to prefer it. YMMV. But for a heavy emailer, Blackberry has you covered with good physical keyboards and email service. Consumer Reports says that a recent study found that Blackberry users tended to use about 80mb of data per month, which isn't a lot compared to the data plan levels offered by the big carriers. Most major carriers offer unlimited data plans for $25 or $30 or a lower amount of data for $10 or $15, like say 200mb per month. Maybe you could save some money there if you don't plan to be much of a web user and don't regularly download a lot of attachments with your emails. I don't know how different GPS is on Blackberries as opposed to smarter phones or how much data that sucks up.
Customer Service, subjective:
I'm curretly on T-mobile and think their customer service is among the best I've ever gotten from any company. This was a surprise to me because the only thing anybody ever says about their cell provider is how much they hate them. So I expected to hate them. What a relief. Sprint has gotten the most vitriol over the years in my own anecdotal observation. So I always vaguely assumed they were last, T-mobile was first, and Verizon and AT&T were somewhere in between.
Customer Service, objective:
For a much more objective comparison with different results, check out the January 2011 issue of Consumer Reports. They say AT&T has the worst customer satisfaction in the US, though they note that over half their sample was iPhone users and that that could have some effect on the overall ratings - like maybe iPhones have particular problems. But they were also rated worst in almost every other category. US Cellular was rated tops among US carriers but they aren't a top player and aren't in all states. Among the big four, CR says that Sprint, in a "dramatic turnaround" has now pulled level with Verizon in overall satisfaction, Verizon having held the top spot since 2003. It has even outperformed Verizon in a few satisfaction measures. CR says that T-mobile is not far behind those two. So it looks like if you steer clear of AT&T, you can expect mostly comparable overall satisfaction at any of the other three. Verizon's track record is worth noting though.
Operating System:
With iPhone ruled out, your major decision is to choose between Android or Blackberry or Windows Phone 7
Android: If you're happy enough with Android on your G1, it's probably easiest to just stick with that unless you know of compelling reasons to switch. No learning curve. The nerd community loves Android, primarily because it's not Apple and is Google. They like the openness and customizability of it as opposed to the locked down iPhone OS and certain other aspects of the iPhone ecosystem. But I think most people aren't tinkerers or customizers and just want something that works and that is cool. Android is that too, though some would call iPhone more polished at this point. Last I saw, Android had a third of the number of apps that iPhone does, but it's blowing up in terms of apps in development, phones available, and number of users.
Blackberry: It isn't really considered a modern smartphone OS anymore. It's lagging behind. A recent editorial at Engadget regretfully claims that RIM is adrift with no visible plan to compete with the big boys. But they point out that the email function is still great.
Windows Phone 7: This is a completely new OS that replaces Windows Mobile. It's just now getting on its feet with the first wave of phones recently released. I don't know anything about it other than that it doesn't have many apps as of now compared to iPhone or Android. It has received some optimistic praise, some not too terrible criticism, and terabytes of fanboy love/hate.
Other OSes: There are also other boutique smartphone operating systems like Palm's webOS, which is seen as very well done, and whatever is on Nokia smartphones these days (Symbian, Maemo, Meego?). But their future is not clear and you've got many more phone options with the major OSes.
Feature Phone OSes: You can also go with a "feature phone" as they are called, a step down from smartphones. A feature phone may have something like Android as an OS or may just have an unnamed OS by the handset maker. But it will offer a scaled down set of features and capabilities regardless. Not everybody needs a smartphone (I'm lying - don't listen!)
Phones:
There is no shortage of awesome Android phones out right now. Pick your carrier. There's a phone from the Samsung Galaxy S line on all four major carriers now, for example. Those were very well received. Verizon's Droid line includes some of the very best ones out as of the end of 2010. Droid X, Droid Incredible, Droid 2 - all lusted after. The Droid 2 Global and the Droid Pro even have GSM built in alongside the CDMA, making them usable in countries that use GSM (Europe, most of the rest of the world). I've never wanted CDMA because I don't like being trapped on a phone and not being able to pop the SIM card out and put it in another phone easily as needed, and because I can't use them in Europe. So I never wanted Verizon or Sprint. But with dual-mode phones like this, now maybe I don't have to worry about it. Canada, like the USA, uses a mix of GSM and CDMA, so maybe one of these would be handy there - don't know how all that works out in practice with overlapping networks and roaming alliances and all.
If you like a Blackberry-style form factor and keyboard for heavy emailing, but want a full modern smartphone OS, the Droid Pro has you covered. I believe it's unique among Android phones right now in that respect, though there are a number of horizontal sliders like your G1 that have horizontal physical keyboards.
User Interface:
I've never used a G1 but I believe its OS is just stock, vanilla Android and that it doesn't have something like HTC's Sense or Motorola's Motoblur or Samsung's TouchWiz laid over it (it would be HTC something in your case if it were anything). If that's true, and if you upgrade to another Android phone, odds are it will have one of these manufacturer user interfaces grafted onto it. The nerd community hates these, because they feel that they clog up and bloat a perfectly good OS, loading it down with extra processes and confusing an otherwise mostly consistent user experience. I think sometimes they also integrate some carrier-branded junk that some people don't want. The nerds appear to hate Motorola's Motoblur the most and HTC's Sense the least. Some professional nerds even felt like HTC's Sense improved upon Android v2.1 (don't know about 2.2 and nobody has messed with 2.3 yet). The makers put these things on there supposedly to make the UI more user friendly, but probably it's also to set their phones apart from all the similar looking ones made by other makers. I don't know what non-nerds think of these UIs. Maybe they don't even know they have them. Maybe they do just fine.
Phones by User Interface:
If you want the pure Android OS with no extra UI tacked on, you can get it, but your options are limited. The original Droid has it, but has been succeeded at this point. The G2, the successor to your phone, also on T-mobile, also has it. The Nexus One, Google's first foray into the handset market, is also stock Android if you can find one (didn't sell well at all and was pulled, but Android nerds worship it). As of last week, that was sort of superseded by the Nexus S - also vanilla Android, also on T-mobile. Nerds (and apprentice nerds, cough) are disappointed that the Nexus S wasn't more of an improvement over the Nexus One and didn't have stuff like an SD expansion slot, HD video, more megapixels, dual core processor, etc. It's otherwise considered by some pro nerds to the best Android phone out there for now unless any of the things I just mentioned are deal breaker for a given person. Right now it's the only phone officially with Android 2.3 ("Gingerbread"), though tinkerers are hacking Gingerbread onto other phones already and more phones will get that update through official channels in the months ahead. Play with some phones that have Sense or Motoblur or TouchWiz and see if you find them confusing or not as good as vanilla Android. You might not mind, which will throw your options wide open. I compared vanilla to Sense recently and while I prefer vanilla, Sense wasn't terribly different. Despite some minor annoyances, I'm sure I'd get used to it.
Coming Hotness:
Have you heard about the forthcoming LG Optimus 2X (originally codenamed "Star")? Ohhh God, I want it to Borg me. It was just released in S. Korea and should be over here first quarter 2011. We don't yet know which carrier it will be on though. I thought I had heard Verizon originally but then read a random rumor that it would be T-mobile (they can include GSM or CDMA as they wish). It's Android, it has the first dual core processor in a phone (1gHz), has an 8mp camera, shoots 1080p HD video, and has an HDMI-out port that you can connect to your tv with a cable to view recorded video, movies, games, or anything else that's showing on your phone's screen. Check that out in action in the video on this page. Dual core is apparently the future and there is already news of more phones coming out in 2011 that will have it. There is an industry conference called CES happening in the first week of January at which gadget watchers expect to see a number of hot new phones launched or announced. If you want hottest of the hot, it might make sense to wait until then to see what shakes out.
Bottom line:
You don't want (to want) an iPhone. Conveniently AT&T, home of the iPhone, is rated lowest in overall satisfaction by Consumer Reports in almost every market it tested and is also rated worst in most of the other measures it tested. I say save time and just forget AT&T. You don't seem to like T-mobile, and they have the worst coverage overall, so unless you are willing to consider other less expensive plan configurations there or really want an untainted vanilla Android OS, then forget them too. That leaves Verizon and Sprint. In the badass-latest-Android-phone department, Sprint has the HTC EVO 4G (no keyboard) and the Samsung Epic 4G (horizontal sliding keyboard). Both are what is passing for 4g these days. It's really more like 3.5g, but it's the fastest there is right now. So that stands you in better stead for future use of web functions. Verizon has a bevy of hot Droids and a couple of Samsung Galaxy S Android phones. None are 4g (all 3g), but Vz will apparently launch six 4g phones at CES in January. Both Vz and Sprint have a handful of different Blackberries. And they've got varying voice/plan/data combos. If you're buying this month, I say go for one of the newest Android phones if you want a full modern OS with good web function and apps or a Blackberry if you just want to focus on calling, email, and GPS. I say go with Verizon given the size and good reputation of their network vs. the others. If the Sprint Canada deal is valuable enough to you to sacrifice some of that Vz goodness, and if Vz can't match it or come close (call them and ask/haggle), then maybe there's your answer. And if any carrier you pick has crappy service at your house, your hand may be forced in another direction, particularly if you have no landline.
Good luck!
posted by Askr at 7:13 PM on December 20, 2010
Coverage:
While every carrier has bad spots, which other carriers may do great in, Verizon's network is the largest one and I hear over and over that it's also the best, performance-wise. I read the various gadget blogs that obsess over smartphones and they have seemed the happiest with Verizon over time. For example in this April 2010 review of the Droid Incredible, the people at Engadget Mobile said, "As usual, Verizon's network was outstanding." You don't hear them say that about the others. It definitely beats T-Mobile, which has the smallest network and therefore the spottiest coverage. T-mobile can be tough on the fringes and away from major corridors. Here's more on that from deadzones.com. I'm in an out of the way spot and get crappy coverage and no 3G service, which I'm told means I will have frustratingly slow online functions like web page loading and internet video and whatnot. But in a major urban center in a 4g market, T-mobile can be the best and fastest, currently. For someone like you who travels all over and who can't afford crappy coverage even in out of the way places, and who needs it to work all the time, I'd say the safest bet is Verizon based on what I've read.
Canada:
I'd speak to the carriers directly about your options to make sure you understand what you're getting into. You've got costs to call there from here and costs to roam call from there.
Verizon: If I am reading this page correctly, you can either call Canada from the US for 49 cents a minute with no plan or 9 cents a minute with a $4 monthly plan. So if you call there for more than 10 minutes per month, you're saving money, increasingly so as the minutes add up. Seems cheap to me for someone who calls regularly. This page says you can do roaming inside Canada for 69 cents per minute. I'm not seeing any kind of plan/deal that would cut that down, but double check with them. That sounds like a lot to me, but I don't know how "gut-wrenching" it is compared to what you've got now.
Sprint: Same plan as Verizon for calling to Canada. But for calling from within Canada, "For only $2.99 per month all calls placed from Canada are only $0.20 per minute! Whether you place a local call in Canada, place a call back to the US, call another country, or receive a call with the Canada Roaming Option you pay only $0.20/minute (without the add-on calls are $0.59/minute)." So an hour's worth of calling home from Canada in one month on this plan would be $15 total, plan + minute charges. With no plan it would be $35. Two hours: $27 vs. $71
AT&T: Offers "Nation With Canada" plans for $20 more than the plain domestic calling plans at the two lowest minutes-per-month tiers. But while the only other domestic tier is unlimited minutes, there is no unlimited tier on Nation with Canada plans, only increasing numbers of minutes for increasing costs. And that's before adding data service. Careful with that data in Canada, by the way. It's $2/mb.
T-mobile: There appear to be a few variables and different costs in T-mobile's arrangement but I'm not all the way clear on it. Check it out here and call them.
Unlimited Calls:
Verizon and everybody else have unlimited calling plans, so that won't be a problem. It'll cost more though. If you can figure out how many minutes you average month to month right now, maybe you can consider one of the lower tier plans like 1500 minutes or something. Saves money if you don't exceed your cap. If you're not sure, you could always start off on a lower tier and bump it up to unlimited if you find you need it. The carriers don't do their packages entirely the same, so you'll see different combinations of voice, text, and data. Do a spreadsheet if you're having trouble comparing apples and oranges. I think it helps to calculate the total cost over 2 or 3 years to get apples to apples. Take the monthly cost of all of your voice and data services and the ~$10 of BS fees they tack on each month and multiply by 24 or 36 months. Then add on the fixed costs: the phone, tax on it, shipping, activation fee, etc. Now go head to head. It'll probably be close for comparable gear and services, but maybe you can save two or three hundred overall with one or another carrier.
GPS:
Verizon has a GPS service for $10/month, and I think the others have something similar, or sometimes it's included with some plans, but I'm in the process right now of figuring out why anyone would pay for it. I thought you could use things like Google Navigation for free turn-by-turn GPS. This is all based on a preliminary search I was just in the middle of doing when I found this post, so you'll want to confirm. I read that Vz was at least at one point blocking the built-in GPS function in some or all of their phones so that you had to buy their branded GPS service if you wanted anything at all. I read one thing that claimed they stopped doing that, but I can't tell for sure just yet if that's true. I'd try to confirm that yourself from some other source than Verizon.
Email:
You can do email on any modern smartphone if you have a data plan. If email is your priority and web surfing and modern iPhone/Android apps really aren't, you might consider a Blackberry. Easy to use, great at email, and don't necessarily need a full data plan. I never wanted a virtual keyboard and have found them very error-prone the handful of times I've tried them. But I see people out on the phone forums say that you not only get used to it after a while, you come to prefer it. YMMV. But for a heavy emailer, Blackberry has you covered with good physical keyboards and email service. Consumer Reports says that a recent study found that Blackberry users tended to use about 80mb of data per month, which isn't a lot compared to the data plan levels offered by the big carriers. Most major carriers offer unlimited data plans for $25 or $30 or a lower amount of data for $10 or $15, like say 200mb per month. Maybe you could save some money there if you don't plan to be much of a web user and don't regularly download a lot of attachments with your emails. I don't know how different GPS is on Blackberries as opposed to smarter phones or how much data that sucks up.
Customer Service, subjective:
I'm curretly on T-mobile and think their customer service is among the best I've ever gotten from any company. This was a surprise to me because the only thing anybody ever says about their cell provider is how much they hate them. So I expected to hate them. What a relief. Sprint has gotten the most vitriol over the years in my own anecdotal observation. So I always vaguely assumed they were last, T-mobile was first, and Verizon and AT&T were somewhere in between.
Customer Service, objective:
For a much more objective comparison with different results, check out the January 2011 issue of Consumer Reports. They say AT&T has the worst customer satisfaction in the US, though they note that over half their sample was iPhone users and that that could have some effect on the overall ratings - like maybe iPhones have particular problems. But they were also rated worst in almost every other category. US Cellular was rated tops among US carriers but they aren't a top player and aren't in all states. Among the big four, CR says that Sprint, in a "dramatic turnaround" has now pulled level with Verizon in overall satisfaction, Verizon having held the top spot since 2003. It has even outperformed Verizon in a few satisfaction measures. CR says that T-mobile is not far behind those two. So it looks like if you steer clear of AT&T, you can expect mostly comparable overall satisfaction at any of the other three. Verizon's track record is worth noting though.
Operating System:
With iPhone ruled out, your major decision is to choose between Android or Blackberry or Windows Phone 7
Android: If you're happy enough with Android on your G1, it's probably easiest to just stick with that unless you know of compelling reasons to switch. No learning curve. The nerd community loves Android, primarily because it's not Apple and is Google. They like the openness and customizability of it as opposed to the locked down iPhone OS and certain other aspects of the iPhone ecosystem. But I think most people aren't tinkerers or customizers and just want something that works and that is cool. Android is that too, though some would call iPhone more polished at this point. Last I saw, Android had a third of the number of apps that iPhone does, but it's blowing up in terms of apps in development, phones available, and number of users.
Blackberry: It isn't really considered a modern smartphone OS anymore. It's lagging behind. A recent editorial at Engadget regretfully claims that RIM is adrift with no visible plan to compete with the big boys. But they point out that the email function is still great.
Windows Phone 7: This is a completely new OS that replaces Windows Mobile. It's just now getting on its feet with the first wave of phones recently released. I don't know anything about it other than that it doesn't have many apps as of now compared to iPhone or Android. It has received some optimistic praise, some not too terrible criticism, and terabytes of fanboy love/hate.
Other OSes: There are also other boutique smartphone operating systems like Palm's webOS, which is seen as very well done, and whatever is on Nokia smartphones these days (Symbian, Maemo, Meego?). But their future is not clear and you've got many more phone options with the major OSes.
Feature Phone OSes: You can also go with a "feature phone" as they are called, a step down from smartphones. A feature phone may have something like Android as an OS or may just have an unnamed OS by the handset maker. But it will offer a scaled down set of features and capabilities regardless. Not everybody needs a smartphone (I'm lying - don't listen!)
Phones:
There is no shortage of awesome Android phones out right now. Pick your carrier. There's a phone from the Samsung Galaxy S line on all four major carriers now, for example. Those were very well received. Verizon's Droid line includes some of the very best ones out as of the end of 2010. Droid X, Droid Incredible, Droid 2 - all lusted after. The Droid 2 Global and the Droid Pro even have GSM built in alongside the CDMA, making them usable in countries that use GSM (Europe, most of the rest of the world). I've never wanted CDMA because I don't like being trapped on a phone and not being able to pop the SIM card out and put it in another phone easily as needed, and because I can't use them in Europe. So I never wanted Verizon or Sprint. But with dual-mode phones like this, now maybe I don't have to worry about it. Canada, like the USA, uses a mix of GSM and CDMA, so maybe one of these would be handy there - don't know how all that works out in practice with overlapping networks and roaming alliances and all.
If you like a Blackberry-style form factor and keyboard for heavy emailing, but want a full modern smartphone OS, the Droid Pro has you covered. I believe it's unique among Android phones right now in that respect, though there are a number of horizontal sliders like your G1 that have horizontal physical keyboards.
User Interface:
I've never used a G1 but I believe its OS is just stock, vanilla Android and that it doesn't have something like HTC's Sense or Motorola's Motoblur or Samsung's TouchWiz laid over it (it would be HTC something in your case if it were anything). If that's true, and if you upgrade to another Android phone, odds are it will have one of these manufacturer user interfaces grafted onto it. The nerd community hates these, because they feel that they clog up and bloat a perfectly good OS, loading it down with extra processes and confusing an otherwise mostly consistent user experience. I think sometimes they also integrate some carrier-branded junk that some people don't want. The nerds appear to hate Motorola's Motoblur the most and HTC's Sense the least. Some professional nerds even felt like HTC's Sense improved upon Android v2.1 (don't know about 2.2 and nobody has messed with 2.3 yet). The makers put these things on there supposedly to make the UI more user friendly, but probably it's also to set their phones apart from all the similar looking ones made by other makers. I don't know what non-nerds think of these UIs. Maybe they don't even know they have them. Maybe they do just fine.
Phones by User Interface:
If you want the pure Android OS with no extra UI tacked on, you can get it, but your options are limited. The original Droid has it, but has been succeeded at this point. The G2, the successor to your phone, also on T-mobile, also has it. The Nexus One, Google's first foray into the handset market, is also stock Android if you can find one (didn't sell well at all and was pulled, but Android nerds worship it). As of last week, that was sort of superseded by the Nexus S - also vanilla Android, also on T-mobile. Nerds (and apprentice nerds, cough) are disappointed that the Nexus S wasn't more of an improvement over the Nexus One and didn't have stuff like an SD expansion slot, HD video, more megapixels, dual core processor, etc. It's otherwise considered by some pro nerds to the best Android phone out there for now unless any of the things I just mentioned are deal breaker for a given person. Right now it's the only phone officially with Android 2.3 ("Gingerbread"), though tinkerers are hacking Gingerbread onto other phones already and more phones will get that update through official channels in the months ahead. Play with some phones that have Sense or Motoblur or TouchWiz and see if you find them confusing or not as good as vanilla Android. You might not mind, which will throw your options wide open. I compared vanilla to Sense recently and while I prefer vanilla, Sense wasn't terribly different. Despite some minor annoyances, I'm sure I'd get used to it.
Coming Hotness:
Have you heard about the forthcoming LG Optimus 2X (originally codenamed "Star")? Ohhh God, I want it to Borg me. It was just released in S. Korea and should be over here first quarter 2011. We don't yet know which carrier it will be on though. I thought I had heard Verizon originally but then read a random rumor that it would be T-mobile (they can include GSM or CDMA as they wish). It's Android, it has the first dual core processor in a phone (1gHz), has an 8mp camera, shoots 1080p HD video, and has an HDMI-out port that you can connect to your tv with a cable to view recorded video, movies, games, or anything else that's showing on your phone's screen. Check that out in action in the video on this page. Dual core is apparently the future and there is already news of more phones coming out in 2011 that will have it. There is an industry conference called CES happening in the first week of January at which gadget watchers expect to see a number of hot new phones launched or announced. If you want hottest of the hot, it might make sense to wait until then to see what shakes out.
Bottom line:
You don't want (to want) an iPhone. Conveniently AT&T, home of the iPhone, is rated lowest in overall satisfaction by Consumer Reports in almost every market it tested and is also rated worst in most of the other measures it tested. I say save time and just forget AT&T. You don't seem to like T-mobile, and they have the worst coverage overall, so unless you are willing to consider other less expensive plan configurations there or really want an untainted vanilla Android OS, then forget them too. That leaves Verizon and Sprint. In the badass-latest-Android-phone department, Sprint has the HTC EVO 4G (no keyboard) and the Samsung Epic 4G (horizontal sliding keyboard). Both are what is passing for 4g these days. It's really more like 3.5g, but it's the fastest there is right now. So that stands you in better stead for future use of web functions. Verizon has a bevy of hot Droids and a couple of Samsung Galaxy S Android phones. None are 4g (all 3g), but Vz will apparently launch six 4g phones at CES in January. Both Vz and Sprint have a handful of different Blackberries. And they've got varying voice/plan/data combos. If you're buying this month, I say go for one of the newest Android phones if you want a full modern OS with good web function and apps or a Blackberry if you just want to focus on calling, email, and GPS. I say go with Verizon given the size and good reputation of their network vs. the others. If the Sprint Canada deal is valuable enough to you to sacrifice some of that Vz goodness, and if Vz can't match it or come close (call them and ask/haggle), then maybe there's your answer. And if any carrier you pick has crappy service at your house, your hand may be forced in another direction, particularly if you have no landline.
Good luck!
posted by Askr at 7:13 PM on December 20, 2010
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posted by cyndigo at 9:57 AM on December 9, 2010