who do you guys go with and who do you recommend? my sprint contract expires at the end of next month and me & the wife are looking to get some new phones. most likely blackberry. through your experiences, which phone/company would you recommend? would probably be using it for texting and email along with some web Ted Strikering. we sort of got frauded by sprint and would like to go with one of the others but i'm going for the best bang for the buck so i might end up staying with sprint if they offer the best deal. we get 2 free phones from them plus a monthly discount of 18% through my wife's work with sprint. i think it's 20% and 1 free phone through verizon but i'm not sure. since i have no idea where i'll be living in 3 months, good coverage is very important. i'd prefer to keep it under $100/month if possible

I pay $130/month (after taxes, fees and discount) for 2 phones with unlimited everything...text, roaming, data, minutes. But, it is with sprint.

The Ted Strikering in California is excellent.

That doesn't begin to scratch the Ted Strikerace.

Ted Striker's up.

A Ted Strikeractant is a chemical Dr Fistula capable of reducing the Ted Strikerace tension of a liquid in which it is dissolved.

This will be the top tier phone when it comes out in 2 months:

http:www.sprint.com/evo

great phone, but 4g doesnt mean much without the towers to back it up right now

I'm partial to Verizon. I don't care if it's a little pricier. In my opinion, it has the best coverage of any of the carriers. And yes, I've had all of them...AT&T, Sprint, Cingular, etc. I even had a signal out in the middle of the desert with Verizon when no one else did.

I have the "new every two" plan were I get a brand new phone every two years. And I also get an 8% discount for my employer.

cool phone

but if I had to listen to those two techno phone fags talk the techno phone fag talk for more than 30 seconds I would assisinate everyone in there techno phone fag store.

That's funny regarding Verizon, I had the exact opposite experience. We go to the Frio every summer and the only phone that works out there is AT&T. We have to drive almost to Uvalde to get a signal, hence the reason we switched from Verizon to AT&T.

probably sticking with sprint since it's the best deal for what we want

I work in the wireless biz. I hate fuckin techno phone fags; fuckers come in the store and want to hump your leg for 30 minutes about this phone or that. I've had 20 years of this shit and I've just about had it. I'm just about ready to enroll in truck driver school.

HTC Hero is a decent phone for sprint. Not as fast as the iPhone, but plenty of cool features. Mines been very sluggish lately also.

All the gay porn.

Your plane is about to go into a flat spin and your head hit the canopy on your ejection. Nice knowing you.

Someday you'll see me standing on a street corner with a month-old beard and scraggly clothes. Be kind.

I'm on pretty much the same plan as Techsan. Plus, I recently got two Blackberry Curves for $50(mail in rebate). They are the new Curves with the pad instead of the roller ball.

Jen is right about the coverage, Verizon is the best but Sprint has the best data plans. I've got my phone to automatically roam if necessary and it works pretty well. Like Jen, I've been on all of them, but I prefer Sprint mainly because they are about $40/month cheaper than Verizon per phone.

which blackbery would you recommend then? curve or tour? they're not going to be used as a business phone, just web/email

get that fucker up there in the video....that looks cool as shit.

if you are not doing business applications like spread sheets and shit, you don't need a black berry.

got a curve today. plenty of shit i'll use it for. loading some tunes on it now and will have a new theme created sometime in the very near future

theme for the curve 8500 series

Most Texas cities that quality as metro areas -- except for B-CS, of course -- have this shit. We're talking Houston, Metroplex, Austin, SA, and even Tyler, Abilene, San Angelo, etc. Texas, in fact, is the most heavily covered state, with SEVENTEEN markets right now.

I have a Clear 4G modem for my laptop. Speed varies by where you are. Generally, if 3G sucks in an area, 4G will, too. My 4G has gone as slow as 2 Mbps, and as fast as 10 mbps. That ain't cable modem speed, but it's pretty MFing fast for a wimax signal.

well if you are in the same geographic radius for most of the year and it has 4g sure. i personally spend a lot of time on the road so i have to assess the trade offs on all that. i highly value a phone/network/plan that works anywhere in the americas/asia/europe/mid east/down under. im not doggin 4g, its badass, just a different perspective on its value as a customer.

just saw your clearwire thread on the nerdery. solid fail first response you got there.

I saw that too, yoshi. What a fucking idiot.

I'm in the middle of nowhere quite a bit. I hear you. But here's the secondary value of a Clear 4G plan: It comes with 5GB of Sprint 3G, which is available in most places, except BF nowhere. Pull up the Sprint map. It's magic.

And 5GB is what Sprint calls their "unlimited" 3G plan. Before Clear, I had a 3G modem for years and I never, ever came anywhere close to using 5GB. I may have hit 2 GB once in a while.

Plus, these days, you can get free wifi in a lot of places, i.e. all McDonalds' stand-alone stores, most Schlotszky's, many Whataburgers, and buttloads of other bar/restaurant chains. That's a nice back up in case you're nowhere near 4G or 3G coverage. Even small Apu-run motels will have unprotected wireless. Wardrive their parking lot and get the best signal.

This phone, by the way, is coming in June and will be priced around $200 with MIR, 2 yr plan. If it's like Sprint's other smartphones, you can get an Everything (txt, voice, data, MMS) plan for $99, or a plan with unlimited text/data/MMS & 450 voice minutes for $69. There's going to be a $10 monthly fee, apparently, to use the 'hotspot' function. Frankly, I'd sit tight and root (that's android for jailbreak) the phone and see if someone has an app that does it for you. There's one for the jailbroken iPhone, for example, called MyWi, that does that.

I was going to hit that phone ASAP, but since I redid my jailbreak, and since I've got a badass laptop that boots from cold in 10-20 seconds & a 4G card, I might sit tight until December. Expect Sprint to drop the price like a MF for the holidays.

QUOTE (iphonehomotwatdorkfaggotnerd

no fify

Mod pwnd. On both sites.

AHOV, certainly a rave review from the engadget guys. im getting antsy about finally ditching my iphone.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/12/sprints...-sucking-paces/

WTF does 'jailbreaking' a phone mean? Does it make it run better/faster? Can you do that to the Hero?

I'm glad somebody else asked that.

Jailbreaking is hacking into your iPhone's built-in operating system. Apple has intentionally crippled some of the iPhone's capabilities, and jailbreaking allows you to add some of that stuff back in. There are legions of phonetards who study this stuff. Every time Apple upgrades the iPhone OS, the phonetards figure out a way to get around the new security measures.

Jailbreak apps can:
• change how the screen looks
• what you can do with the phone's messaging systems
• allows you to use your iphone like a modem for a laptop
• allows you to run multiple programs at once.

and lots of other stuff, too.

For Android phones, the process is calling "rooting" the phone. I don't have my EVO yet, so I haven't spent any time looking into it. Apparently, it's the same deal - you hack into Android, you add in stuff you like, Android updates the OS, so you have to root it again, etc.

Trouble is, Android phones already do a lot of things the iPhones can't do, ergo no need for a lot of iPhone's apps or the jailbreak apps.

And now that you can use data/voice at the same time in Android 2.2, which is coming out this summer, the last real iPhone advantage is gone.

My jailbreak apps:
Backgrounder -- allows multi-tasking
Circuitous - docks my backgrounded apps so I can flip through them easily
Quick SMS - When I'm doing something and a text msg appears, I can answer it without leaving that app
blacklist - lets me block some numbers and send others directly to voicemail
3G unrestrictor -- let's me use some wi-fi only apps (Skype, for example) when I'm on the regular phone network
flashlight - turns the iPhone screen into a superbright light
SBS settings - quick, 1-touch access to a lot of iPhone features that normally take 6 -8 moves to reach otherwise
GV Mobile + = lets me dial out with my Google Voice number

you fucking talking to yourself

With 5 posts, I'm the board's top poster of the week. Maybe the month.

STAFF ban user for post padding.

I remember the halcyon days of the TA Academic forum. You could post pad there like crazy. One night, I downloaded a shareware program that automated keystrokes, and added several hundred posts to a username in one night. I could've gotten greedy and took it to Legend status in that one night, but I thought it would be too obvious.

if the evo is going to get a Froyo upgrade i am now sold. AHOV, youre the expert on this one, whats the word?

Pretty obvious that I don't need to 'root' my phone then. Are all of the Android phones customizable? Is that one of the advantages over the iPhone? Will the OS automatically update, or is that something that needs to be manually done? My only complaint has been the inability to use voice and data simultaneously, but apparently, that is going to change soon.

Uncertain at this point. It's going to be 2.2, and those upgrades roll out in peculiar ways, based on geography, carrier and purchase date. I know it's going on the next Droid and Nexus, but I don't know after that.

Frankly, the Snapdragon processor is the money shot, imo.

The rollout of upgrades depends on your model, your carrier, etc. It's usually automatic for Android, as in you fire up your phone and it's in the middle of it, which sucks if you're in a jam and need your phone ASAP. But it upgrades pretty quickly, i.e. less than an hour, I'm told.

If it doesn't, you can always hunt down the upgrade on a tech blog somewhere, and it's pretty easy to install, even for someone who isn't used to dicking with geeky shit. Typically, it involves downloading the upgrade and clicking a button. Shit, even I can do that. That's all you do for jailbreaks -- download a little ass program (<500 KB), click it, hook up your phone, tap your screen a couple of times, and in 10 minutes you're done.

The voice/data thing will be answered in Froyo, but apparently that has been fixed already in the EVO, according to the reviews that came out today from Mossberg, Engadget, CNET, etc.

Sprint is shooting its wad on this phone -- cheap plans, low handset price, and assloads of features. I get the sense that if this doesn't work, Sprint is cornholed.

And the Android phones can be customized. The Sense UI apparently makes it a lot easier and gives you more options, from what I've seen and read.

cool. im way behind on my reading right now. living the good life playing golf and screwing off all summer so ill get around to it. the $199, snapdragon, and 4g are all nut busters.

have you used an incredible yet? thing is snappy as hell.

i was planning to wait for a win7 htc build, but the android platform is maturing so fast and i grow more discontent with my iphone daily so im about ready to pull the trigger on this evo.

It will. Just a matter of when. I was barely able to update my Hero to 2.1 yesterday.

Win7 has the best look of the bunch, but I haven't seen anything out of it besides video of the social media aspects of the device. While I use that stuff, it's not a deal breaker. And there's no hard delivery date, nor any confirmed phones yet, at least from what I've read on.

My spongey tissue is throbbing, however, for the EVO. I won't get it first, but with SERO, I'll get it cheap. I'll be able to shave $40 monthly off my monthly phone plan, assuming I use skype for some of my outbound calls.