Summary: Poweruser tires of living on the bleeding edge, tries to slip back to leading edge. I can't love phones anymore, there's no payback. They don't love you back. Plus I have gadget fatigue, having chewed thru the Galaxy Tab and Dell Streak in less than 2 months.
I'm posting tonight from my new HTC Inspire 4G phone. A few days ago I would have never have considered buying an HTC but here is why:
- I need to turn in my old Dell Streak since they want to do a teardown of it at work.
- I need to stay on ATT because I travel and i need a GSM "world" phone that will work in almost every country. Also I read that I could keep my $30 unlimited data plan.
- I was concerned that the Motorola Atrix, with its new dual-core Tegra2 hardware, would be buggy. I'm a hardware engineer - I know what first versions of platforms are like. Not stable. Believe it or not, I am actually tiring of living on the bleeding edge of technology. On the bleeding edge there is no just buying a device and enjoying it. You are a guinea pig and have to discover all the faults of the new hardware the hard way. You have to put up with whatever flaws you find in the hideously expensive hardware you just bought. Wait on firmware releases, research workarounds, install new firmware then reinstate my custom environment, etc. Taking up many many hours. When really what I want to do is use the damn thing for the purposes I bought it for. This is why, for example, I am so glad I didn't get the Galaxy S Captivate--i use GPS extensively and would've suffered without it. That phone would have been totally unusable to me. I use Google Maps many times a day, for realtime traffic and searches on retail establishments. And Samsung has been promising Froyo for months and haven't delivered yet. OTOH, The HTC Inspire is Snapdragon based and should be stable. I don't want to buy a phone until I can read some reviews on it. The Inspire reviews so far are reasonable. These "minor" issues that all smartphones have become real barriers for powerusers like me. I'm sick of having to deal with them.
- the Inspire was available today. I am not an impulse buyer but when I want something I want it Right Now. The Atrix comes out Tuesday but I have an all day meeting Tues and a 9am meeting on Weds. God only knows when I'd be able to get one.
- the other strikes against the Captivate are: no HSUPA, low Quadrant benchmark score (900), laggy performance (fixable with custom ROM), no Froyo. But the superAMOLED display is truly amazing to see.
- the downsides of the Inspire are: no FFCAM, laughably small 1200mha battery, average 800x480 display, 4.3" display (good), but narrow viewing angle with no antireflective coating. Also no HSUPA.
In summary the Inspire bested the Captivate with its wider screen (i don't care for the long skinny screens), 4G network, and higher benchmark performance (Quadrant 1900). Plus I really liked how it felt in my hand. I think its a good compromise phone, that has no major issues, while waiting for LTE to get fully installed. A year from now when I'm ready for a new phone, hopefully there will be a good LTE phone available.
The big unknown on this phone was of course the so-called 4G (HSPA+) network. ATT is deploying a faster version of their 3G network (HSPA+) this year and is calling it 4G. These "4G" phones are not actually compatible with the true 4G "LTE" network, but do have about twice the download speed of 3G. So far I have been seeing download speeds about twice as fast as 3G (1-2.5Mbps) per Speedtest.net, and browsing has been very quick. However it appears ATT has disabled fast upload speeds (disabled HSUPA) so folks are seeing approx 350kbps MAX. Yes. At least half what were used to on 3G which was up to 1Mbps on a good day. Blog uploads will be slow. No video conferencing for us. But that's OK noone has a front facing camera anyways. Whew.
The bottom line is, all ATT Android phones don't have HSUPA and are stuck with slow upload speeds. So if you need to upload in realtime this could be an issue. And HSPA+ speeds are not going to improve - today's performance is as good as it gets until LTE rolls out (according to the ATT rep). At which point we'll all have to get new phones if we want the benefit of 4G.
Still trying to understand HSPA+ performance. Supposedly when ATT's backhaul switches over to fiberoptic, network speeds will improve - but for who? What about phones without HSUPA? ATT has shown time and time again that network speed is not a metric they care about.
So for now I'm quite happy to have a phone that fits in my pocket again, is faster than anything I've ever used, and only cost $99.
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