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Matt Meiser
09-27-2011, 10:29 PM
We currently have Sprint and the coverage at our house has steadily dropped off to where it's becoming unusable at times. That's really bad since Frontier hasn't been able to keep our home phones working for more than a few days at a time for the last month, a repeat of a few past incidents over the last 8 years. We are thinking of bailing out of our contract and going to Verizon which has much stronger coverage. We each also have an iPod and I have an iPad. We are thinking about iPhones to consolidate with our iPods.

We currently have Android phones. My wife's Samsung Intercept is absolutely awful performance-wise. We really should have returned it right away and got her something different. My EVO is great when it has service but I had a failure on the charge port which I had to pay a deductible for replacement. I had a different HTC phone before that that developed internal problems on two different examples so I'm a little gun-shy. I'm wondering about the durability of the iPnone. We'd probably get something like the Otterbox Defender cases for them but I really don't want to be replacing one under contract.Not sure If we'll get the 5 when it comes out or go for a discounted 4 if they do that.

Mark Kelly 92040
09-28-2011, 12:34 AM
Matt,

I've had three iPhones over the last three years and I have been very happy with all of them; I have family members who have them and a number of friends as well and they are all happy with them. I also have other Apple products as well. My experience with Apple has been that they are very good at standing behind their products - even when they are no longer under warranty. Apple has replaced the battery in my MacBook Pro three times now and none of them have been under warranty. My first iPhone went swimming unexpectedly and had to be replaced. While Apple could have charged full retail to replace the phone, they didn't and I was able to get out with only a cost of $99.

I've had no hardware issues with any of my iPhones and only know of one other person who has. I believe that issue was quickly resolved by Apple. If you do end up with a Verizon iPhone, keep in mind that it is a CDMA unit and not GSM which will limit its use to pretty much just the US.

Mark

Paul Cohen
09-28-2011, 1:09 AM
We have had 10 from iPhone(3), iPhone 3(3), iPhone 3G(2) and iPhone 4(2) and all are still operating I do use a "Spec case" which protects extremely well. After about 4 years some of the batteries have gotten week but that is to be expected. We are on AT&T, I don't like Verizon because of lack of multitasking between the phone and apps something I do all the time. Rumor is iPhone will be available on multiple networks in the next few weeks.

Matt Meiser
09-28-2011, 8:28 AM
For me the most important thing is coverage, second is price, third is nice to have features like the voice/data at the same time thing. If we change to either Verizon we are going to have a good size increase in price, while losing services (nights and weekends start at 9 instead of 7, limited texts, limited broadband, mobile to mobile is VZW only instead of all mobile, etc) but gaining coverage. Best case coverage-wise ATT is a lateral move, maybe worse since my Sprint phone will roam to VZW at no cost to me if there's no Sprint available. The problem is that if there's a whiff of Sprint, it doesn't roam. We are considering offsetting some of the price by taking our landline number to VZW on either a Home Phone Connect or just to a cell phone and migrating that number to eventually be my daughter's cell phone number. We don't want to give up the number, but we are using it less and less.

International roaming isn't that important to me. I haven't even been to Canada in probably 8 years and its only about 20 miles away. If we do take a trip to Europe, we could look into renting a phone or buying a prepaid. That's something we'd like to do, but I don't see it happening in the next 2 years.

Phil Thien
09-28-2011, 8:57 AM
Have you considered a Sprint Femtocell? If you have a good Internet connection, it allows you to make/take calls from your cell via your Internet connection.

In fact, I have a friend I was talking with yesterday and his AT&T service steadily worsened at his home and a level-3 tech at AT&T said it was because of the saturation of users in the area, and suggested the AT&T equiv. to the Femtocell (the Femtocell is a Sprint product, but I guess all the providers have their own similar technology). He has been happy with the solution.

Another alternative if you have a solid Internet connection is to sign up with someone like CallCentric (a sip trunker) to handle your calls. They will pipe incomine/outgoing calls over your Internet connection. You can get something as simple as SIP phones (from Aastra or Cisco/Linksys), or you can build an Asterisk box or get a larger router that can handle the LARGE or HUGE (can't remember what it is called) DD-WRT with Asterisk built-in. Or build a 3CX (Windows PBX) box. That works well, too. And CallCentric is $.015 per minute (CHEAP) local/long-distance. And most of Europe is like .019 per minute. If you do this you will need to enable QoS on the DD-WRT router, PM me and I will help you with parameters that work great.

Or get the iPhone. I still use a BB, have considered the iPhone, but we have a very low corporate rate for the BB phones through the business, and the service has worked well. I haven't really needed much more. If I travelled more, though, I'd want an Android or iPhone. Probably the Android, as I wouldn't want to tether the iPhone to iTunes (I sort of hate that, I want my devices to stand a little more on their own two legs).

Oh, and finally, people bring me all sorts of things they'd like fixed. iPhones are very, very low on that list. A broken screen here and there. I don't do iPhones, but my anecdotal evidence would indicate they are pretty darn solid.

Matt Meiser
09-28-2011, 10:00 AM
Their femtocell (called Airave) actually works great. My parents' house has 1' thick brick walls that are a great signal blocker. Sprint gave them one and waves the service fee. But unfortunately we don't have real broadband available so it won't work for us. Sprint was supposed to look into whether they could supply me with a whole-house amplifier solution but I missed the call back from the guy and he didn't give me a way to get back to him and never called back. But it sounded, from the initial call, that he probably couldn't. I am considering ordering one from Amazon and giving it a try since I can return it if it doesn't work. The one I'm looking at costs about the same as one iPhone.

Charles Goodnight
09-28-2011, 10:18 AM
I have the current iphone, and love it. As far as apple reliability goes, I have an ipod that I finally quit using. I got it for my daughter about 10 years ago, at some point she upgraded and gave it to me, and it worked just fine. Eventually the battery died, and replacing the soldered in battery would have been more than the cost of replacement. I continued to use it on a dock attached to my stereo. The point is I kept promising myself a new ipod when this one died. It NEVER died. Finally the iphone gave me an excuse to get a new one. I got the iphone on the Verizon pre-order over a year ago. Other than having to replace the third party protective plastic case there has been no maintenance (I abused the iphone to the point that the old case more or less broke into little pieces to the point that no amount of superglue was going to save it.). As far as mac reliability goes, mostly I have been happy. The computer I am typing this on is more than 5 years old, and other than being slow, and not working with the latest OS seems to have no problems. My first mac, bought in 1989, lasted over 10 years, although it did get a motherboard upgrade during that time. I got rid of it when Apple finally quit supporting it and their major OS upgrade did not work on the old machine.

Ben Hatcher
09-28-2011, 10:32 AM
If you switch from Sprint to AT&T you have to get new phones. With Verizon, there's a chance you can keep using your current ones should you need to.

I have an iPhone 3G that is about 3 years old and still going. I've never kept it in a case or had a screen protector. I have dropped it many times, only once did I break the screen. Replacing it wasn't difficult and parts were about $7. My girlfriend's has taken even more of a beating and somehow still lives. Though, after it got dropped into the water though it still works, it is a more than a bit quirky now.

Matt Meiser
09-28-2011, 10:58 AM
Sounds like the iPhone is very modular with lots of replaceable parts? Not necessarily intended to be user-replaceable, but at least not glued and soldered together?

Ben, part of the deal is that my wife needs/wants a new phone because hers is so slow. And by slow I mean it can literally takes her 5 minutes to google a business's phone number and call it. First you wait for the browser to open, then wait for the keyboard to respond, then wait for the browser to respond to you touching a link. I used to get mad at her inability to use the thing until I tried to use hers one day.

Ben Hatcher
09-28-2011, 12:42 PM
Yes, the iPhone 3G and 3Gs at least are very easy to take apart and replace broken bits. Pretty much everything is in there with screws or tape and is connected via ribbon connectors. I don't recall any two boards being soldered together. As for your wife's phone being slow, what about resetting it to the original settings? That worked like a charm when my iPhone 3G became sluggish.

Matt Meiser
09-28-2011, 1:15 PM
She said its been that way since she got it--I never tried hers because I was fixated on the EVO at the store--and my brother has the same phone as her and the same complaint. In fact, I believe his comment was something to the effect of "I see you have the worlds slowest phone too!"

Larry Browning
09-28-2011, 2:05 PM
Well, I 'm going to be different than all the "i" whatever lovers. I will also say that I consider myself extremely cell phone challenged. I have been issued an iphone by my company and that is the only reason I have one. If I had my preference I would probably have one of those jitterbugs or something that is a phone and nothing else. It seems to me that a phone should be first and foremost a phone. Everything else should be an after thought. When in fact it just the opposite of that, the phone is the after thought. These things should be called itexter or imailer or isurfer. Just my 2 cents. I know this doesn't help answer your question, but I feel better now. :p
My wife has a Windows 7 phone and loves it! (I am pretty sure I wouldn't though) She gets very frustrated with how slow my iphone is. the iphone is slow at everything from surfing the web to simply bringing up the contact list. Her Windows phone is faster at everything.

Joel Goodman
09-28-2011, 3:07 PM
Get a case for any iPhone -- the screens can shatter if they are dropped. Happened to a co worker as well as my son. Otherwise seems pretty good.

Matt Meiser
09-28-2011, 11:10 PM
After a grueling 3 hours in Best Buy (why do I keep going back there????) the deed is done. We'd thought about waiting but 3 things drove us to do it today:

1) Best Buy is selling the iPhone 4 32GB, black only, for $250. white is $299, both are $299 everywhere else. Not sure why or how they are discounting it $50.
2) Best Buy will buy your old device on the spot and if you take BB gift cards they give you more than if you want a check. The check price was comparable to Gazelle but the gift card price was a good 20-30% more. And they do that part first so you can use the GCs toward the new device.
3) I called Sprint to ask the cost of terminating our contract. I got transferred to a support person, then a manager, They still have the 2 towers our phones use the most on the disabled list. They keep pushing out the repair date (probably because it rains every ____ day lately) so he offered to waive the termination fee on one line which saves us $90, but that flag on our account expires at teh end of the billing cycle which is Saturday. They had initially wanted to give us the Airave and give my wife a new phone to keep us, but the Airave is a non-starter.

iPhone is sitting on my desk syncing to iTunes right near where the Evo was drifting in and out of roam all day--almost full strength signal.

Also an FYI. I thought today to call our insurance company and found out that we can get loss, theft, and damage insurance on our phones through them at a much lower rate than the cell companies. The deductible is lower, and they tell me that a claim won't get factored into our homeowners insurance rates. And if we have a claim, basically we go buy a new device, give them the receipt, and they process a claim. No sending off the device and waiting 1-2 weeks. For warranty, we are going to get the Applecare plans.

Tim Morton
09-28-2011, 11:26 PM
After a grueling 3 hours in Best Buy (why do I keep going back there????) the deed is done. We'd thought about waiting but 3 things drove us to do it today:

1) Best Buy is selling the iPhone 4 32GB, black only, for $250. white is $299, both are $299 everywhere else. Not sure why or how they are discounting it $50.
2) Best Buy will buy your old device on the spot and if you take BB gift cards they give you more than if you want a check. The check price was comparable to Gazelle but the gift card price was a good 20-30% more. And they do that part first so you can use the GCs toward the new device.
3) I called Sprint to ask the cost of terminating our contract. I got transferred to a support person, then a manager, They still have the 2 towers our phones use the most on the disabled list. They keep pushing out the repair date (probably because it rains every ____ day lately) so he offered to waive the termination fee on one line which saves us $90, but that flag on our account expires at teh end of the billing cycle which is Saturday. They had initially wanted to give us the Airave and give my wife a new phone to keep us, but the Airave is a non-starter.

iPhone is sitting on my desk syncing to iTunes right near where the Evo was drifting in and out of roam all day--almost full strength signal.

Also an FYI. I thought today to call our insurance company and found out that we can get loss, theft, and damage insurance on our phones through them at a much lower rate than the cell companies. The deductible is lower, and they tell me that a claim won't get factored into our homeowners insurance rates. And if we have a claim, basically we go buy a new device, give them the receipt, and they process a claim. No sending off the device and waiting 1-2 weeks. For warranty, we are going to get the Applecare plans.

iphone 5 is being released on oct 4th...will not require sync to itunes...priceless!!

Matt Meiser
09-28-2011, 11:44 PM
Thats supposed to be a iOS 5 feature which from my understanding is going to be able to be loaded on existing devices.http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/features.HTML

That said I do fully expect there to be some killer new feature.

Steve knight
09-29-2011, 12:52 AM
iphone 5 is being released on oct 4th...will not require sync to itunes...priceless!!
no the announcement about it is coming out the fourth. well we can hope. but still it should be the new phone.

Steve knight
09-29-2011, 1:03 AM
the iphone is the only phone that has not had problems with sawdust causing problems. I have more phones get all wonky because of it.

Kevin W Johnson
09-30-2011, 12:52 AM
For me the most important thing is coverage, second is price, third is nice to have features like the voice/data at the same time thing. If we change to either Verizon we are going to have a good size increase in price, while losing services (nights and weekends start at 9 instead of 7, limited texts, limited broadband, mobile to mobile is VZW only instead of all mobile, etc) but gaining coverage. Best case coverage-wise ATT is a lateral move, maybe worse since my Sprint phone will roam to VZW at no cost to me if there's no Sprint available. The problem is that if there's a whiff of Sprint, it doesn't roam. We are considering offsetting some of the price by taking our landline number to VZW on either a Home Phone Connect or just to a cell phone and migrating that number to eventually be my daughter's cell phone number. We don't want to give up the number, but we are using it less and less.

International roaming isn't that important to me. I haven't even been to Canada in probably 8 years and its only about 20 miles away. If we do take a trip to Europe, we could look into renting a phone or buying a prepaid. That's something we'd like to do, but I don't see it happening in the next 2 years.

Yeah, the multitasking part is absolutely useless without a signal. Something AT&T lacks in my area, (and many others from what i've heard and read) even though the coverage map lists areas on my drive home from work as moderate. Really? The test phones i tried would not come close to keeping a signal.

I had nTelos until about two years ago. They started upgrading towers, a good thing, right? Nope, the signal strength dropped at my house. I got tired of having to set the phone in one spot on my desk to reduce the dropped calls, and it still wasn't 100%. Forget walking through the house with the phone in hand.

Kevin W Johnson
09-30-2011, 1:02 AM
After a grueling 3 hours in Best Buy (why do I keep going back there????) the deed is done. We'd thought about waiting but 3 things drove us to do it today:

1) Best Buy is selling the iPhone 4 32GB, black only, for $250. white is $299, both are $299 everywhere else. Not sure why or how they are discounting it $50.
2) Best Buy will buy your old device on the spot and if you take BB gift cards they give you more than if you want a check. The check price was comparable to Gazelle but the gift card price was a good 20-30% more. And they do that part first so you can use the GCs toward the new device.
3) I called Sprint to ask the cost of terminating our contract. I got transferred to a support person, then a manager, They still have the 2 towers our phones use the most on the disabled list. They keep pushing out the repair date (probably because it rains every ____ day lately) so he offered to waive the termination fee on one line which saves us $90, but that flag on our account expires at teh end of the billing cycle which is Saturday. They had initially wanted to give us the Airave and give my wife a new phone to keep us, but the Airave is a non-starter.

iPhone is sitting on my desk syncing to iTunes right near where the Evo was drifting in and out of roam all day--almost full strength signal.

Also an FYI. I thought today to call our insurance company and found out that we can get loss, theft, and damage insurance on our phones through them at a much lower rate than the cell companies. The deductible is lower, and they tell me that a claim won't get factored into our homeowners insurance rates. And if we have a claim, basically we go buy a new device, give them the receipt, and they process a claim. No sending off the device and waiting 1-2 weeks. For warranty, we are going to get the Applecare plans.

Did Apple ever fix the antenna grounding issue on the iPhone4?

Matt Meiser
09-30-2011, 7:51 AM
Are you talking about the "death grip" issue where you could cause the phone to lose signal? I read that's not an issue at all on the Verizon phone because its got a completely different antenna design for the CDMA network.

This thing is amazingly clear. I've noticed it and had one person even comment on it, and in that case I was using my BT headset.

We did run into one minor glitch--we happened to actually get our phones turned on with about 2.5 hours left in the billing cycle. While waiting for them to finish up a few things, I synced my email accounts, calendars, and contacts. That was apparently enough to use up that tiny fraction of data I had been allotted because we got texts today that I was over. A call to Verizon seems to have gotten that taken care of.

Kevin W Johnson
09-30-2011, 11:01 PM
Yeah, that was the issue. I hadn't heard that the Verizon phone had a different antenna design.

On a side note, i cannot for the life of me understand how the GSM versions went to market with such an issue. ANY sort of field testing should have revealed such an issue. Inexcusable, IMHO.

Glad you got the overage taken care of. Just watch your next bill to be sure. I had an issue years ago with Verizon, before getting mad and switching to nTelos. They billed me for calls i didnt make. I called them about, they looked it up, were able to tell it was a mistake, and said they'd take care of it. Next bill, still there, another call..... next bill, still there. I let charges balance forward for a YEAR, thinking eventually i'll get a call about it.... nope. I finally called them again, and they eventually got it fixed. Right before i dropped them.

Fast forward a few years and back to nTelos, we (my wife and I) had a go round with them again last year, in which they (unknown to us until we changed my wifes phone to the same phone i have and noticed the data charges were different) overbilled us by putting me on a global data plan for about 8 months. They told us, both the Verizon store, and calling the 800 number, that all they could refund was 3 months of that..... yeah, what ever! A letter to the FCC, SCC, and the BBB, lit quite a fire under their butts. My wife submitted those letters on Sunday night. Monday, we got a call that they would be crediting our bill for the full 8 months of overcharge.

The network, at least in our area, is really good. Where they need work is customer service (also took my wife nearly a full day of being passed around and being on hold to disconnect the land line at her house after we got married), plenty of people that could transfer service, or connect service, but must only be one person in the country that could initiate disconncting service that was nearly impossible to reach. Just know that you have to keep a good eye on things.... and you will likely at some time have a hair pulling session. :eek:

Bryan Morgan
09-30-2011, 11:51 PM
A few of our sales people have them... they don't like them as far as business use goes, but they are indeed durable. These people always drop them, leave them on their cars, etc. They've survived thus far... :)

Matt Meiser
10-01-2011, 11:15 AM
We've actually already been with Verizon almost a year with a data card plan since Sprint doesn't offer a comparable data card plan. I had some trouble at first because they didn't set up the account right and the card was receiving phone calls and texts. They were great about it.

Jim Rimmer
10-03-2011, 1:48 PM
I have an Iphone and several other managers here have them. They warned me to get some kind of protector cover for it so I got the OtterBox. I've dropped it twice and it survived with no problems. I was warned by other users that unprotected they are easy to break and not to carry them in your hip pocket as some of the younger folks do because you will crack the screen if you sit on it.

Derek Gilmer
10-03-2011, 2:29 PM
I have an Iphone and several other managers here have them. They warned me to get some kind of protector cover for it so I got the OtterBox. I've dropped it twice and it survived with no problems. I was warned by other users that unprotected they are easy to break and not to carry them in your hip pocket as some of the younger folks do because you will crack the screen if you sit on it.

I went with out a case or screen cover on my 3gs. It spends its entire life in my front pocket with keys and change. The back is scratched up but other than that it works great.

Eric Franklin
10-03-2011, 8:19 PM
I had the originally iPhone I which used for 2 years with a hard plastic case and didn't have any problems. I currently have an iPhone 4 without a case. I started using it just in my pocket but ended up using a just a belt clip to hold the phone. I got the phone when they came out a year ago June. Around Christmas the top button stopped working which Apple swapped out the phone for a refurb. I have never had a problem with broken glass. A lot of people that have iPhone 4's and have never seen either the front or back glass broken. They are more durable than they seem.

Enjoy your new phone.