Agreed. The smart thing to do is choose a carrier that has good coverage where you are, and has the best plans. Sprint clearly has the best plans
Obviously more than one factor has to be taken into account. But all four major carriers have, at least, good coverage where I live. Sprint's is far from the best, but it's usually acceptable. Around here, it's a trade-off. Verizon has better coverage, but costs more, so pick your poison.
If each carrier has one point in their favor, verizon on better coverage and sprint on better pricing, it's not unreasonable to use the hardware as the tie-breaker.
AT&T is out. And, I don't know about T-mo. I'm going to have to look into their coverage in the area. I can't think of anyone that I know with the service around here. I do know that they claim to already have their "4g" network up and running in my city.
lol. The EVO, Epic and EVO shift are far from behind the curve.
They're all pretty good phones. I could certainly live with the EVO. However, I'm done with Samsung after the fiasco that was the Moment, and now their tardiness in upgrading to 2.2. Plus, I've still seen issues with their GPS receiver, and I use that quite a bit. And the smallish screen on the shift (not to mention, lack of anything really new or innovative on it) makes me less than enthusiastic about it.
The only issue I have with the EVO is, again, it's six months old. The shelf life on phones these days is remarkably short and I'm a little skittish about paying for something like that. The processor is already a generation behind. Plus, who knows how long they'll support it. Are they going to come out with another beast of a phone in June and completely stop updating the software on the EVO?
When I bought my moment, it was one of the two best android phones that sprint offered. However, it was already 3-1/2 months old and very quickly left behind by better phones. Support stopped entirely 6 months into my ownership. Granted, the EVO is way better, even for its time, than the moment ever was, and there's no way my experience would be as miserable with it. That being said, there seems to be better options out there. Heck, the mytouch 4g on T-mo is less than half the price of the evo, and as I understand it, already a slightly superior phone.