Didn't have a great day coming back from Boston (reception wise). We stopped at a rest stop on the Connecticut Tpk and I noticed I only had 1X. Of course I grabbed my wife's IPhone and she had 3G. DAMN!
Not satisfied, I tried pulling up the same website and hers got it, though not particularly fast, and I got the dreaded "no connectivity" message. This was the first time the differences were that significant.
We sat down at a table closer to a window and she maintained her 3G while I was switching between 1X and 3G. At times my connection speed matched hers, but generally at this location the IPhone was faster with no data drops.
OTOH, while we were driving prior to arriving at the rest stop, my wife was streaming a local radio station on TuneIn Radio. She was dropping the stream fairly regularly and I kidded her that she had a bad phone. We tried the S3 and it didn't drop the stream as long as I was on the App. She thought it was just coincidence in that we may have hit a bad signal area while she was connected. To see if that was the case, we had both phones running the App and hers still dropped the stream while mine maintained it.
So what does all this prove? Again, it seem inescapable, comparing two phones is so location dependent even when it appears they're getting the same signal. It seems at one location phone A may do better than phone B and at another location the results might do a 180. Go figure. Multipath rejection? Possibly.