My trip to the Verizon store

[John Jason]

There are several Verizon stores here, but one of them is in an area (the airport) where 4G LTE has been enabled for some time. I called them to verify that they had 4G in their store, then I went there today (April 29) to check out the new Charge.

The sales dude told me the Charge was supposed to arrive yesterday, but they still had none in stock. The only 4G phone they had was the Thunderbolt.

I went there mainly just to check out how fast their 4G network really is, so I figured that playing with the Thunderbolt ought to tell me what I wanted to know. I quickly determined that it had Speedtest.net installed, so I ran a few tests. (The 4G icon in the panel was visible the whole time). I was impressed! I got between 11 and 14 Mbps down and 2 or 3 up. At the moment I have a 3G phone on T-Mobile and the best I can ever get is 2 Mbps down and .75 Mbps up. The Verizon 4G speed is great in comparison! And it made the Thunderbolt run really fast.

The Verizon airport store is in a small shopping center which also contains a Best Buy just a couple blocks from the Verizon store. After leaving the Verizon store I stopped at the Best Buy. They gave me the same story about the Charge not being available yet, but they let me play with a Thunderbolt. Using Speedtest.net I got roughly the same up and down speeds as I did at the Verizon store. 4G was always visible in the panel.

I am bummed now because I want to switch to Verizon for their great speed, but their phones suck. Sure, it may be the end of the year before the rest of the city gets LTE, but their LTE is worth waiting for. But if I have to put up with crappy phones to get it, maybe I should stick with T-Mobile.

 

[WA_Bob]

I'm not sure I'd call their phones "crappy", but it's all your own judgement. Regardless, their service is consistently good everywhere I've been for 3G and it's great in the Houston, TX area for 4G. If you can afford to wait, hold off on getting a new phone to let Verizon come out with phones more to your liking. It costs a bit more, but their service is more widespread and generally better than anyone else's.

 

[3devious]

The Charge has been delayed indefinitely last I heard. Why would you want a Charge and not the Thunderbolt? The Charge is a low end phone meant to appeal to the budget minded consumer that wants as smartphone (an oxymoron if there ever was one.)

 

[John Jason]

Why would you want a Charge and not the Thunderbolt? The Charge is a low end phone meant to appeal to the budget minded consumer that wants as smartphone (an oxymoron if there ever was one.)

I didn't say I wanted a Charge. I merely wanted to look at it. My main reason for going to the Verizon store at the airport was to check out the speed of their 4G LTE network, which has been enabled in that part of the city.

Now that I have determined that Verizon's 4G LTE speed is better than anything the other carriers are going to be able to offer, I want a Verizon account; even if I have to wait until the end of the year to get 4G LTE in the rest of the city.

The phone I really want is a Samsung Galaxy S II, and on Verizon. Or I might settle for the HTC Sensation. But neither is likely to make it to Verizon for a long time, if ever.

 

[yohobojo]

The Charge has been delayed indefinitely last I heard. Why would you want a Charge and not the Thunderbolt? The Charge is a low end phone meant to appeal to the budget minded consumer that wants as smartphone (an oxymoron if there ever was one.)

The Charge is $300. You do realize.

 

[ben7337]

The Charge has been delayed indefinitely last I heard. Why would you want a Charge and not the Thunderbolt? The Charge is a low end phone meant to appeal to the budget minded consumer that wants as smartphone (an oxymoron if there ever was one.)

How is it a low end phone?

It has a better screen than the thunderbolt
a faster gpu PowerVR 540 beats the Adreno 205
same cpu speeds/core architecture
It does have a tiny bit less ram, 512mb vs 768mb, but very very few phones have 768mb or 1gb, and the difference is currently negligible in smartphones, a proper android phone doesn't need anywhere near this much memory normally.
Similarly it comes with a 32gb microschd card or so I am told, so it is competitive with the htc on storage out of the box, and storage is super cheap and hardly useable for determining value of a phone

Overall the Charge is marginally better than the thunderbolt, and I imagine the $300 pricetag, while high, is due to the new super amoled plus screen mostly.

If you call the charge low end and budget minded, even sarcastically, then the exact same applies to the thunderbolt too. Though in all fairness I think they are both overpriced and mid range now.

 

[WA_Bob]

I can't call either phone "low"end myself, but you're right the differences are negligable between the Thunderbolt and the Charge. Honestly though, asking $300 for the Charge is kinda ridiculous. I'd be curious to look at it myself, but I wonder at their business model is that makes them think they'll sell many at that price.

 

[3devious]

Is that the subsidized price? I'm shocked that they would charge so much for it. Every little bit of memory helps (especially the way people write apps these days.) I thought that the Thunderbolt had more features than the Charge was reported to have. I thought it also had a smaller screen. It doesn'thave a keyboard so I stopped reading about it at that point.
Doesn't TMobile have some flavor of 4g? I know that VZW's is the fastest on paper right now, but I don't know anyone that's really been able to compare them (other than news clips here and there.)

If you can't get what you want, you may as well wait (unless you're speculating that the cost of 4g is going to go up like I did with this Xoom here.)

 

[John Jason]

Doesn't TMobile have some flavor of 4g? I know that VZW's is the fastest on paper right now, but I don't know anyone that's really been able to compare them (other than news clips here and there.)

That's why I went to the airport Verizon store. I published my results above. Very impressive.

I have also been in T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint stores where I tried out their best 4G phones. The best I ever got was a bit over 4 Mbps down and under 1 Mbps up. Those results are in their stores. And I tried several stores for each carrier.

That's why I say that no other carrier is going to beat Verizon at 4G, once Verizon finally gets it deployed. And I mean by a wide margin. AT&T and T-Mobile won't be able to come close until and if the merger goes through because neither has the spectrum. And Sprint is going to have to convert from Wimax to LTE to match Verizon, and they don't have the cash to do so. By the end of this year Verizon is going to be the data king, and will likely retain the position for several years.

Now if they could just get some cool phones.

 

[kyler13]

It does have a tiny bit less ram, 512mb vs 768mb, but very very few phones have 768mb or 1gb, and the difference is currently negligible in smartphones, a proper android phone doesn't need anywhere near this much memory normally.

Tiny bit? You realize 768 is 50% more than 512, right? I'll tell you what... I'll sell you a Droid Charge now for $450 on contract.

Doesn't TMobile have some flavor of 4g? I know that VZW's is the fastest on paper right now, but I don't know anyone that's really been able to compare them (other than news clips here and there.)

Meh. HSPA+ is a pretty fast and easy way to get higher data rates to a consumer, but the standard wasn't designed for sustained rates at capacity over most of the cell area, especially if you're moving, like in a car. It works for T-Mobile's small subscriber base, but it remains to be seen what will happen when more and more phones on AT&T's network get HSPA+. Backhaul is yet another issue which Verizon planned for well ahead of time. Their LTE network is fiber connected. At CES, AT&T admittedly coughed up the fact that they don't have the backhaul and probably won't until late in the year to support HSPA+, let alone LTE, over the majority of their metropolitan footprint.

 

[ben7337]

Tiny bit? You realize 768 is 50% more than 512, right? I'll tell you what... I'll sell you a Droid Charge now for $450 on contract.

I never said that I wanted a droid charge, and I admitted it was overpriced, so most of what you said is just a mindless attack, but as for memory, my parents windows xp desktop came with 256mb of ram, if an old desktop OS that is way way bigger than the android OS can use 26mb of ram, and 512 is more than enough for android, most android phones should have 300+ mb free most of the time, then what advantage does 768mb hold over 512mb? What actual functionality will you be using where the droid charge won't be able to do something but the thunderbolt will just because of the memory. Where is the loss of quality in user experience. please do show me.

 

[kyler13]

I never said that I wanted a droid charge, and I admitted it was overpriced, so most of what you said is just a mindless attack, but as for memory, my parents windows xp desktop came with 256mb of ram, if an old desktop OS that is way way bigger than the android OS can use 26mb of ram, and 512 is more than enough for android, most android phones should have 300+ mb free most of the time, then what advantage does 768mb hold over 512mb? What actual functionality will you be using where the droid charge won't be able to do something but the thunderbolt will just because of the memory. Where is the loss of quality in user experience. please do show me.

I was making a point about the significance of 50%. It's not a mindless attack, it was an intelligent response to a ridiculous claim that 50% increase is a little bit. I don't care if you want a Droid Charge, you'd probably be upset if someone tried to charge you $450 for a $300 phone.

Don't waste anyone's time trying to compare memory management on an x86 platform with Android OS. Your memory analogy isn't valid. Do a little research into how Linux-based Android manages applications in memory and get back to me on whether or not you think the increase will benefit user experience.

 

[jikhead]

FYI, when I went to go check out the thunderbolt in ft worth, tx...I saw double the download and 1.5x the upload speeds you reported.