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Should I get the F3?

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dishe

Well-Known Member
I had a Galaxy Victory before this that recently got run over by a car. My neighbor lent me his old EVO LTE to use in the mean time, which is a much nicer phone than the Victory was (what do you expect? Flagship device), but I don't really care for the size of it. I kind of miss my little 4" Victory, which was more-or-less a Galaxy S3 Mini. He offered to sell me the EVO if I liked it enough to keep it, but I think once I'm spending money I want something a little more recent.

I started looking for an S4 mini on ebay as a replacement, but the prices are still kind of steep on that model. Also, its still a bit bigger than the 4" phones I'm used to and am comfortable with in my hand. Enter the LG F3. I like the size of this device, but I'm concerned that it may not be a relevant enough device to have a user community supporting it anymore (one of the things I really disliked about the Victory was that the users jumped ship and moved on pretty quickly, leaving the community somewhat of a skeleton).

I see there are ROMs here and people are still posting about it- would you guys recommend this phone to someone like me at this point in time? Or should I move on and keep looking?
 
Keep looking for now. The roms you're talking about are a customized stock rom and an alpha CyanogenMod port. I'd try something else with an unlocked boot loader and several active and post alpha roms with all hardware working.
 
iWindoze said:
Keep looking for now. The roms you're talking about are a customized stock rom and an alpha CyanogenMod port. I'd try something else with an unlocked boot loader and several active and post alpha roms with all hardware working.
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What would you suggest that is similar to this, then?

I don't need crazy customization or AOSP ROMs, the Victory didn't have that either. Those days are behind me. I just want to know that I can have something stable and remove bloatware. Perhaps overclock, etc, although I'm not even sure I'd need that (seems speedy out of the box). A cleaned up stock ROM is more than enough for me!
The Victory would, for example, get a firmware update rolled out, and the ROM community's solution would be to hide the update notification, rather than build a new ROM based around the update. There were bugs that never got worked out (volume would get stuck or suddenly get maxxed out), files for rooting with broken links (because the host had deleted them long ago due to inactivity)... I just want a device that was popular enough to be alive still.
 
dishe said:
What would you suggest that is similar to this, then?

I don't need crazy customization or AOSP ROMs, the Victory didn't have that either. Those days are behind me. I just want to know that I can have something stable and remove bloatware. Perhaps overclock, etc, although I'm not even sure I'd need that (seems speedy out of the box). A cleaned up stock ROM is more than enough for me!
The Victory would, for example, get a firmware update rolled out, and the ROM community's solution would be to hide the update notification, rather than build a new ROM based around the update. There were bugs that never got worked out (volume would get stuck or suddenly get maxxed out), files for rooting with broken links (because the host had deleted them long ago due to inactivity)... I just want a device that was popular enough to be alive still.
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There is a workin cm 11 for the sprint vm version of the f three
 
roadkill42 said:
There is a workin cm 11 for the sprint vm version of the f three
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Ok, CM is always good to hear- 100% hardware working?
But I'm less concerned with which actual ROMs are available, and more concerned with weather or not I should bother going down this road, or look into something else if this is already on its way out. And if so... what?
 
dishe said:
Ok, CM is always good to hear- 100% hardware working?
But I'm less concerned with which actual ROMs are available, and more concerned with weather or not I should bother going down this road, or look into something else if this is already on its way out. And if so... what?
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There is more ROMs coming be patient exclusive 36 and phenomx4 working on this phone there both good at what they do I think cm 12 b coming to just rummor though if u get am zte awe there is a lot going on with it. That's my daily driver my f3 is my toy lol
 
I should probably add that I'm on Sprint, so not everything that's available to you guys is available to me. I don't get subsidized handsets, however, since I'm on a Framily plan. I pay for handsets outright, usually via ebay.
 
dishe said:
I should probably add that I'm on Sprint, so not everything that's available to you guys is available to me. I don't get subsidized handsets, however, since I'm on a Framily plan. I pay for handsets outright, usually via ebay.
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The Tribute is also available on Sprint prepaid and contract plans.
 
daffyducknj said:
The Tribute is also available on Sprint prepaid and contract plans.
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I actually don't see the Tribute for sale on contract plans- seems only Sprint Pre-Paid.

Anyway, I honestly think I like the F3 better- smaller screen and seems cheaper used since it has been around a bit longer. I also like the hardware button for home with the LED notifications.

Right now I'm using the LTE EVO (HTC One X), and I really, really, REALLY don't care for it. Too big, capacitive home button always gets pressed by accident when typing spacebar in portrait... the only thing I like about it is that it has enough memory that I don't need to muck about with Apps2SD, otherwise I think I'd rather have something like the F3 than this any day of the week.

What does the Tribute have that this doesn't? A Quad-core CPU? That's nice, but my wife's LG Mach shares the same dual-core CPU as the F3 and doesn't seem slow at all to me. The Tribute seems more like something in between the F3 and LTEVO, trying to appeal to those that wanted the features "premium phones" usually have (mainly, a larger display) but without the one thing I like about the flagship HTC I currently have... more than 4GB of internal storage. Once I'm already dealing with that, seems like the F3 is a no brainer better deal.

At least, that's the conclusion I've drawn at this point. Anyone want to shed some light on something I'm missing?
 
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