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Root suggestions post-Victory, new VM rootable handset please?

tarvoke

tarvoke

Member
in the somewhat-near future, I can see my goghvmu/670 nearing the similar point in the past, where I simply had to give up my beloved LG Optimus V (and along with that, my $25/mo grandfather-plan lololol)

I've more or less kept the stock VM OS (since it's surprisingly decent, modulo-bloat), aside from rooting and keeping mostly up-to-date with the modem/radio updates. and, of course, titanium-freezing the heck out of about 200+ useless apks.

I'd simply like to hear any recommendations on what the (preferably-rootable) next iteration might be. I've naturally already been doing some research on the limited offerings from VM, but would love/appreciate some personal opinions and stories.

I don't need the absolute newest-fastest thing. and no way am I buying a USD500 machine. but 200 is reasonable. not really looking to change carriers - as much as I would prefer GSM to vm/sprint's CDMA, I have had so very few complaints* with VM in the last 10 years, and the 4G service has gone from negligible to phenomenal (and this from someone who lives on a remote/rural island in the Atlantic)

I really like LG and Samsung, but totally would not mind trying other brands.

I feel like I have at least another comfortable year out of this Victory, but the time will eventually come, sad to say. (then the poor thing will go into my growing pile of firetv-remotes/smartglass-remotes/kindle-readers/BT-home-automation-remotes etc. :( )

thank you!!!

*one absolute horror-story, but that was sort of mostly my fault for buying cut-price top-ups on fleabay.
 
Honestly, after the victory I went to the s3. It's great and you can get them cheap on eBay. There is tons of development. Lollipop roms a-plenty. And ppl are building marshmallow for it. Stock is even really decent (especially compared to the victory). Rooting is a breeze with odin.
It's the best thing vm has under $200.
If you plan on a custom rom try not to get the triband s3 , sph-L710t. Try to get sph-L710 (no "t" at the end. )
If you plan on staying stock rooted then the triband is fine. But there is only 1 custom rom for it. You can use a few other roms but there are some special steps. Triband means it uses sprints spark network (all three lte bands at once) so its a good device.
Good luck!
 
a hearty thank you to one of our most respected members :D

wow, the s3 specs still kick the ass out of most anything at that price! plus amoled is sweet and seems still not very common.

a little leery of buying used and doesn't seem to be any new ones (or if I do find some, the price will be crazy I'm sure) - oh wait, ebay 710 (presumably non-t, or at least it doesn't mention triband) for $244 NEW-in-unopened-box. seller rating 99.1% (altho we know that is often near-meaningless on fleabay lol) that's not bad at all.

(I'm just anti-used 'cos mostly I worry about abused/damaged charge ports and audio jacks and power buttons, bad ESNs, whether the UICC is included (a lot of the used ones say "not included" - but even more used-listings simply don't say :( ) )

I had mainly been looking at the moto-g, the stylo, and the desire (I know there are 7 million versions of desire - VM-webstore carries the 626s, spamazon has the VM 816... didn't really check out differences.)

but, hmmmmmm, that S3 is looking pretty good right now. 2100mah battery vs newer-ish phones coming with less-anemic 3000, but that's about the only negative I can see.

thanks, brother!

now I have some proper head-scratching to do. plus I'll probably wait and see what pops pre/post Thanksgiving. (the ebay dude has "25 sold, more than 10 available" so hopefully won't sell out by then and have me kicking myself lol)
 
(I even called my local rat-shack this afternoon to see what they had in stock... unsurprisingly mostly the same as VM webstore, plus a couple that VM no longer sells directly. but sadly no mention of S3...)

oh. dear. lord...
wally-world has them NIB for 199, claiming "free store pickup TODAY" ... dare I even? oh, wait, it is some "data done right" version which apparently is not simply some branding gimmick but a recent partnership between VMU and WW and requires an entirely different type of account. Danger! Super-Run-Away!

I emailed the NIB ebay seller asking if it was the normal/good kind of 710, or the wally-world version. I will report back...
 
sorry to ramble on... actually it almost doesn't sound bad, basically like a family plan for VM prepaid. and if you get the multi-line, you get legit wifi hotspot (well, we all know how to make wifi hotspot work on most VM/sprint phones w/regular plans anyway, but...) - and now you can get 30/mo / 40/mo single-line plans too, although don't seem quite as good as our good ol' 35/mo benefits.

I'm still just somehow creeped out and paranoid about the walmart association. (like, I've already seen postings from earlier all this year saying walmart has already tried to disassociate themselves from the program (or maybe a lot of the stores are simply ignorant/uninformed of it), and refuse to support/service problems, refuse to accept returns/refunds, etc. etc. etc.)

plus (and I don't even care about keeping my current #, since I only ever give ppl my GV#) I just worry Weird Bad Things will happen if I stop my current plan and start one of those DDR plans.

http://www.virginmobileusa.com/datashare/
 
The data done right one is the triband. But like I said, if you plan to stay stock, no biggie. I haven't really researched the data done right plan, but I don't think you keep you number if you do it.
I got a couple s3's on eBay new for like $180. But I haven't looked in a while. Another thing I liked is that it has 16 GB of storage. Nothing on vm's lineup has that for the price.
 
huh, interesting about the DDR / triband thing. I kinda-sorta-figured it might be still hackable, but didn't want to trust some WW-alliance. and didn't realize until you just mentioned now that was what the -t thing was about.

I ended up ordering the vanilla S3 from the ebay guy. price a bit high, but, fine, ok. again, just from the kickass specs and your solid recommendation. thank you. hopefully here sometime next week.

I don't understand owning a white-colored phone (just makes me think AAPL) but I can deal given the super-nice specs.

(this gets sort of hard to 'asplain. I sort of work for the USN/DoD and a year ago our new (now-defunct) CEO, berated/cursed my friend - a network tech - for 45 minutes, simply because the VoIP desk phones we were shipping only came in white at the time. yeah like it was her fault what color our gear comes in. luckily my friend is an ex-marine and while she didn't take the issue to HR (how can you when it's the frggn CEO) she was not traumatized by it either.

//sorry-derail.

yeah the 16g storage is still (surprisingly) unusual. and the 2g RAM vs 1, can't hurt. also I think this is the 2x 1.5ghz krait rather than 4x cortex, or at least as far as I can tell. but we'll see.

what will be more interesting is - my wife, do I wipe the goghvmu and give her that, or simply get her one more S3? (long story short, she had went for the kyocera pop-out kbd a la old-school sidekick, not for the price but 'cos she thought it was hilarious-retro. now she is sort of regretting that decision.)
 
Funny, my wife came from the kyocera rise (slide out keyboard).
Only downside on s3 is it has KitKat and is done being updated. But custom roms are going to the 6.0 realm so there's that.
Actually that was an interesting little story, when you throw in things like usn/dod. Lol

But yes the phone only has a 1.5 ghz dual core, but it does have 2 GB RAM so... Mine handles things fine.
Easy root, odin flash twrp, then twrp flash SuperSU. Easy peasy. I can get you links if you want.

Also it's not just the ddr ones that are triband. Boost and vm started sending those out because its technically the refresh version. Triband was all they had for a while. There are regular vm tribands out there too. They are just rom limited. They root just as easy, just when ppl flashed roms on them they lost data connectivity and rotation was reversed. Most found ways around it. There are whole threads dedicated to it in the s3 section.
 
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Oh yeah, forgot to mention, you can get lifeproof cases on amazon for like $25. Also extended batteries, or wireless charging adapters. Lots of stuff for this aging little phone. During its launch it was THE phone. So accessories are plenty.
 
Madbat said:
I got a couple s3's on eBay new for like $180. But I haven't looked in a while. Another thing I liked is that it has 16 GB of storage. Nothing on vm's lineup has that for the price.
Click to expand...

sweet price! I probably paid a little too much but I feel like it will have been worth it. except the stupid thing still doesn't arrive until Friday lol.

Madbat said:
Easy root, odin flash twrp, then twrp flash SuperSU. Easy peasy. I can get you links if you want.
Click to expand...

thanks, brother. but no worries. I have cursed at having to use odin before (actually I think last time I was using heimdall?) - it's been literally years-since, I think. but I can probably manage again :)

regardless of all of the above, thank you again for the recommendation. feeling pretty happy about the choice.
 
actually arrived today, nice.

haven't tried root yet, it is still doing 17 million updates.

but damn it is slim and gorgeous screen. I did buy another for my wife. this thing is amazing esp for being like 2 generations back.
 
tarvoke said:
actually arrived today, nice.

haven't tried root yet, it is still doing 17 million updates.

but damn it is slim and gorgeous screen. I did buy another for my wife. this thing is amazing esp for being like 2 generations back.
Click to expand...
That was my impression as well upon opening it. It easily keeps up with today's mid range devices. Not a flagship of course (although it was THE flagship at launch). In my opinion pretty much the best bang for buck on vm's lineup. Just an opinion of course, others may disagree. I'll think you'll be satisfied.
 
Madbat said:
That was my impression as well upon opening it. It easily keeps up with today's mid range devices. Not a flagship of course (although it was THE flagship at launch). In my opinion pretty much the best bang for buck on vm's lineup. Just an opinion of course, others may disagree. I'll think you'll be satisfied.
Click to expand...

the moto-g and stylo still look halfway decent on paper, esp. at the lower prices. but I am so glad I went this direction instead. (as mentioned, I already ordered another for my wife lol)

wrong-forum:

I tried to root the lazy way, but towelroot just froze/hung (like, no error message, no message of any kind, button simply turned orange and stayed orange - it didn't even reboot like it says it will on failure.) - I didn't bother trying to type in codes manually, given that there was no error/reboot.
((too bad, since I read most people saying towelroot does not trigger KNOX. not that I care too much, but that still would have been nice))

then tried heimdall in linux, but it would not cooperate at all. (just refused to see the phone, even though I manually created the udev rule, restarted udev, even rebooted.) - but for whatever reason unknown, NOW it can see the phone, hahaha.

ended up giving up into windows and grabbing ODIN.

tried the latest twrp-2.8.7.0-d2spr-virgin-boost, but bad luck - it would give the small blue text at upper left corner, but then black screen (and not just b/c e.g. missing video driver objects - it actually shut off the phone, I know because I tried contacting the phone at that point.)

ended up with the latest (outdated, I know) philz - philz-d2lte gave the same odd behavior as twrp, but philz-d2spr works just fine.

then SU .zip from inside recovery. of course only shortly after that did I find chainfire's autoroot packages for ODIN lol. guess I should have just asked you for links :D

may go (back) to TWRP eventually, with flashify or from inside philz - since twrp is what I've been using since forever. but I plan on keeping stock ROM for now, not doing much aside from the occasional nandroid backup, so not to worried what recovery I have as long as I have a working one. maybe if later I want lollipop (which I have been truly enjoying on various Amazon devices - they haven't had time to bloatify it yet, so their versions are much closer to AOSP... for now. and I like that.)

super-wrong-forum:

also picked up the lifeproof case and THAT THING IS NUTS. took me so many tries to get it 100% closed - either I accidentally-figured-it-out, or maybe it stretched just slightly enough after all those tries.

and then, of course, having to remove it (ALSO NOT EASY! ha) and later struggle to attach it all over again, due to having to pull the battery after each ODIN attempt lol.

I worry a little, about how slightly the data/charge port isn't perfectly aligned in the bottom - the thickness of the plastic of the usb cable seems like it might be putting small stress on the phone's microUSB due to slight angular pressure from the case. seems like poor design on nuud's part. ah well.
 
I notice the port stress on the lifeproof as well. Hasn't been a problem yet. Twrp should have worked, you can use the official d2spr version from their website. Flashify installs it fine, but I usually grab the img file from their site myself since flashify is kind of hit and miss finding the latest. (Longest run on sentence ever)
Any files you get, make sure d2spr, not d2lte. Just because d2lte files will be very outdated. They used to be unified as d2lte (all u.s. s3's) but they aren't any more. So the most recent builds of anything really will be d2spr. Welcome to the s3 club!
 
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