i almost got a Photon 4G as I'm tired of waiting for a dual core LTE phone on Verizon to replace my Droid , the Bionic will be released this week, Sept 8th 2011 - but the price is $299 , and i need to buy one for myself and my wife , that's $600.
The Photon is $99 at Best Buy and Radio Shack - nearly the same phone as the Bionic , the OMAP4430 on the Bionic slightly more advanced than the Tegra2 on the Photon, both have 1GB of RAM which should get thru Ice Cream Sandwich upgrades nicely.
So basically the phones are near the same where a huge difference is that the Photon is 1/3 the price of the Bionic.
The carrier differences - Sprint a bit less maybe $20 less per month total (counting the $10 premium smart phone fee) than a comparable VZW plan but in the NOLA area including N Shore, LTE is active where can't say the same for Sprint's Wimax (no matter that LTE is a bit faster, either are plenty fast enough).
Though I'd like LTE right now with the Bionic is it worth $600 for 2 phones and $20x12 = $240 more yearly in fees? (over 2 yrs that's an extra $480 in fees, plus $400 extra for 2 Bionics over 2 Photons - total of $880 more in 2 yrs for the phone and monthly fees for 2 years of the Bionic over the Photon)
I hope Sprint adds Wimax in NOLA (all over the metro area) soon but for $800 for two phones over 2 years i can live with the 3g speeds - just so Sprint's 3g is similar to what I get with my Droid on VZW - around 800 kbps avg down - which is fine for web browsing, email, etc, even streaming Netflix.
Anyway - hope to find a Photon in stock this week , forget the Bionic, wish i would have went to the Photon a few weeks ago - well at least it is $99 now.
If anyone can tell me that they get at least 700 kbps or so down with Sprint with an Evo , Evo 3D or even Photon - please let me know.
Switching to Sprint and living with 3g i can do, but if the 3g is really slow, I will then only regret leaving VZW and losing my unlimited data with them - but really the Sprint 3G speeds have to be decent right?