Hey everyone,
Some of you might know me. I generally hang out in the root section of this forum. I've come to say goodbye. You see, I really like the EVO. It's a solid phone with a great screen and has a great community of people behind it.
But it has these finicky LTE radios.
I'm lucky enough to be in a city where LTE is being rolled out. I flipped my lid when I woke up a few weeks ago to find that LTE had been turned on where I live. I literally ran around my neighborhood using Sensorly to map the LTE coverage. The speeds are unreal.
The thing was, I noticed that the EVO had trouble connecting to LTE sometimes. Other times it would connect, then immediately drop back to 3G. I chalked it up to the network being new and not officially live in my city and moved on. But then I started talking to other EVO owners on XDA and S4GRU, and realized that the EVO had some very finicky LTE radios. S4GRU even wrote an article about it.
I decided to be bold. I bought a Galaxy Note 2 off contract to compare the reception of the two phones. I figured, if I didn't see any appreciable differences, I could return it. I'd be out $35 for the restocking fee, but that's the price you pay for diligence.
Going around town, the first thing I noticed was that the Note was picking up LTE signals in places that I thought had no LTE coverage at all. They weren't always very strong, but they were present, and the Note was finding them where the EVO wasn't, even if I toggled airplane mode on and off to trigger a radio search. The speed tests shocked me, because not only was the Note finding more LTE signals than the EVO, but it was consistently getting faster downloads. Uploads seemed about the same on both, sometimes slightly higher on the EVO. 3G speeds were comparable between the two.
What really did it in for me is that I took the phones into work. I work in an IMAX booth, so I'm basically in a big thick box that's difficult for cell signals to penetrate. I can make calls easily enough, but data has always been tough. And although I knew the area around my work had active LTE, I had never seen more than a fleeting glimpse of the LTE logo on my EVO when in the booth. I even did the trick where you force the phone into LTE only mode, and it did pick up an LTE signal, but it was so weak that it was slower than 3G. I figured that once again the box I work in had prevented me from getting the good data speeds I wanted.
Imagine my surprise when I saw that the Note got mild but solid LTE coverage in the booth. I pulled over 3 mbps down, which is actually great considering the above factors and that Sprint is still doing work on the network. My EVO, by contrast, had 3G only and pulled down less than 1 mbps.
This was enough for me to consider keeping the Note and reselling the EVO. With that in mind, I started figuring out everything the Note can do. Well, let me tell you, I fell in love with this phone overnight. After having a Nexus 4G, I was not a fan of Samsung, but the SIII and the Note II are different beasts entirely. Samsung has really upped their game in every possible area. The way TouchWiz has been implemented on the Note is really impressive, and I never thought I'd say that about boring old TouchWiz. But the Note is a really spectacular phone.
In the end, I decided to keep the Note. I will be reselling my EVO to recoup some of the cost. But at this point, I'm happy as a clam. I am, however, sad to leave the EVO and all you great people. I want to thank EarlyMon for being the most active and helpful mod I've ever seen (and I moderate a forum on another site, so I know how hard it could be). You're all great people and the passion you have for your phone is second to none. Thanks for letting me be a part of it. I'll still be around, but over at the Note 2 forum.
tl;dr: Found out Note 2 has better LTE coverage, so I'm switching phones.
