My review of SPRINT? Terrible! (S3 related)

[steveu694]

Why doesn't the OP go in & edit the title ?

Edit what? It's MY take on a review based on this phone with the shitiest carrier out there right now. Sprint sucks, not the phone. It was a review on the GS3 on Sprint. Read the title again....

 

[Trent Reznor]

Edit what? It's MY take on a review based on this phone with the shitiest carrier out there right now. Sprint sucks, not the phone. It was a review on the GS3 on Sprint. Read the title again....

I don't think Treb was/is knocking your review Your title comments "review of the S3 for Sprint"..... a better revision would be "review of the S3 on Sprint". One implies it is an S3 issue... the other that it is a sprint issue Your review clearly indicates you are knocking Sprint... not the S3.

 

[pastafarian]

This thread has moved to the Sprint section and had a small title adjustment. Carry on!

 

[treb1797]

I don't think Treb was/is knocking your review Your title comments "review of the S3 for Sprint"..... a better revision would be "review of the S3 on Sprint". One implies it is an S3 issue... the other that it is a sprint issue Your review clearly indicates you are knocking Sprint... not the S3.

Exactly. Don't knock the phone when it's the network.

 

[boomerbubba]

Yeah, test out Sprints terrible service and then call me a liar. I paid $350 to leave them. That's how terrible it was. It's unusable. See for yourself..... Buddy

I intend to test Sprint's new LTE service. I will test it in an area (Waco) that is built out pretty completely for LTE, unlike Houston. I will use the new OTA update, designed to mitigate the temporary thin coverage problems you have experienced. I will continue to study the only site on the Internet (S4GRU) that is dedicated to tracking Sprint's network rollout and is publishing knowledgeable articles about the network, rather than emotional end-user rants in general GS3 forums. And I will also give credence to all the positive reports (mixed with the negative like yours) that I have read about Sprint LTE performance, with the objective of understanding what the specific problems, solutions and future plans are and why. And I will make a rational decision about the purchase within my 14-day trial cycle.

 

[Mr. Ed]

Sprints roll out of LTE is going no differently than ATTs did less than 2 years ago.

This tower was just turned on in my area this week

And for the record....my super awesome galaxy note on ATT
Connected to LTE even

I can't wait to see what happens when Network Vision is complete.

 

[bearballz]

Man I'm so jealous! Can't wait until they light up LTE in Chi-town!

 

[SUroot]

I know, but don't you guys have something just as fast? Called "H"?

Hsdpa is 3.5g

 

[tenceriker]

Reading threads like these is always fun. So much emotion over a peice of metal. Sure, I have my SGS3 on Verizon but before that and for a while I was rocking the SGS2 on Sprint's 4GWimax which was destorying my D3 on Verizon in pretty much every catergory. Like many users have stated you need to check what the coverage is like in your area before you buy anything cell/wireless related. Also, it helps to have multiple phones if you can because the snapshots of "x carrier" is better than "carrier y" are mostly opinions and trolling. Sorryb the OP had a bad experience but for Sprint to not get the SGS3 would have been carrier suicide. Sometimes you have to work with what you have which is what Sprint is doing. Hell, I remember the complaing last year with Verizon and now those same people who jumped ship to ATT are complaining they can't get 4GLTE coast to coast yet.

 

[Metfanant]

At&t was clocked at doing avg of 30 mbps. That's 10x as fast and the bill is $35 more a month. Verizon did 15mbps.

Speeds on 4G vary so much its incredible...you shouldn't put much stock in what others are seeing

 

[ravenas]

Good point. I'm just not gonna wait a year and not be able to use this awesome phone....

IMHO, you should have gone to T-Mobile first then. Your awesome speeds on your awesome phone are going to cost you an awesome amount of money in data overage fees as you blow through your cap in a week.

Sprint's getting a helluva lot of flack right now because they are in transition. Despite that, they are holding to their commitment of unlimited data and offering the best phones on the market at competitive prices. That's why stock analysts are giving them promising marks. Meanwhile Verizon & AT&T just head closer and closer toward their duopoly which suppresses the US cellular market and costs consumers a small fortune. It'll be interesting to revisit this topic in a year's time.

FWIW I gave up my Wimax S2 to my sister in exchange for an S3 and slightly lower monthly bill (went from individual to shared family plan with us splitting the cost). LTE is not due to be switched on in my market until the Fall. I mostly use WiFi and have an awesome cable broadband service to rely on. For a backup I picked up an unlocked GSM Nexus phone and am running that on T-Mobile's cheap $30/mo prepaid special (100 voice minutes/unlimited data & text).

 

[bearballz]

I may jump on that T-mobile deal as well if the LTE build out here in Chicago runs overscheule.

 

[steveu694]

IMHO, you should have gone to T-Mobile first then. Your awesome speeds on your awesome phone are going to cost you an awesome amount of money in data overage fees as you blow through your cap in a week.

Sprint's getting a helluva lot of flack right now because they are in transition. Despite that, they are holding to their commitment of unlimited data and offering the best phones on the market at competitive prices. That's why stock analysts are giving them promising marks. Meanwhile Verizon & AT&T just head closer and closer toward their duopoly which suppresses the US cellular market and costs consumers a small fortune. It'll be interesting to revisit this topic in a year's time.

FWIW I gave up my Wimax S2 to my sister in exchange for an S3 and slightly lower monthly bill (went from individual to shared family plan with us splitting the cost). LTE is not due to be switched on in my market until the Fall. I mostly use WiFi and have an awesome cable broadband service to rely on. For a backup I picked up an unlocked GSM Nexus phone and am running that on T-Mobile's cheap $30/mo prepaid special (100 voice minutes/unlimited data & text).

Tmobile? No thanks, they are never gonna have LTE. As for my plan, I get 3 gigs a month. That means I would have to burn through 100 megs a day to reach that cap. Not gonna happen. I use wifi at home.... Even if I didn't I still wouldn't use 3 gigs a month. Tmobile is a backyard operation. It's equivalent to the walmart generics when it comes to phones and service.

 

[n0ve]

Sprint is undergoing major changes, yes they've said this for years but the IDEN network is finally down, leaving more towers/resources for CDMA and LTE...The lack of throttling is great, yes coverage is spotty but overall I'm pleased. I used to be an authorized sprint dealer back before they bought nextel, now they REALLY sucked back then, compared to today, they are much much better...and actually improving steadily..

 

[ravenas]

Tmobile? No thanks, they are never gonna have LTE. As for my plan, I get 3 gigs a month. That means I would have to burn through 100 megs a day to reach that cap. Not gonna happen. I use wifi at home.... Even if I didn't I still wouldn't use 3 gigs a month. Tmobile is a backyard operation. It's equivalent to the walmart generics when it comes to phones and service.

When I had a Wimax phone I easily blew through 500mb a day just streaming video. It felt good knowing I could do so and not worry about metering my use to avoid a big scary bill at the end of the month.

As for T-Mobile having crappy phones, you don't have to buy their phones. That's precisely why I picked up the Galaxy Nexus. It feels liberating having an unlocked GSM phone. I know I can swap out the SIM card and use it for international service. Plus since I got the phone from Google I don't have any carrier bloatware and get OS updates from Google. I got Jellybean a few days after it was announced. My gleaming new Galaxy S3 from Sprint is still stuck with Ice Cream Sandwich. (I do not like to root and custom rom.)

In future I'll either buy unlocked phones from Google or look to the ebay/resale market.

Now from what I'm hearing on the network rollout front, Sprint is turning LTE on in my area next week. Including two towers at my beach place. I'll be stoked if I start getting 20-25mbps speeds at the beach. That'll be faster than my crappy Verizon DSL there.

 

[boomerbubba]

I intend to test Sprint's new LTE service. I will test it in an area (Waco) that is built out pretty completely for LTE, unlike Houston. I will use the new OTA update, designed to mitigate the temporary thin coverage problems you have experienced. I will continue to study the only site on the Internet (S4GRU) that is dedicated to tracking Sprint's network rollout and is publishing knowledgeable articles about the network, rather than emotional end-user rants in general GS3 forums. And I will also give credence to all the positive reports (mixed with the negative like yours) that I have read about Sprint LTE performance, with the objective of understanding what the specific problems, solutions and future plans are and why. And I will make a rational decision about the purchase within my 14-day trial cycle.

Just to follow up. I did apply the LG8 update to my Galaxy S III and spent half a day yesterday testing in Waco. It should be pretty representative of what the fully built out Sprint LTE network is like because Waco was deliberately built out as a Field Implementation Test area by Ericsson, the Sprint contractor there.

Overall, the results were very positive. I had 4G service almost everywhere I drove around the city and surrounding countryside. There were exceptions, mostly in rural areas outside of major highways, and in some downtown locations blocked by relatively large buildings. But I did try inside one building about four blocks from a Sprint LTE tower, and got snappy data performance.

So the LTE map on sprint.com is overly optimistic because it shows blanket coverage everywhere. But overall, my results were quite satisfying. If I lived in Waco with this phone and this carrier, I would be pleased.

BTW, I first tried to see what LTE service was like there before applying the L710VPLG8 OTA update, which optimizes the threshold signal level for connecting to LTE. But I got nothing even in strong coverage areas with fast LTE after the update. So anyone (like the OP on this rant thread) who did not try updated firmware would have a very wrong negative impression. (The EVO LTE model is supposed to be getting a similar update soon.)

This phone, and this network, are keepers. I just have to wait a bit to get LTE coverage in my hometown.

(I posted a fuller review with mapped sample results, signal strengths and speed tests at S4GRU.com, but it is in a sponsors-only forum there so I could compare sample sites to S4GRU's exclusive maps of Sprint towers.)

 

[NYCHitman1]

Just to follow up. I did apply the LG8 update to my Galaxy S III and spent half a day yesterday testing in Waco. It should be pretty representative of what the fully built out Sprint LTE network is like because Waco was deliberately built out as a Field Implementation Test area by Ericsson, the Sprint contractor there.

Overall, the results were very positive. I had 4G service almost everywhere I drove around the city and surrounding countryside. There were exceptions, mostly in rural areas outside of major highways, and in some downtown locations blocked by relatively large buildings. But I did try inside one building about four blocks from a Sprint LTE tower, and got snappy data performance.

So the LTE map on sprint.com is overly optimistic because it shows blanket coverage everywhere. But overall, my results were quite satisfying. If I lived in Waco with this phone and this carrier, I would be pleased.

BTW, I first tried to see what LTE service was like there before applying the L710VPLG8 OTA update, which optimizes the threshold signal level for connecting to LTE. But I got nothing even in strong coverage areas with fast LTE after the update. So anyone (like the OP on this rant thread) who did not try updated firmware would have a very wrong negative impression. (The EVO LTE model is supposed to be getting a similar update soon.)

This phone, and this network, are keepers. I just have to wait a bit to get LTE coverage in my hometown.

(I posted a fuller review with mapped sample results, signal strengths and speed tests at S4GRU.com, but it is in a sponsors-only forum there so I could compare sample sites to S4GRU's exclusive maps of Sprint towers.)

Just wanted to thank you for taking the time to inform us all about your experiences. Very informative, to say the least.

 

[boomerbubba]

Just wanted to thank you for taking the time to inform us all about your experiences. Very informative, to say the least.

Thx. I wish I could post a link to my own test, but it is in a sponsor-only area at S4GRU. However, by coincidence another S4GRU member posted his own Speedtest results from Waco the next day in a public thread. I also have seen other positive results about Waco, and no negative reviews that I can recall, posted in several forums recently. I suspect this one from XDA was done on the I-35 corridor, where the signal is strongest. In my own test, with the advantage of knowing from S4GRU's exclusive maps where the Sprint towers are, I deliberately went looking for holes in the LTE coverage. And I did find some, but these were exceptions to coverage that was generally good.

The reason Waco is relevant is that this small city was deliberately built out early as an internal test area for Ericsson, Sprint's contractor in the region. So the coverage should be more representative of what Sprint's LTE network will look like when it is complete. By contrast, most early anecdotal reports (positive and negative) have come from Sprint's first officially "launched" cities including Houston, DFW, San Antonio, Atlanta and Kansas City. But they launched with a small fraction percent of their towers ready, and are still being fleshed out.

The other big factor is that the LTE-capable handsets are new, and Sprint learned the hard way that these phones needed tuning to fix the threshold signal level where they would downshift from LTE to 3G service, so handsets running the early firmware could only hold an LTE signal that was very strong. This obviously magnified the problem of the thin coverage in launch cities. Those firmware updates are still in the pipeline for some.

 

[boomerbubba]

Duplicate post. Delete if possible.

 

[IOWA]

Sprint is undergoing major changes, yes they've said this for years but the IDEN network is finally down, leaving more towers/resources for CDMA and LTE...The lack of throttling is great, yes coverage is spotty but overall I'm pleased. I used to be an authorized sprint dealer back before they bought nextel, now they REALLY sucked back then, compared to today, they are much much better...and actually improving steadily..

Just a quick correction. IDEN isn't down. Not until 2013.

 

[Mr. Ed]

Just a quick correction. IDEN isn't down. Not until 2013.

Think of it as a rolling project. As LTE towers go up IDEN towers come down, with completion scheduled for 2013.

 

[IOWA]

Think of it as a rolling project. As LTE towers go up IDEN towers come down, with completion scheduled for 2013.

Oh believe me, I'm well aware of that.. considering I still have ~ 30 devices that run on iDEN. Tehe. ;-)