Wish me luck! Switching from iPhone to Android.

if you drop your phone in water, you should put it in a sealed container with a bunch of dry rice. It pulls the water out.

^^^ That's what my wife had to do! Her phone at the time was a Motorola Flipside.

The rice trick worked like a champ.

Re: battery life. It's going to be crap on all top smart phones. They have big screens, powerful processors and other shit to power. And if you have fancy live wallpapers running on them, plus widgets and other apps running all day long, if you're surfing the net for hours on end, sending emails, texts, making calls and playing games, of course the fuckers battery is going to die in less than 24 hours. Use it sensibly, get a battery monitoring app and an app to conserve battery life and the battery will be fine.

Honestly, I don't get why smartphone companies are so obsessed with weight saving to the degree that they are. They love to talk about how they shaved a picogram or something from the weight, but given that your typical landline handset weighs more than a smartphone does and that most smartphone users won't be holding the phone up to their ears all that often (as they'd rather be surfing the web, etc.), I don't see why they need to do this. Just keep the thing under half a pound and let everyone have decent battery life for a change.

Shit, I've thrown my work cell phones against street curbs and the battery didn't fall out.

2 and a half years with an iPhone and I've never once had any reason to need access to the battery.

Tuckerfan, the reason I would rather them keeping making phones thinner and lighter is because you can always strap a battery pack on or if it's a Droid carry an extra battery if you need more power but when I'm not using my phone I want to notice it as little as possible in my pocket.

Yabut, strapping on an external battery kind of defeats the purpose (as does carrying around a spare) of making smaller batteries. Not to mention that in most cases the reduction in battery size is more than offset by the increase in screen size.

How does it defeat the purpose? It can be small when you want it small or bulky when you want more juice. IMO that's better than always bulky.

I'd be willing to bet most people never take the external battery off once they install it. Most of them are designed, after all, so that you don't need to take it off once you put it on. Spare batteries (especially ones that are small and thin) are just asking to be lost somewhere, or forgotten when you need it most. Then there's the extra hardware which is required if you want to get the most use out of your extra battery. Not only do you have to carry the battery, but you need to carry alternative methods of charging the battery, so that you don't have to have your phone tied up charging the thing.

Verizon's spokesborg has the lamest excuse possible for killing Google Wallet.

I have my original Samsung Galaxy. Best phone I ever bought.

I rooted it and installed a custom ROM. Get 2 days easily if I have good service. Which, when you travel all over the world is pretty sketchy.

You'll never guess what my cell bill is though?

What luck! The Bay Area's LTE service went online today. I still have a week left before I go back to Phoenix, so it's nice to be able to use my sweet new LTE phone on an LTE network!

I did speedtest.net last night and I got 24 Mb/sec down and 14.5 Mb/sec up.

Just noticed that the LTE icon is off today.

Maybe they were just testing?

I just ran it on the LAN here and got:

.30mps down and .13mps up.

Oh well, better than no internet.

No I pay for it myself. Company reimburses me though with complete 'travel' coverage as they call it.

Basically I expense all 'business' related stuff, including my cell bill to a single credit card, and then just hand in all the statements every month and they write me a check for it all.

And it certainly isn't free. Not even close. I tried to get the best roaming deal I could, but because I HAVE to use data the cost is pretty high. I try not to watch videos or stream music, but constantly doing email, with up to 200 messages sent received on a daily basis, and constant sync into our CRM platform, with literally thousands of different things I have to check on a daily basis, I use quite a bit of data.

I wish cell companies would have better roaming fees.

LTE icon is back! I guess I just temporarily ducked out of the service area.

Consider yourself lucky to have LTE. North America accounts for something like 87% of all the LTE in the world. Verizon is probably a big chunk of that.

I have work in California a few weeks from now, and I'm thinking of going into the Verizon store and finding out what the best deal they have in regards to 'international' usage. Only problem with that is my home number right now allows friends/family to call me without it costing LD for them, but I could probably save quite a bit if I had a Verizon plan versus the carrier I'm with right now.

I wish there were a reliable way to use dual SIM cards in a single phone. Friends/family call me on my 'home' number, phone automatically rings. Business people call me on my 'work' number, same phone rings, but its technically a different number.

Why hasn't anyone come up with that yet?

RingCentral or google voice will allow you to forward to your phone's number, from a local number.

Also, with RingCentral, they have apps that allow you to make a call from your phone.

They have. Prices start as low as $60 USD.

Yep, my cell phone for the radio station has both AWCC and Roshan SIMs in it.

Sucker's rooted now.

All I have to decide now is whether I want to load a custom ROM or not.

CyanogenMod 7 seems to be the popular one, but I guess there's only an Alpha Build for the Skyrocket. I think some other guys have already built ICS (that's Android 4.0) based ROMs for the Skyrocket, but I don't know about those...

I'd wait a bit for ICS to drop. Also, if you're not aware yet, the market is having a sale on top apps, $0.10 for applications that normally go for more.

Oooohhhh a dime app sale, eh? I'll have to check that out. Thanks!

Also Amazon's appstore has a free app of the day everyday.

You can somewhat do that with Google Voice.

That Nexus is great on paper EXCEPT for lack of removable storage. That's a real head scratcher to me in this day and age.