[Samsung Galaxy S (4G Model)] ambeestar:
so!

got the samsung galaxy 4g the day it came out. i had actually gotten the g2 originally, and 13 days later, this phone came out and after holding it in my hands i had to have it. it was just... sexy.

so the day i got it i was so happy. i ended up paying nothing for it through a weird fluke situation on tmobiles part, which made it even better.

then the troubles started.

in getting the new phone i knew that although this phone boasts the speeds that it does there was no way i was going to get those speeds. i do a speed test. at the tmobile store (1/4 a mile away from a tower on a tuesday afternoon around 2 pm) i get ..... 0.03 down and 0 up.

....k.

so i give it some time to get used to my sim card and my usage. that's when i notice the battery. i had to charge my phone two times a day on light usage. i turn off all synching, including my google calendar and contacts to see if that helps the battery. meh, a little. but i'm still charging it at least halfway through the day, and i am not able to use my phone at work. that means from the time i unplug it ten minutes before i leave for work until 6 pm (11 hours later) my battery is at roughly 20% ... and i've done nothing on the phone whatsoever. i'm super sad about the battery life and still getting sad speed tests on my "4g".

then about a week after purchase more problems kick in.

pretty soon my picture messages aren't coming through. it's giving me messages i'm used to seeing on my iphone, something about the message size being too big to download (sorry, the wording has left my mind now that i am trying to document it all for you guys).

then i start getting no texts. and sending them is a joke. if i have less than three bars (i usually have two at home and my work building) i am not able to send. it will try and give me a failed message. pulling out the battery will usually fix it, but after a couple of weeks of that it gets used to that fix and doesn't work at all.

i go into the tmobile store.

they switch out my sim (which we had done once before) and at this point my phone doesn't recognize the new sim. the rep tells me i broke my phone (even though my phone at least recognized the previous sim) and tells me that i'll need a new phone, offering to sell me one for cheap. i leave, pretty irritated at the dude.

i go to work, call 611, they tell me my IMEI has never been active on my account. we activate it and lo and behold, my phone recognizes the sim (mmhmm). but still sending messages is still a joke. out of 10 messages i can usually get one to send. it's a sad ratio of sent to failed.

in addition, i am still charging my battery at least once to twice a day with hardly any usage whatsoever (what good is using a phone that never has service anyway?). i've turned off wifi at all times, 4g is off, everything synching is off. i'll take out the sim and put it in my iphone so that it's not constantly searching for service (which texting worked just fine on my iphone) and it STILL dies by the end of my work day - i am lucky if i get 12 hours of standby before having to charge it. i condition my battery with no luck.. it still sucks. i root it and set SetCPU to underclock down to 200mhz when idle just to see if that will help the battery. i get about 14 hours of standby on that.

so, after all of this and about two months later, i finally got a replacement phone today. after looking at the back of the new phone and the old one i discover something interesting...

my sim contacts have been broken this whole time! sad!

( i was going to link to the pic but can't since i'm a new user. :P )

now, has this new phone fixed my issue? well, for one i'm getting 4g speeds at my place (i live in downtown SLC, i should be getting them here!) for the first time ever and have yet to come across a "failed" message when sending texts. only time will tell but mostly i want to post this to let you know.. if you are having this issue this is NOT normal. talk to tmobile. troubleshoot what you need to and get that mother replaced!

(i'll report back on battery life tomorrow.)