[Thunderbolt General] allquixotic:
There are plenty of better phones out there as far as performance and features go. The Thunderbolt is an inefficient beast; in the class of smartphones, it's metaphorically similar to the 17" Desktop Replacement laptop. In other words, it's big, heavy, and very power-hungry, relative to other members of its device class.

If you had waited until the May or June launch of the Samsung phones with the Tegra 2 dual core SoC with Nvidia graphics, that thing will absolutely blow your socks off, and probably also ship with Android 2.3 or 2.4 if it's out by then. Why buy a phone still using the old PowerVR SGX core if you are crazy about graphics performance, when the SGX is just a few months away from being eclipsed by Tegra 2 phones?

It's the first LTE smartphone to market. Ever. Period. In the whole world. And you're telling me you bought it because it's fast? Pssh -- as far as the non-networked components go, it's basically no better than a Droid 2. It's the last model to use 2009-2010 era SoC, and the only reason it doesn't use something more cutting-edge is because the brand new chips are still being debugged and tested, and they needed a phone out in March.

The Thunderbolt has a separate radio chip for the CDMA/EvDO and the LTE. This is highly suboptimal from both a power standpoint and size/weight. Qualcomm says they can probably have chips available by early 2012 that offer both traditional CDMA, voice, and LTE in a single integrated circuit, which would also probably use smaller fabrication process technology for even less power consumption and weight. The Thunderbolt is a "hack" as far as smartphones are concerned; it's very unusual for any kind of phone to have two radios in it (even if it supports more than one radio protocol, they're usually supported together on a single chip). The phone was rushed, hence why they couldn't wait for Qualcomm to get their integrated LTE+CDMA chip together.

You can rip the Thunderbolt apart this way by looking under the hood and pointing out its many limitations and flaws. The only thing that stands out -- the only killer feature that sets this apart from the Droid 2 or any other 2010 Android-based 3G phone -- is the LTE. If not for the LTE, the Thunderbolt is just a power-hungry, heavy version of the Droid 2 (or Droid X, I guess, since it lacks a hardware keyboard too).

Since Verizon locks you in to a two year contract, you should really be planning ahead a bit unless you have $600 - $750 to sink on a retail smartphone. If you had waited for just a few more months to get the more killer "core specs" (CPU, GPU, RAM) on the phones coming out in the latter half of 2011, you would be getting the first round of the next generation of the CPU/GPU bump. And since that's what you seem to value (moreso than the bandwidth), that's probably what you should have waited for.

Now you're stuck with a phone (as am I) that will have significantly underpowered specs by the time the two year term is up -- it's entirely possible that new Android apps and games written in Q1 2013 (the last stretch of your 2 year term) will not run at all on your Thunderbolt, or lag so badly that they're unusable, because they are tuned to run on e.g. the Tegra 2 or later dual core platforms.

But I don't play games on my phone, so that doesn't matter to me. The LTE is why I value this phone so much and bought it, and since I don't exercise the CPU/GPU as highly as cellphone gamers, it probably won't matter a lick to me that in early 2013 I won't be able to play Angry Birds 3 on my Thunderbolt. I'll be satisfied that I got a full two years worth of fast LTE service, and that's what's important to me.

So just saying, if you don't care about the extra bandwidth, you made a fairly bad choice. The other aspects of the Thunderbolt are gonna be obsolete pretty quick because the non-network parts of the phone are built around a late 2009 platform, so unless you want to shell out retail when Tegra 2 phones hit, you might come to regret your purchase in about a year.

In comparison to graphics cards, it'd be like buying a Nvidia GTX 280 (supporting DirectX 10.1) a month before the Fermi cards hit the shelves (supporting DirectX 11).