[Verizon Droid Charge] kalibar:
Is there a way to switch between 3G and 4G Verizon phones without retiring your SIM card? I tried to reactivate my Charge tonight, but it failed both online and with the rep over the phone. I'll try stopping in my Verizon corp store this weekend for a new SIM I guess, but man, what a hassle.

In any case, I wanted to offer some follow-up now that I've been living with a Fascinate for about a week. For starters, the phone is absolutely fast as **** with CyanogenMod. The guy I bought it from had been using the stock Samsung/Verizon ROM with TouchWiz and Bing for over a year, and man, I can see why he was ready to unload the phone for practically no money. The difference in utility between out-of-the-box and with CM7 is really just beyond astonishing on this phone; moreso than others I've flashed in the past. I guess it should make perfect sense, since the Fascinate/Charge is basically a Verizon Nexus S underneath, and we all know that the Nexus S is snappy and awesome.

Also, the battery life is superb. I was thinking I'd grab the 1800 mAh Samsung battery from the Sprint SGS2 that a bunch of people in the Fascinate subforum are using, but even with the current year-old 1500 mAh stock battery in here I haven't managed to kill the phone even once. Today I'm at 72% remaining after admittedly a day of very, very light usage. On my heaviest days where I streamed a bunch of Google Music over Ev-DO I was sitting at about 30-40% by the end of the day which is still completely awesome.

The work that jt did for this phone to get people onto AOSP ROMs is really incredible, and I can fully appreciate why he's spoken so highly of around here. It honestly boggles my mind how anyone who knows better could choose a Samsung-based ROM over CM7/MIUI for this phone.

All that said... I'm seriously missing LTE. I know, I know. A hacked Fascinate is a killer phone, but Verizon's Ev-DO is kinda slow as **** -- it's slower than the T-Mobile HSPA that I had before this, and it's somehow even slower than Sprint's Ev-DO that I came from before that. I'm really enjoying the small size of the device, but you could pay T-Mobile's or AT&T's lower rates to use a first-gen Galaxy S, and you'd get better speeds for your trouble. My buddies and I signed our Verizon contract for LTE.

So I'm kinda stuck on this one. The smart money says to just sell the Charge now, stick with the Fascinate for a couple months, and then grab a Galaxy Nexus after the secondhand pricing on them has settled down. But since we don't know what kind of DAC is inside it or if it'll really fair any better on the battery front, I'm hesitant to do that -- I already know the Charge's hardware is what I want, it just makes me crazy to live with it.

So last night I flashed EP4P debloated and then Humble 5 onto my Charge and messed with it for an hour or two just using Wi-Fi. It's definitely a lot snappier than even EP3HA was, and feels a lot closer to the hacked Fascinate in terms of performance than the Charge ever has. danalo's doing a pretty solid job covering up Samsung's ****-awful theme, so he deserves some praise there.

I'm still really worried about data dropouts and awful battery life, but there's really no way to test that stuff without re-activating this thing and keeping the Fascinate at the ready if (when) it ****s me over.

Maybe the best solution would be eating the Verizon ETF and going back to a Vibrant, heh. CyanogenMod on these first-gen Galaxy S phones is totally legit.

cool yea man thanks for your insightful post