[HTC EVO 3D] ZachPA:
Well, Mikey, it's been a trip. I've been with you on the GB ROM since 2.something and on ICS from 0.0000001. You are in the top 1% of most devoted devs on xda, and it's been your efforts with the EVO 3D that helped me get the most out of my android phone.

I regret that I won't be joining you on the EVO LTE side. I've jumped ship from both Sprint and HTC.

Sprint has let me down way too much. While the price was pretty good, in the end there just wasn't any value in a service that just doesn't deliver. I live and work in the same cell, and for whatever reason it has not been able to broadcast a stable EVDO or CDMA signal to any Sprint phone in the area, regardless of the make/model of the device or the user.

How bad you ask? Just for ****s and giggles, I decided to run a little test. Just to test things out, I drove several times throughout a day to about 1/4 mile from the tower, a distance that was both line-of-sight and far enough to allow the signal to fall to earth from the tall tower. The tower is located in the middle of an open field, and it's shared by Sprint and Verizon.

Sprint's speeds over the course of an afternoon/evening/late night: 130/220, 180/174, 87/430, and 230/71. I repeated each test several times and threw out any measurements that were too far off. I was especially dismayed at the 10pm test with 87 kbps download speed. I can do better than that by calling and writing 0s and 1s on a pad with paper. Just for kicks, I kicked my EVO onto the 00002 Verizon 3G PRL. Same tower, same time, same location speeds: 1.3/840, 1.1/403, 930/256, and 1.7/670. I pretty much exclusively bang the Verizon towers with that 00002 PRL.

It wasn't always this bad. Sprint had a good thing going for the first eight months I owned the OG EVO. Then all the Boost and VM customers started sucking the bandwidth, and just when it couldn't get any worse, Sprint signed up a zillion iPhone customers. Poof went the bandwidth.

I've pestered Sprint about it pretty much every month since January, but nobody there (even at Dan@Sprint.com, which is practically useless if you ask me) seemed to care. I never got a single bill credit or offer, despite practically refusing to pay for a service I could barely use.

I could have lived with it, though, but I feel like HTC has let me down also. It seems to me like HTC went out of their way to be hostile toward the development community (us!). Locked bootloaders, encrypted partitions, refusal to release source code until it's absolutely necessary. All hallmarks of a company who caters to carriers and not customers. I selected a Galaxy S3. Samsung seems like a company that knows there is a huge dev community and they don't throw us hurdles they know will be overcome anyway.

I really like the look and feel of the EVO LTE. But I think I will like the SGS3 better. I know the display is a little suspect, as I'm not thrilled by the PenTile AMOLED, but I've seen it in action and it's not as bad as some say. I'm happy the SGS3 has 2 gigs of RAM; it's been my experience that 2 gigs will speed up Android much more than adding a couple of CPU cores could.

Anyway, enough ranting for one day, I suppose. I will still own the EVO 3D, so I suppose I will check back here regularly for updates on MR ICS (or even JB, maybe!), and I shall hope to find a dev in the SGS3 forums who is as dedicated as Mikey.

Thanks.

PS: Maybe if I hit the lottery I'll send an SGS3 your way, Mikey.