[Onetouch Idol 3 General] mikeisgo:
Quick impressions after the weekend with the phone

So I got this phone on friday, as an upgrade to my Nexus 4, which has developed a touch screen issue. Here's my current pros/cons regarding the switch to the Idol3

Pros

* Very nice looking

* thin

* big screen

* It definitely seems to handle notifications with Android 5.x better than my nexus 4 did.

* LTE seems to work great. In my area, I've always gotten really good T-mobile reception, so I can't comment on if it gets better or worse signal than the Nexus 4. So far it seems the same for my area. Nexus 4 didn't have LTE, so being able to access LTE now is a big plus, as T-mobile has been putting a lot more work into expanding LTE as compared to HSPA+.

* convenient that it took the same sim card as my Nexus 4

* Screen looks very nice, at 1080p resolution (it could be the resolution that is making things stutter some)

* cannot beat the price. (this is where my conflicts begin with the phone. I can't not want to keep it at the price, on the other hand, when it stutters, i feel annoyed and wish i had something that did not do things like this, but at what cost $400 dollars more?)

cons

* screen is a bit reflective

* every so often things stutter a bit for unknown reasons. Hard to say whats really going on here. Task window has a "clean all" button, which lets you free up memory. But with 2GB of memory, that really shouldn't be the issue.

* Tap & Go.. isn't really what its cracked up to be. At least not when comping from a Nexus 4, that had android 5.1 on it. I have no idea if the phone and version are the reason, but saying it to provide context. Tap & Go let me setup my google accounts, which was nice, but after that, noapps downloaded, and my home screen didn't magically appear from my backup copy. Honestly I have no idea how my normal phone would restore with the Nexus 4. Either way, it didn't transfer much over. I use the Google Now Launcher, which if anything I would have though would store its settings in the cloud and be able to retrieve my layout etc, but it unfortunately did not. So of course I spent the day or so reconfiguring, redownloading and relogiging into apps. Thankfully going to the google play site on my laptop proved a quick way to re-setup the phone, as when you go to install an app that google knows is on one phone, it defaults the choice to the newest phone, which is the Idol 3 in my case. So i did a lot of click search, rinse repeat to install all my apps back on my phone, and the phone remotely started downloading everything easily. Win for that feature at least.

*The notifications and ringtones on this phone have settings that start at Loud and get louder. In general being a loud speaker is good. However when you're trying to set an alarm and you don't wnat to wake up your wife in the morning. Having every alarm start at Jarringly loud kind of sucks. I feel like this is partly the sounds, but I even noticed that a notification i brought over from the Nexus 4 the "Neon" alarm, which is normally quiet, is a bit louder even at the lowest volume setting. So if you're looking to be able to quiet the phone down, its relatively impossible without relying only on vibrate. I currently have all the volumes on 1 tick above silent, and its still fairly loud. This out of anything else may make me return the phone, if I can't find some sort of resolution to it. Transferring over sounds that are mixed at a lower volume seems to help some, as evidenced by bringing the Neon sound over.

Other:

Screen size: 5.5 inch seems to be the max I can actually use. THe phone is big. Its a very thin bezel so it doesn't feel as big as some other 5.5. inch phones. Using this, has also made me realize that the other contender I was looking at, the nexus 6, would have been waaaay too big. At this point the Idol3 just fits in my pocket in my jeans, and running shorts, etc. Anything bigger wouldn't work. Even with that said I'm not sure the 5.5. inch screen is for me. I'll have to continue to feel it out.

Performance comparison:

If you look at the specs compared to the Nexus 4, they're using similar processors and RAM. The Nexus however is pushing less resolution. I think this is the main point of the performance difference. I never felt like i had performance problems with the Nexus 4. At the very least when things were slightly slow, it was consistent. With the Idol 3 i feel like this are blazing along, and then every so often it comes to a halting jarring stop. I may get used to this, as the phone works well the rest of the time. I'll see how I feel about it in a week. I only started using it as my daily phone today, since it took me the weekend to find the time to set it up.