[HD2 General] _tangent:
Ok, so the friend who's also on t-mobile popped round this evening. Didn't have time to do any testing in my own home, as we had an errand to run. However, during the journey i had the phones side by side to make a direct comparison, and also had time to do this briefly once we'd arrived at our destination. No time for bandwidth comparisons yet - just looking at indicated signal strength and band. Important to note that his handset is a G1, running android, so as indicated before, comparing actual "bars" of signal is perhaps somewhat arbitrary and fruitless - who knows what differences there are between the way microsoft and google calculate signal strength.

First thing to note is the H/3G indicator issue. One of the previous posters does indeed seem to have it quite right in saying that 3G only changes to an H whilst a transfer is actually in progress. My handset does sometimes seem to flick from 3g to H whilst i'm not directly making data calls, but i imagine this is some auto sync in the background, either from the weather app, or the facebook app, or the facebook-linked contacts. Whilst browsing, it says 3G all the time, until a link is clicked, in which case it changes to H for the time it takes the page to load, then back to 3G. Not sure if this is just a change in winmo from the last version i had to this or, or an HTC customisation.

In terms of signal/banding the phones were more or less the same, with a couple of notable exceptions. Firstly, at one point during the 30 minute journey, my phone had switched to a full GPRS signal, whereas his was still on 3g, with a fairly weak signal (1 bar). This lasted for about 30 seconds at 30mph, and then the HD2 went back up to 3G. I wouldn't read anything into this, as the two platforms no doubt have totally different strategies when it comes to maintaining network connections and the criteria for switching up to a higher band etc.

The only other interesting occurrence was after we'd arrived. Sat side by side on the couch, my phone was reading 3g with 1 bar of signal strength, occasionally 2, whereas his was a pretty consistent 3. Outside the building we were both more or less full signal. Now, i'm not sure whether we can compare these reported signal levels - as i said above i'd have thought each platform did it a different way, unless there's some standard they all have to conform to. Also, i opened up opera to check something offline, and occasionally my connection dropped down to zero bars. However, this did not disrupt browsing. Didn't even seem to slow it down. Still read H when loading pages, and it was still fast and smooth, and at now point did it drop to GPRS or lose a connection entirely. Interesting because on my old kaiser, zero bars was quickly followed by the searching for connection graphic. In other words, nothing would work with zero signal. Now, i'm not sure whether the signal strength thingy is just calibrated differently on the HD2 (maybe 0 is the new 1) or perhaps the software does a better job these days of maintaining a connection - who knows.

However, only thing to report so far is that indoors, in this particular location anyway, the HD2 seemed to be reading a lower signal on it's indicator than the G1 IF the two can be compared as directly as this.

All pretty qualitative so far, so i'm going to have a go at some bandwidth tests and band comparisons in the more challenging areas of my house when he's next over.

I think that's certainly the primary factor at work here. What i was mainly concerned with, was whether the handset itself was under-performing - i.e. would other phones with t-mobile sims achieve better reception. Strangely, in the past i had always dismissed "signal" as a property of the network rather than the handset. Obviously though, with a few minutes thought, it's easy to see how the hardware is also an important factor. Not all receivers are born equal - even though i imagine these days it's pretty much a solved problem, from an engineering perspective - just like all software to interpret radio signals and hold connections isn't either.