[Galaxy S I9000 General] thequinox:
Wind Mobile

Thanks for the reply AllGamer.

I find myself in EXACTLY the same situation as you! Haha. I live in Edmonton and I just HAD to try out this $40 all you can eat plan from wind. I've got an i9000m unlocked and on Rogers and I love it. The GPS is it's main flaw though, it's pretty terrible and sure I get pissed at it when I try and use it, but it's not a big enough deal for me to want a new phone right now. I also hate TouchWizz and use ADW exclusively.

Anyway, I bought this cheap Alcatel with the $40 plan from wind here to try out their network. I figure if I don't like it I can return the phone and just be out the one month plan fee, and if I do like it I can use the phone in the interim until I get an AWS compatible phone. I just had to jump on it now because the $40 Holiday Miracle plan expires tomorrow.

I've only had the phone half the day now, and the reception doesn't seem too bad. I'll have to move around the city and stuff a lot more to get a real sample though. If Wind is able to deliver I should be able to save at least %50 every month once I ditch my Rogers plan.

I ran some speed tests here at work and I didn't really care for the results though. This is the only place I've tested, so it could be this tower or something, I'll have to test more to know for sure. Anyway, I'm getting:

Rogers w/GT-i9000m:

Down - Up

1884 - 1148

2944 - 1237

2567 - 1244

3291 - 1242

*Wind w/OT-981A:

Down - Up

1749 - 159

1280 - 156

1575 - 159

1529 - 159

I can live with 1.5Mpbs down, that's not to bad, but the upload is terrible! I called customer support to ask if they had some sort of upload cap in place, but they said they've never heard anything like that. I'll try some other places around the city and post back the results.

I really want to like Wind, or more, my wallet really likes to want Wind XD

Anyway, I kind of got off topic here, the reason I asked the initial question is because if I do move to wind I'll have to part with my SGS. The SNS seems like the logical way to go, but I've heard bad things about the quality control and as you know, living in Canada, we can't exactly easily exchange it at Best Buy.

I don't think the MicroSD would be a huge deal, but I don't really like not having it either. I agree, the multimedia support would be a pain to give up. If Samsung did one thing right, it's the great codec support on the SGS. As for the rest of TW and the crippled samsungafied Google apps... they can go.

One of the reasons I really liked the SGS was the multimedia support, but I found I didn't really use it. One of the reasons is all my stuff is in 720 MKV and while the SGS can play those files locally, Allshare is incapable of streaming anything in an MKV container. This is a huge drag and as a result I never gave it much use. The 720p camera recording is also nice but again, I have no way of outputting 720p. It would be nice if it had mHDMI out, but now I'm just dreaming XD. BTW, does the SNS support video out through composite like the SGS?

I already have a pretty good feel of what I'm getting into if I get a SNS, but I like hearing real world things from users. You can't tell everything from specs, it really is about the experience. My biggest fear is getting a defective one. Pop into the SNS forums here on XDA and it becomes apparent quite quickly that there are problems with a lot of them.

*Update: I just noticed the the Android SpeedTest.net app is not pulling the Wind phone's location properly. My SGS on Rogers is testing with a server right here in Edmonton. The Alcatel is trying to use a server in... Virginia O_o. That could certainly lead to some extra latency XD. Edmonton isn't available in the server list, so I'll try and find a more reliable way of comparing. Perhaps a different app will let me manually input a server IP to test with.