[Epic 4G General] th3j3ster:
Carrier IQ - Sprint is EVIL

Carrier IQ was something I've heard about only in passing, until a few days ago. Recently, k0nane (Bless your heart, you shiny golden god) was able to dig down into the bowels of the OS and remove Carrier IQ from the mix, publishing the changes in the rom, SyndicateROM Frozen.

The result is astounding.

Lag has been almost entirely obliterated (remaining lag on my device may be due to launcher or other third-party software inefficiencies. Battery life is RIDICULOUSLY improved. And to top it all off, Sprint can't spy on my activities by collecting logs from my phone. Brilliant.

I did a little test yesterday to monitor the effects. While I can't think of a good way to show that lag has decreased, trust me, this effect is NOTICEABLE. I was considering jumping the Epic ship and going to either the Nexus S or an HTC device, but once again thanks to k0nane and the ACS I may stick around for a while. It's THAT much better.

My second test was of the battery. Since I got the epic on release day, I've been really, really paranoid about hanging around in spots without a charger. I have two chargers at home, two at the office, and one in my car. I really couldn't go even a day without charging again. As an approximation, with little to no usage in any given day, I'd unplug my battery at around 8am and I would go to lunch at 2pm. In that 6 hour span, My battery would drain from 100% to around 40%, Making the battery drain roughly 10% per hour with very light usage, and giving the full life of the stock battery from charge to dead about a 10hr span. Yesterday, I used the phone pretty heavily as I was playing with the ROM, updating my apps, re-setting up all my settings to the way I had it. In total I went 15:30 hours without charging, and my battery percentage after almost 16 hours (remember, this is with HEAVY usage), was at 40%. This means with Carrier IQ removed (and all the other optimizations in the ROM), my battery life jumped from an awful10%/hr drain to a 4%/hr drain, with a discrepancy in weight of usage. Pretty impressive jump no?

What does this mean? It means that Sprint, because it views itself as a powerful carrier, would rather greatly gimp their devices and provide an awful, laggy, and short (without a charger) user experience just to be able to spy on its user whenever it so pleases. Isn't anyone else completely infuriated by this? The amount of money I sunk into the phone and the contract just to have them provide me with a crap user experience and mistrust/information stealing infuriates me. This behavior is appalling. This is UNACCEPTABLE.

Look, I wasn't born yesterday. I'm not surprised by this. I am, however, severely pissed off now that I know the extent of their deception, their power-mongering behavior, and their absolute disregard for customer experience. It's bad enough that I can't go into a sprint store with a problem without getting attitude for improperly trained, moody, and ignorant employees, but now I have to use a device that is riddled with more problems than a submarine made out of wire mesh screens and gorilla tape, simply so sprint can gather our personal info at their whim.

I wrote this post mainly because I'm pissed. But more so because I want you to be pissed. I want us all to be pissed together, and get loud about it, and bombard Sprint online with questions and statements of outrage until they recognize their own stupidity and respond.

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twitter.com / sprint

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