Cellphone Question for Sean
 

My DroidX is eligible for an upgrade through Verizon from today. I was thinking to wait of the iPhone 5 in the Fall, but my battery life is now shit and the GPS doesn't really work at all.

I don't particularly care if it's Android, iOS, Windows, Blackberry.

Requirements.
The goddamn GPS has got to work reliably. It was never very good on the Droid.
Good quality pic/vid
Gotta be fairly tough as I'm a little rough on things.
Battery to offer good life.
Form factor and overall speed I'm not quite as concerned about.

What's hot?

After the recent update i've been loving my HTC EVO Shift. You've seen the picture quality in my posts

How's the GPS? This is mission critical for me. I use it for navigation as I have to drive around a fair bit.

Just wait for the SGIII, I would say get the HTC One series (great set of phones) but VZ wont get them.

Or just root and mod the phone.

The iPhone 5 is going to be a very nice phone, and will probably be out in September or October. It's going to be roughly a 4" screen with an 1136x640 resolution. The phone will be the same width as the current iPhone, but taller. It's also going to be only 7.9mm thick as opposed to the current iPhone which is over 9mm. The camera is rumored to be an upgraded version of the 4S camera which is already one of the best on the market. It will have LTE and is rumored to have an upgraded version of the A5X CPU. I expect it to be one of the nicest phones on the market when it comes out.

Alternatively you could buy a Samsung Galaxy S3 now. We pre-ordered one for Alexis this morning. It has a qualcomm dual-core S4 processor with 2GB of ram, so it's fairly future proof. People were upset because the world GS3 has a quad-core processor, but the S4 is A15 based and the quad-core Exynos is A9 based. Based on everything I've seen they're about equal with the S4 actually producing better benchmarks. The camera is fantastic. It's the same Sony sensor from the iPhone4S. Shutter speed is instant and it has a 3 picture burst mode. It also can record video in 1080p. It has a removal battery and sd card slot which are two things the iPhone doesn't. It's nice to be able to expand your memory for cheap or to swap out a battery if necessary. The stock battery is 2100mah and is supposed to have excellent life.

It's a thin phone, but it's bigger than your X, where as the iPhone5 will be smaller. I don't mind the size, but then again I would buy a Note if it were available on Verizon. My main gripe with the GS3 is the screen. It is 720p, but it's pentile matrix which means it only uses 2 subpixels per pixel instead of 3. I don't like pentile matrix screens because they don't look as sharp as a true RGB screen, but it doesn't seem to bother most people.

It also has an unlocked bootloader which is really important IMHO for an Android phone. This allows you to flash custom kernals and roms.

Since you're already in the Android ecosystem, I'd buy an SG3 now. It should do everything you require and then some.

Thank you for the excellent technical summary. Any word on the GPS antenna for the SG3? I'll straight up murder some bitches if it's as dodgy as my X.

http://androidforums.com/samsung-gal...t-gps-fix.html

Amazing actually, i love that if i dont have the address i can input the name and it will still find it, i can count on one hand how many times its lost signal