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macgyver655
Joined: 22 Aug 2007
Posts: 8508
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| Posted: Wed Aug 26, 2009 7:24 pm Post subject: O.T. Cell phone and air card ??????? |
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I'm going to be looking for a carrier that has good service everywhere so I'm asking what yous guys use based on where you live. Also thinking about an air card for internet but have no idea on that one. All suggestions on either or both are greatly welcome.....
Thanks......
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dturco
Joined: 06 Feb 2009
Posts: 3778
Location: Eastern Shore Maryland
TV/Projector: Runco DLP VX-3000i Marquee 9500 parts doner
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| Posted: Wed Aug 26, 2009 7:35 pm Post subject: |
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I use Verizon for cell phone service. It worked in Boca Raton Fl, Crisfield Md, Phila Pa, Niagara falls Canada, and every state in- between. And on the cruise ship in Puerto Rico.
Can you here me now?
It works every where I've gone in the last 7 years.
_________________
Firefly rules. Can't stop the signal.
http://www.hulu.com/firefly
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garyfritz
Joined: 08 Apr 2006
Posts: 12088
Location: Fort Collins, CO
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| Posted: Wed Aug 26, 2009 7:53 pm Post subject: |
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I also have Verizon. It seems to me they don't have the most solid network sometimes (but I haven't used another network to compare), but I think they cover more areas than just about anybody else. At least they used to.
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Nashou66
Joined: 12 Jan 2007
Posts: 16171
Location: West Seneca NY
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emdawgz1
Joined: 14 Mar 2006
Posts: 7949
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garyfritz
Joined: 08 Apr 2006
Posts: 12088
Location: Fort Collins, CO
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| Posted: Wed Aug 26, 2009 8:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Nashou66 wrote: | | Get an Iphone and forget the card and use the iphone to surf the web, |
I'd love an iPhone, but according to the AT&T website the coverage is mighty spotty out here. If you spend all your time in cities you're OK, but anything other than that is dicey at best. My house is just outside a town of 130k and yet I'm in a marginal "moderate" coverage area. Within half a mile there are areas with no coverage at all. There are plenty of stretches of interstate in WY / NM / AZ / NE / KS with no coverage at all, and lots of fairly major highways with little or no coverage.
3G coverage is much worse.
By comparison Verizon shows full digital coverage everywhere within miles of here. You have to go up in the mountains, or out in the middle-of-nowhere plains, to find any gaps in their map.
AT&T might work fine for you in your area. But Mac, you're going to be living on the road. If you want full coverage everywhere, Verizon has a lot bigger network.
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drice1234
Joined: 07 Oct 2006
Posts: 1309
Location: Allen, Texas
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| Posted: Wed Aug 26, 2009 8:29 pm Post subject: |
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I would consider getting a sky card with one carrier and a phone with the other. This way you could be assured of coverage. If you got a phone like a Blackberry you could tether it with your usb cord for a internet connection when your air card did not work and then you could use a service like Skype with your air card for phone coverage for when your phone did not work.
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Nashou66
Joined: 12 Jan 2007
Posts: 16171
Location: West Seneca NY
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Clarence
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 3827
Location: Smith Mtn Lake, VA
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| Posted: Wed Aug 26, 2009 9:40 pm Post subject: |
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My work gives me a Sprint phone with unlimited minutes (including personal minutes) plus a Sprint Air Card. So I've had Sprint for over 10 years.
The signal for phone service has always been spotty... ironically it seems worst at customer sites, airports, hotels, and our multiple offices, including our HQ which is only a couple of miles from Sprint's HQ... my phone won't even ring (0 bars) unless I stand next to a window.
But the USB Air Card is great... I leave it on 99% of the time on my work laptop... it's as fast as my 802.11g wifi at home. I don't even mess with hotel wifi anymore. Plus I've been able to get a signal everywhere... Adirondack mountains, middle of nowhere in UT, etc.
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macgyver655
Joined: 22 Aug 2007
Posts: 8508
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| Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 12:17 am Post subject: |
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Great suggestions so far guys. Keep them coming.
Clarence, is that air card through Sprint also?
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CRT_Ben
Joined: 28 Aug 2006
Posts: 1684
Location: Northern Virginia
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| Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 12:32 am Post subject: |
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| macgyver655 wrote: | Great suggestions so far guys. Keep them coming.
Clarence, is that air card through Sprint also? |
I run WM 6.5 on my HTC titan (Sprint mogul, vzw x6800, etc). Browsing the web on the phone is great with Opera Mini (proxy browser so it's really fast - look up how it works), and I routinely use a program (WMwifirouter) to create my own secure wifi access point that I hook into with my laptops when I'm on the road. It works great, and eliminates the need for a separate aircard + aircard plan. I'm on Verizon btw.
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Clarence
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 3827
Location: Smith Mtn Lake, VA
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| Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 12:45 am Post subject: |
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| Clarence wrote: | | My work gives me a Sprint phone with unlimited minutes plus a Sprint Air Card. |
| macgyver655 wrote: | | Clarence, is that air card through Sprint also? |
Yes.
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macgyver655
Joined: 22 Aug 2007
Posts: 8508
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| Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 1:20 am Post subject: |
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| Clarence wrote: | | Clarence wrote: | | My work gives me a Sprint phone with unlimited minutes plus a Sprint Air Card. |
| macgyver655 wrote: | | Clarence, is that air card through Sprint also? |
Yes. |
Sorry. I missed that part. I'm just so friggin tired...... I cant see straight.... 
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macgyver655
Joined: 22 Aug 2007
Posts: 8508
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| Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 1:21 am Post subject: |
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| CRT_Ben wrote: | | macgyver655 wrote: | Great suggestions so far guys. Keep them coming.
Clarence, is that air card through Sprint also? |
I run WM 6.5 on my HTC titan (Sprint mogul, vzw x6800, etc). Browsing the web on the phone is great with Opera Mini (proxy browser so it's really fast - look up how it works), and I routinely use a program (WMwifirouter) to create my own secure wifi access point that I hook into with my laptops when I'm on the road. It works great, and eliminates the need for a separate aircard + aircard plan. I'm on Verizon btw. |
Ok, I'm lost on this. Can you explain better or give me some links? Thanks
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CRT_Ben
Joined: 28 Aug 2006
Posts: 1684
Location: Northern Virginia
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| Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 1:30 am Post subject: |
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| macgyver655 wrote: | | CRT_Ben wrote: | | macgyver655 wrote: | Great suggestions so far guys. Keep them coming.
Clarence, is that air card through Sprint also? |
I run WM 6.5 on my HTC titan (Sprint mogul, vzw x6800, etc). Browsing the web on the phone is great with Opera Mini (proxy browser so it's really fast - look up how it works), and I routinely use a program (WMwifirouter) to create my own secure wifi access point that I hook into with my laptops when I'm on the road. It works great, and eliminates the need for a separate aircard + aircard plan. I'm on Verizon btw. |
Ok, I'm lost on this. Can you explain better or give me some links? Thanks |
Can do, got dinner right now but I'll explain later.
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justtaint
Joined: 21 May 2007
Posts: 191
Location: Chicago
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| Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 2:39 pm Post subject: |
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I'll have to 2nd (or is it 3rd) the suggestion to stay away from ATT's 3G. Living in Chicago I have no problems with it, but travel a hundred miles in any direction to a rural area and coverage quickly gets spotty (or nonexistant). I love my iPhone but its pretty worthless if you aren't near a large city.
_________________
Thomas
Sony 1272
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CRT_Ben
Joined: 28 Aug 2006
Posts: 1684
Location: Northern Virginia
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| Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 5:28 pm Post subject: |
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| macgyver655 wrote: | | Ok, I'm lost on this. Can you explain better or give me some links? Thanks |
Let me preface this: In order to get the most out of any windows mobile phone you will have to spend a good amount of time tweaking it, and have some reasonable computer knowledge. I know you like to tweak but I don't know your computer skill-set, you don't have to be a genius but you need to be fairly competent.
IMO almost every windows mobile (from here on WM or winmo) phone is useless right off the shelf. Maybe this has changed since my phone is a few years old now but if it just comes with regular old WM 6.1, the interface blows. WM 6.5 is not released yet but the good folks at www.ppcgeek.com and http://www.xda-developers.com keep getting their hands on development builds, and even in dev state it's way better than WM 6.1. In general, with 6.1 or 6.5 you'll need some third-party programs to really take advantage of what the phone can do. Anyhow, I'll try to keep this limited to web surfing and internet sharing.
Opera Mini - free browser from Opera: it's a proxy browser which means: Your phone makes a request for www.curtpalme.com/forum to a bank of Opera's servers. Their servers fetch www.curtpalme.com/forum, compress and shrink the images, and re-format the text to fit on your phone screen with no horizontal scrolling needed. Once this is done, they send the page back to your phone, in my experience pages are reduced 1/5 - 1/10th of original size, making browsing the web really snappy and quick.
Opera Mobile - free browser from Opera (well the beta is free): This is a full featured browser that can handle nearly anything a desktop browser can, including Flash. The downside is no compression, so downloading the page is slower and the browser has more information to format, so drawing the page is slower as well, and the browser eats memory. Feels very sluggish compared to Opera Mini but I refuse to send money-related passwords through the proxy servers, that's when I use Mobile, so I don't use it much. The issue with passwords in Mini is that the password is encrypted from you to the Opera Server, but the server decrypts your password and sends it (encrypted again) to the real web site. Since the proxy server must know the password in order to pass it along to the web site, I only use Mini for low-security stuff (email, forums, etc). Basically you must trust Opera for everything you load through Mini.
Internet connection sharing - This can happen a few ways. If you have ActiveSync (microsoft - free) installed on your computer, you can hook your phone up via USB and charge battery / transfer files / share your phone's internet connection with your computer. I think this can also happen via Bluetooth. The downside is you need Activesync.
A better method is if your phone has wifi, you can use a program called WMWifiRouter to create your own ad-hoc wifi network which any computer can connect to. You can also secure your network which is always a good idea. Imagine you and your wife stop somewhere for the night and you have two laptops. Load WifiRouter on the phone and in a few seconds you can both connect to the network and the internet. It's really pretty sweet, and it's a feature I use a lot. Needless to say it drains the battery like a bitch, it probably would last an hour of constant broadcasting so it's good to have it plugged in while sharing via wifi.
Let me know if you have questions about anything else, or need more details.
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greg_mitch
Joined: 03 May 2006
Posts: 5320
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| Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 5:43 pm Post subject: |
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| CRT_Ben wrote: | | macgyver655 wrote: | | Ok, I'm lost on this. Can you explain better or give me some links? Thanks |
Let me preface this: In order to get the most out of any windows mobile phone you will have to spend a good amount of time tweaking it, and have some reasonable computer knowledge. I know you like to tweak but I don't know your computer skill-set, you don't have to be a genius but you need to be fairly competent.
IMO almost every windows mobile (from here on WM or winmo) phone is useless right off the shelf. Maybe this has changed since my phone is a few years old now but if it just comes with regular old WM 6.1, the interface blows. WM 6.5 is not released yet but the good folks at www.ppcgeek.com and http://www.xda-developers.com keep getting their hands on development builds, and even in dev state it's way better than WM 6.1. In general, with 6.1 or 6.5 you'll need some third-party programs to really take advantage of what the phone can do. Anyhow, I'll try to keep this limited to web surfing and internet sharing.
Opera Mini - free browser from Opera: it's a proxy browser which means: Your phone makes a request for www.curtpalme.com/forum to a bank of Opera's servers. Their servers fetch www.curtpalme.com/forum, compress and shrink the images, and re-format the text to fit on your phone screen with no horizontal scrolling needed. Once this is done, they send the page back to your phone, in my experience pages are reduced 1/5 - 1/10th of original size, making browsing the web really snappy and quick.
Opera Mobile - free browser from Opera (well the beta is free): This is a full featured browser that can handle nearly anything a desktop browser can, including Flash. The downside is no compression, so downloading the page is slower and the browser has more information to format, so drawing the page is slower as well, and the browser eats memory. Feels very sluggish compared to Opera Mini but I refuse to send money-related passwords through the proxy servers, that's when I use Mobile, so I don't use it much. The issue with passwords in Mini is that the password is encrypted from you to the Opera Server, but the server decrypts your password and sends it (encrypted again) to the real web site. Since the proxy server must know the password in order to pass it along to the web site, I only use Mini for low-security stuff (email, forums, etc). Basically you must trust Opera for everything you load through Mini.
Internet connection sharing - This can happen a few ways. If you have ActiveSync (microsoft - free) installed on your computer, you can hook your phone up via USB and charge battery / transfer files / share your phone's internet connection with your computer. I think this can also happen via Bluetooth. The downside is you need Activesync.
A better method is if your phone has wifi, you can use a program called WMWifiRouter to create your own ad-hoc wifi network which any computer can connect to. You can also secure your network which is always a good idea. Imagine you and your wife stop somewhere for the night and you have two laptops. Load WifiRouter on the phone and in a few seconds you can both connect to the network and the internet. It's really pretty sweet, and it's a feature I use a lot. Needless to say it drains the battery like a bitch, it probably would last an hour of constant broadcasting so it's good to have it plugged in while sharing via wifi.
Let me know if you have questions about anything else, or need more details. |
I would disagree about it being "useless". What are you comparing it to? My WM6.1 Pro came with Opera already installed.
Did you pay for WMWifirouter? I see it is $30 on the website. I also saw a few on the torrents.
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CRT_Ben
Joined: 28 Aug 2006
Posts: 1684
Location: Northern Virginia
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| Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 6:06 pm Post subject: |
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| greg_mitch wrote: | I would disagree about it being "useless". What are you comparing it to? My WM6.1 Pro came with Opera already installed.
Did you pay for WMWifirouter? I see it is $30 on the website. I also saw a few on the torrents. |
I'm comparing the operating configuration that came on my VZW XV6800 vs. the heavily modified, software-rich 6.5 install I'm running now.
When I bought my phone it came with NONE of HTC's software, not HTC home, HTC task manager, nothing. So you're stuck with the stupid WM6 "Today" screen, a Contacts interface that requires a stylus, hell the entire OS requires a stylus, there's no finger scrolling, the scrollbars are too thin to hit with your thumb, the only browser it came with was the steaming pile of worthlessness known as Pocket IE. Verizon also locks down the standalone GPS and internet sharing.
Now I have an operating system with touch scrolling throughout, redesigned home screen (Titanium, complete with weather, etc.), redesigned start and settings menus, unlocked GPS with Google Maps and iGo 8, internet sharing six ways from Sunday, iContact application, fantastic browsers in Mini and Mobile (mini especially), Youtube apps, mobile AIM, Audio Manager (much better media player), PDF reader LE, hell I even have Shazam (stuff it iPhone owners  ). There's literally no comparison, this phone off the shelf does not live up to it's potential in any way shape or form. I'm glad it's changing as you have noted - there's no reason that users should have to spend 50 hours trying different ROMs, finding out which third party programs are the best, hard resetting, changing settings, etc. Until just recently the software side of things has been completely ignored by manufacturers and carriers, which is beyond stupid. The hardware is capable of so much but the software sucks ass.
WMWifiRouter is free sub v1.0 I think. I run v0.89.
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greg_mitch
Joined: 03 May 2006
Posts: 5320
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| Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 6:18 pm Post subject: |
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I guess I have Samsung's TouchWiz interface...so I keep forgetting about standard WM6.
although if you get a phone that isn't entirely touch screen (which a lot of WM phones aren't) then the scrolling is acceptable.
WM wasn't designed with touch in mind and touch has just exploded in the past few years. How many ALL TOUCH devices were there two years ago?
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