Nexus 4 is friggin awesome.

[mekender]

Picked up the S4 today, so far I am very impressed... Still getting used to it, for one the back button is on the opposite side of where it is on my Windows 7 phone. Overall, it is a pretty cool little (bigger than my old phone!!) device.

[Greg]

Bit of a necro post, but I have an interesting (to me, anyway) update.

Now that T-Mobile has been firing up an actual LTE network, I took the time to do some work on my Nexus 4.... You see, thanks to some fortuitous accidents of design ancestry the Nexus 4 has all the hardware needed to support Band 4 LTE. Which happens to be the band TMo is using for LTE. It's not officially supported, was not submitted for FCC certification, has been disabled in software, etc etc.

But the hardware is there and with some playing around in software and system configuration you can get the LTE support working. There's a bit of a community built up around it, such that some clever folks have even put everything you need, software and system-config-wise into a single flashable .zip. Using it is technically naughty, but that doesn't seem to be slowing anyone down.

Oh, if you have Android device encryption turned on and you want to do a system image (Nandroid) backup, you need to be using TWRP as your recovery as it seems to be the only one right now that knows how to handle an encrypted filesystem.

Anyway, I was successful. Tmo's LTE network is live in my area. Testing and a few days of use have shown that the speeds I see are fairly similar to what I saw on HSPA+, but that signal strength and/or availability is more consistent (would make sense, with a new network and fewer people trying to use it). One nice thing is that latency is consistently lower.

Though a minor little gripe- I don't get LTE at my desk. Just like I don't get HSPA at my desk. I get both in other parts of the building, particularly the cafeteria and both bathrooms I normally prefer to use, but not at my desk. Oh well, maybe that's for the best.

[Greg]

I'm sitting in Kearny Arizona at the moment (long story, will write elsewhere), and as I was in north Idaho, using my phone as my internet connection.

Kearny is 90 miles from Phoenix, in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. I'm on Verizon 3g out here, but offpeak hours I'm still getting as much as 2.4 megabit per second.

So far, the best I've seen on Verizon 4g LTE is a bit less than 40 megabit per second, and speeds well over 20mbit are not rare.

And to think, I was paying $140 a month for microwave at 1.5mbit.

Thank god I'm grandfathered on true unlimited unthrottled data...

That's really good. Don't let that grandfathered unlimited data go.

The best I see is around 9 Mb down, 2+ Mb up. Though one time recently I saw 8 Mb down and 8 Mb up. Fastest upload speed I've ever tested, anywhere. Network's not as good, coverage isn't in the same league... but it's a great bargain at $30/month.