Leaving Verizon.

        Well I finally did it, I've been a Verizon subscriber since I first had a cell phone. Whether that be on my own account or with my parents family plan. It wasn't the easiest decision in my life, in upstate NY nothing gets coverage quite like Verizon. Everyone and their mother has Verizon. Especially back in my home town, a tiny little place called Spencer with a population of about 1000, you had no choice but Verizon if you actually wanted to make calls. But with my recent move to Saratoga Springs, my coverage has changed dramatically.

        First step was to figure out which would be financially best. I was spending $185 a month at verizon for 3 lines. 2 with unlimited data, and one that was just used as a dumb line to upgrade through so I could keep our unlimited. That was what made it the hardest decision, I had 2 lines with unlimited, you don't see that very often anymore. The only thing was, it's wasn't worth the cost. Some months I would use up to 11 or 12 gigs of data, but most often I stayed around 3. This was mainly with me deliberately not using wifi, so I figured if I just turned on wifi every now and again I could easily keep it under 2 gigs and go to any carrier I wanted. 

        When I came right down to it, T-Mobile offered by far the cheapest option, and since I work right here in town and have consistent coverage it was an easy choice. For about $100 a month, I get unlimited talk, text, and data for 2 lines. As far as coverage goes, I get voice pretty much everywhere, but data is a little shotty. I get 4G LTE at my house, which is awesome, and it's holds decently around the town. The fact that I'm not on a contract was a huge plus, and with two financing plans on the account, it still clocks in under $140 and is cheaper than anything else that would offer similar offerings. And just for the sake of saying it, I'm not interested in prepaid of any kind. So far I am very happy with everthing they offer, customer service is great, and my coverage is leaps and bounds better than I anticipated. 

        My wife went with an LG G2, which is an amazing device that I will be writing up a post about later. I also went with the G2 at first, but once the Nexus 5 info started rolling a little bit more I returned the device and decided to wait. I am now currently staring at the tracking page of UPS and waiting for it to say "out for delivery". It will be here on tomorrow and I am freaking out in anticipation. Needless to say I will be writing a major post about it as soon as I get my hands on it. Lastly one of the biggest upsides to being on T-Mobile is that I can bring nearly any unlocked device onto my account, which will hopefully turn into something huge for me since my goal is to review as many devices as possible. Needless to say I am on the T-Mobile bandwagon now and look forward to anything else they bring in the future.

Back to Blogging.

Well it's been quite a while since I've posted something one here. My last job had me working 10 hours a day, and restricted me from using the computer for personal stuff such as this. Luckily I got a new job and this one will open a lot of time for me to do this more often. I didn't realize how much time goes into something like this. From deciding what to type up, to constantly worry about spelling errors and sounding stupid, it can take me 30 minutes or more just to type up something simple; it's just the way I am. But I am looking forward to spending more time doing this, and hopefully have much more to write about, but I'll get to that later. From here on out I will be able to post 3-4 times a day starting out, and have a lot of good stuff to write about. Such as switching off of Verizon (finally), to getting a Nexus 5 (still waiting for it to get here). So needless to say it'll start tonight, and carry on at a much faster pace from now on. I'll get better at writing, and taking pictures to post up here. I'll do very thorough reviews of devices, cover occasional news starting with the big stuff such as products announcements, and company changes. Bare with me as this becomes a more routine action.

The Ultimate Switch, Dun Dun Dun.....

          Well unfortunately this post will be thrown onto the inter-web sans pictures. I just never managed to snap any pictures of my brief time with the iPhone 5. Well anyways, to start it off with just a few brief words; I loved my time with the iPhone. I have always refused to use them on the basis of my hatred for the company. I don't use their mp3's, phones, tablets, laptops, or computers. I just hate the way Steve Jobs went about running the company. Don't get me wrong, there is a reason they got as big as they are, obviously. I just don't like some of the ways they went about it. But that is neither here nor there. From a daily usage stand point the iPhone 5 did everything I needed it to and then some. I still plan on using android indefinitely, but I would like to have one around to switch things up. Keep in mind, almost my entire time with the 5 was on iOS 7, ok lets continue.

What I liked:

          Performance - One of the main things that I liked, and is always the argument to go with iphones, is how smooth it was. And I'm not just talking about from a UI stand point, everything ran very smoothly. Games loaded quick and ran great, web browsing was fast, comparable to that of my Note 2. Transitioning from phone calls to text to video chatting, I never noticed so much as one stutter or lag. I knew to expect something simple and smooth, but this improved upon my expectations.

          Camera - I'm not a photographer by any means. Pretty much all I do with a camera is snap a quick picture of my cat because she is doing something cute, or sneak of picture of my wife because god forbid I have a picture of her that she wasn't ready for. With that being said I loved the camera, I'm not sure if it was more the software or not but it always focused quickly, adjusted for lighting, and of course the shutter speed was as quick as I needed it to be. Either way, be it software or hardware, I liked the camera of the iPhone 5 very much for the short time I used it.

          Gaming - Even though I kind of touched on this in the Performance section, I really enjoyed the gaming on the 5. I spent more time than I'm willing to admit on Deer Hunter 2014. Despite the small screen I was able to operate the on screen controls easily, and see everything clearly. Aside from that, I didn't really try any other 3D intensive games, mostly just little ones like Candy Crush and Dots. Which it burned through with ease, which I would love to say was obvious, but my wifes S3 is the most pitful thing I've ever seen when it plays Candy Crush. Slow animations, freezes, jumpy music, it's just not good.

          Screen - I don't really have to much to say here. It's a nice screen that is very pixel-dense. The colors are accurate, lines and text are crisp. It gets rather bright, good for outdoor usage. Really the only bad thing about it is size, and I will get to that later.

          Over-all size - This will contradict what I'm about to say, but I loved the size of this phone. Coming from my Note it was a beautiful gift from god. To be able to use my phone with only one hand is great, and the fact that I don't have to take it out of my pocket when I sit down in the car is a big plus. It's thin, but not to thin. Light, but not to light. Just a great feeling phone.

In the Middle:

          Battery Life - The battery on the 5 was so-so. It can definitely get you through a days usage with moderate use. You know, texting, calling, some small games and browsing. But once I kicked on the Deer Hunter and had a free hour, I could drain half the battery. Even browsing the web, with constant page loads and refreshes, would drain the battery some. Like I said, on my busy days at work it was great, had charge left over at the end of the day. But when I had some free time and wanted to have some fun, it left a lot to be desired.

          UI - While the fluidity of the UI was a nice change of pace (not saying android isn't fluid, it is, it's just a different feel) it had a lot of quirks about it that I didn't like. The biggest annoyance was that there is not up-front back key. Some apps push you though lots of pages and settings to do different things, and usually there is a back tab in the top left, who's placement I don't care for. But when you're in a game or webpages and you just want to go back to the last thing you were doing, it'd be nice to have a static button some where, whether it be onscreen or not, to go back with. Especially in the browser, it really annoying to drag the screen around, or tap the adress bar every time I want to go back a page. Also I hate the new multitasking view, I liked the old view much more, the approach stock android takes. When you open it on iOS you only see one app in the center of the screen, and the sides of one each, left and right. It just makes it a little annoying to scroll back a few apps, as opposed to the old way, where you would just see the bunch of icons and select it, you already knew what you were viewing, you don't need a thumbnail to tell you what you were looking at.

What I didn't Like:

           Screen Size/ Keyboard - I know I just said that I liked this before, but let me clarify. I hate how small text is. The keyboard just feels super cramped, I know I'm probably a little jaded coming from a huge screen, but still. Typing on this thing was a nightmare, I was always hitting the wrong letter or pressing send or space when I didn't mean to. Again this is probably just me being suck-ish at typing on something small, but I just really didn't like it. Also certain webpages were a little hard to get at a comfortable level of having enough on the screen, but also being zoomed in enough so I could read what was on there. I would sometimes end up having to scroll side to side to read paragraphs, and that can become a real nuisance.

          App crashes - I dealt with more app crashes on iOS then I was ever expecting. Every one has always told me that their iPhone "Just Works" but I found this to not always be true. But the huge difference I noticed, a detail that would help to keep this image up, was that when an app crashes it doesn't give you any sort of message that you had an app crash. It also didn't suffer to much from freeze ups, or black screens. Instead, the application would just stop, shut down and throw you back to your homescreen. Just a quick flash and you were back as if you never clicked anything. This happened with more than just games and downloaded apps too. I had it happen with the phone, texts, email, and plenty of times with the browser. But who knows, maybe I was just doing something wrong.......


In the End:

          At the end of the day I really enjoyed using the phone, and could have continued to use it for days; even weeks at a time. It offers good performance, decent battery life, a good screen, and a very manageable form factor. Will it ever replace android as my main device? Probably not, not yet at least. Who knows what will happen with iOS 8, but knowing apple I don't foresee it being some amazing change to pull me in, especially with the change that just took place.But for anyone looking to jump into the smartphone game, or someone already with a smartphone that likes a smaller phone, go for it.

One of each!! Time to really see which reigns supreme.

                   
                 Android has been my OS of choice for years now. Well to be fair, if webOS had stayed around for longer I can guarantee I would still be rockin' it. My start into the smartphone game was the Palm Pixi (I know, I know) and I absolutely loved it, but ever since I made the jump to the Droid X it's been non-stop android. Well now that the big 3 have gotten to a point where it's no longer a spec race, and each have all of the essential features, I have been very curious to put a decent amount of time into each to see which really "does it" for me. And through a string of lucky scenarios I have finally acquired one of each that are still pretty much high-end.

                 The Samsung Galaxy Note II, the Nokia Lumia 928, and the iPhone 5. Seeing as the next iPhones don't come out for another few days (and aren't really an upgrade as far as general user experience go) and Windows Phone being what it is, I have managed to snag the top dog for each of those OS's. My trusty Note II on the other hand has been around for some time now, I myself got this phone in November of 2012. Despite that, it still maintains a place at the top of the android score board. Between the 720p screen, quad-core processor, 2 gigs ram, and 8mp camera I am very satisfied to still use this phone for another 6 months at least. And as most people understand, being broke makes it very hard to stay at the top when it comes to android and all the different manufacturers. So I will try to get a more modern phone for future articles I may post.

                  I recently spent a full week with the Lumia and came away some what impressed. It super smooth, the camera is ludicrous, and it's super user friendly. All these made it super easy for day to day usage. And getting used to the UI is extremely easy as well. I had a lot more about it that I didn't like however. The lack of proper multi-tasking drove me insane. Coming from android I am super accustomed to just launching the recent apps menu and jumping around from games to sports scores to messages, etc. On Windows phone you can long press that back button and see a card style menu to go back to certain pages and screens you were at, but it never seemed to save my progress very well. For instance if I was in a conversation with some one and I came back to check up on if they responded it would throw me back into the main page for messaging, this was a little annoying. Another huge annoyance was the lack of notification light and notification center. Sure something would pop up on the top of the screen, or wake the screen if you weren't using the device. But if I was away from the phone for an extended period of time I would forget to check through my messages or missed calls because there was nothing there reminding me. Lastly, the lack of apps was hard to get used to. On my Note I have a few dozen loaded up, a lot of games, weather, sports, so on and so on. I couldn't seem to find any in the marketplace that I wanted, heck even Candy Crush wasn't there. And even some of the basic apps like Facebook were just slow and glitchy despite being there for so long. Needless to say I was pumped to go back to what I was used to. For anyone new to smartphones, or older people just wanted a simple phone to do basic task like call, text, email, and light browsing I say go for it. If you've been with a smartphone for a while though, be it android or iOS, stick with one of those two.

                And to wrap things up, I will be using the iPhone for the next week to really get used to it. I haven't had an iPod Touch in years and have had zero experience with an iPhone in general besides display units. So far it's not to bad, and I just updated it to iOS 7 a few minutes ago (which I'm not to fond of as compared to iOS 6, but we will see). But once that time comes I'll be writing up a much more thorough post about my impressions, and if it's enough to pull me away from android for a while.

iOS 7 is finally getting released tomorrow.

Despite having stated that I'm an android fan in the about me section, I like to keep up to date on everything out there. That being said, after months of beta testing, tomorrow iOS 7 is being pushed out to all compatible devices. Those out there with an iPhone 4 and up, iPad 2 and up, and the 5th generation iPod should be good to grab this OTA or through iTunes.  Keep in mind that the servers tend to get pretty bogged down on release dates, so don't be alarmed if it takes quite a while, or even fails mid-download. If the past is any indication the update should go live around 12 p.m. eastern, or 9 a.m. pacific time. I've got an old iPhone 4s that I'll be loading it up on to give my first impression on the final build tomorrow night.

Welcome to Techneval.

Being that this is the first post I don't really have a lot to say. Starting today I'll be throwing out posts regarding Android, IOS, Windows, Apple, Samsung, etc. Some will be news and others will be opinion pieces, depending on how exciting the tech world is on any given day. At first it will be mostly cell phone related articles. Over time I will start putting out more about tablets, laptops, games & apps (mobile and non-mobile), and accessories (such as smartwatches, cases and so on). It will take some time before I really get into a rhythm of how to keep everything looking good, like getting pictures and videos in proper areas. So please bare with me and keep coming back to check in on some new information.