Gadgetory

what is going on everybody welcome to good to go I'm Noah crowd so I'm going to take a break from watching March Madness on my mobile device here hi and I'm James Kendrick and I'm gonna keep watching it while we're recording because that's just the way I roll if you're a better multitasker than I am I have no doubts about that anyway but now we all know how you doing today what's going on in Houston besides out you know the road to the Final Four well that's the big news here it's coming up as we know and I guess the other thing is the the big onslaught of 4G which keeps coming and hitting us right and left from all these companies although most of them were just calling it 4g quite frankly yeah yeah no I know the the ability of the American Marketing machine you know to do things to change that the international standards for what's called 4g just amazing I mean it is timely joking aside and I know we're both basketball fans and psyched to watch the the March Madness it is sort of timely though because because we were talking before the show and you were mentioning how Turner who's got the contract starting this year from March Madness did a really nice job with their iOS apps that I you know I i'm watching i think you might be watching in the background there as well and you know stuff like that streaming video is where the whole 3g versus 4g thing and all the stuff that goes along with it starts to really come into play it does and in fact it's the streaming video that it does so well which is going to really come into play with all these data caps from all these plans because as we know streaming videos is is the bad things you can do and eat up all your your your data cap and then get into overage fees then so my god this is so expensive what do i do i know i know i'm a la before i mentioned my latest experience before g i will point out james did it last week i'll do it this week if you're interested in sponsoring the show your logo here and yeah you know if you can hook James up with final four tickets since it's in his hometown it's in houston now I'm while I'm waiting with no tickets you know what to do just I'm all dressed up and no place to go drop us a line and you could sponsor the podcast um so I got this yesterday it goes on sale today it's verizon's first 4g phone the HTC Thunderbolt verizon turned on their LTE network up here in the in San Francisco Bay Area a while back and I've been playing around with the pantech modem the USB LTE modem the speeds have been phenomenal I was getting you know regularly 15 to 20 to 22 Meg's down and I you know regularly 10 in excess of 10 up and I know you had a chance to mess around with verizon's LTE I think even before it officially rolled out yeah yeah just before rolled out in Houston they hooked me up and I got on it and it's just it's a game changer it was regularly as fast or faster than my home internet connectivity which is fast yeah I love binds about that and I think it is the 4g technology to be quite not my experience I would agree i would say up until this point i actually was most impressed with with t-mobile's hspa+ where they had it turned on you know sprint was kind of first out of the gate in the US metropcs first out of the gate with an LTE phone to imam before verizon AT&T now you know it's almost like just to kind of throw their hat in the marketing ring they've got the they're callin 4g i did a write up yesterday the Thunderbolt versus the htc inspire 4G phone for AT&T no contest I did some testing in integra mode because the speed test app doesn't work on Thunderbolt Thunderbolt too fast for it and at least where i was testing you know exact same location both phones tethering the same way this computer you know whole thing Verizon was you know four to five six times faster than AT&T in some cases but the thing that you know you kind of alluded to when we first started talking data caps similar to you verizon's LTE just as fast for all intents and purposes is my home cable modem connection I would switch in a second except data caps and for the amount of data that you use with video and especially you know I we use streaming netflix all the time now on our home TV the living room TV set and that's all data and what the cable modem doesn't matter you pay flat fee but with a 4g modem you've got caps there you know this Thunderbolt for verizon 30 bucks a month standard smartphone plan unlimited LTE on the phone extra 20 a month you get two gigs of mobile hotspot service and probably that unlimited part in the phone is going to change you know before Val September yeah well they've also they're going to metered plans with LTE speeds for sure so James in your estimation take it all that into account and your experiences with the different providers you've used what would you say to somebody you know let's say you had a got an average consumer and then also somebody more of a business person you travel a lot or just somebody who use the device more than average you know on the go would you recommend stepping up to a 4G service now and if so or if not you know why I think if somebody's already a 3g customer and and that's working well I don't see running out and upgrading right away I mean for regular people wrote eventually yeah you're probably going to want to because I think in my experience the the real upside to the verizon 4g was the consistency of the connectivity as opposed to the i'm also sprint 4g wimax streamer and it works well you know when you've got coverage but the LTE network is just consistent it's just never it never fails and another thing along those lines because of the differences in technology of the LTE versus the others the verizon LTE suffers no signal degradation indoors right but the group pointing where they all all the others do in my experience no great website your bars drop and that means your speed drops LTE does not I was it's ironic for being somebody who's covered you know mobile for a while that the office i work at is in a known sort of sketchy cell phone reception area and when i first got a wimax device i was finding that literally moving it from my desk two feet to holding it slightly out the window next to my desk could make all the difference in the world that that's the line site stuff the business of that building penetration rather it's it's for real and i've had the same thing with LTE not not really a factor for me anyway so far yeah why max is particularly subject to the day interference problem i mean i routinely go outside and have super fast speeds and just walk through a door inside and see my speed drop by half rather write another in quite frankly it it's usually still fast enough but right but it does it's noticeable yeah i talked your over the past several days about sprint looking into a move to LTE you know at some point down the road I mean it really seems like you know all roads are kind of moving in that direction t-mobile kind of as a their longer-term plan to just keep bumping up the hspa+ capacity faster and faster but you know you think eventually it's all going LTE well that seems to be the technology to be I mean it's it's rolling out now it's solid so it's certainly a big convening factor for these others I don't know what they will do but I suspect yeah a lot of them are going to go LTE yet it's particularly important too because it's going to have as we saw in the zoom although it wasn't activated and probably on your Thunderbolt there I mean they use a sim card yep for the LTE service so that that opens up a lot right right right yep oh and you mentioned the data caption on the data caps are interesting because they're a big deal but for most kind of mobile use through the things are used to doing you know the web email instant messaging of various sorts even you know uploading and downloading work documents unless you're getting into lots of multimedia use lots of streaming video uploading video you know let like folks like us have to do for our work you're probably not going to hit those data caps in a lot of places but so but but it's kind of like a I mean it's like a drug once you start using it you realize you can do it and you realize you know like in my case the netflix coming through what have you you can hit those caps fast without realizing it and then you're in for all sorts of hurt when you get your overcharges yeah video is is the big culprit with that I i've been using mobile broadband for years and I I do not exceed my my monthly limits even though i use it heavily doing regular stuff but videos a different man all right well we promised each other silent promised to the audience to keep this one under wraps timewise this week so we should wrap it up james if people want more of you where can they find you what's going on on on your blog right now i'm at the mobile news blog on ZDNet and right now the hot topic is typically tablets because the ipad to launch it's on everybody's mind it should i get this or is this one a good competitor I mean yep I mean that's where all of the action is right now that's where the action is and what will go where the action takes us and find time to talk about the other relevant things as we see them all right well until next time from Oakland California San go hoyas I'm Noah Kravitz from technobuffalo com March Madness I'm James Kendrick James always a pleasure enjoy the madness we'll see if we can scrounge up some tickets to the Final Four and let's do it again next week all right let's do it alright see ya see ya you