Review: Britain's 4G smartphones It’s been a good few months since the first 4G LTE network fired up in the UK, and wiser men than I have already tossed their orbs about the what and the how of EE’s monopoly 4G network. Time then to consider the 4G handsets now available for use in Blighty, and in the process cast a beady eye on speeds and coverage outside the …
I must be an exception, I've seen 10+Mbps down with over 3Mbps up, I'm with Three...
I was surprised with the speeds I've seen, and can't see any reason to go to 4G, not until they improve battery life anyway!
But good review in all, and good advice in the end, stick with 3G :-D
Around December 2012, on my Note II on T-Mobile I could get between 10MB and 20MB download late at night and early AM because of the HSDPA+ dual channel arrangement. But T-Mobile now seems to limit the download speed and I cannot get above 4MB now! This is force people like me to go to EE!!!
HSPA+ is fine in locations where there isn't a lot of users all competing for the bandwidth. In city centres its a different matter. I've just run a quick test. On 3 using HSPA+ I'm getting 440K down and 40K up, with a 340ms ping. On EE I'm getting 19.72M down, 18.05M up with a 43ms ping. It's not hard to see which I'd rather use.
" iPhone 5 offered a state-of-the-art user experience if you’d never had a fondle of the latest competitor handsets" I made this comment and was slagged off by some of the ladies who frequent this place.
With regards to bustin' your data cap. Why would 4G make me download/browse/stream more content?
It's the same file, just getting to the handset faster.
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... but never lasts as long.
The merits of 4G aside, I do wish the phone manufacturers would put more effort into battery life. We've gone from phones and PDAs which would last most of the week to barely scraping though 24 hours.
A net connected personal device is great, and I use it every day, but how did end up in a situation where you feel nervous spending a full day away from a charging point?
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The things are near enough exploding anyway. There is only so much energy you can get into a little box, lithium batteries are already getting close to dynamite energy density, and I doubt many people will want energy cells based on RFNA and UDMH any time soon.
You used to be able to get big batteries for BlackBerries with bulging backs, but marketing departments are creating the expectation that new phones will have enormous screens and be very thin. That simply does not go with good battery life.
I used to get 5 GB for 7 pounds on a monthly contract with Three.
Download speeds are 3.5 Mbit and Upload 1.5 Mbit throughout the country.
Why pay for this LTE service when most likely it is only available in a handful of locations and then
falls back onto Three's network of 3.5 Mbits.
Three's 3.5MBits service is sufficient for watching several HD online movies at the same time.
You could easily watch a movie whilst downloading other stuff at the same time.
If you realy want fast speed on the go then join BT Fon by subscribing to BT Broadband for 23 pounds/month.
You get 10 GB fixed line download and unlimited wifi. Your more likely to be in range of a BT Fon wifi signal than this new LTE service.
23+7 = 30 pounds and hell of a lot more download allowance.
Your cheap £7 deal was SIM only and limited texts/calls. £31 includes a subsidised phone and unlimited texts/calls, its not a like for like comparison.
HD (at 720p) needs about 4Mbits/sec for decent playback. Unless 3 can AVERAGE more than that then no, it's not good enough for a single HD stream.
Non of the solutions you suggest will work well in a busy city centre, oh and the EE deal includes unlimited WiFi also.
BBC's iPlayer can do 1280x720 resolution (720p) using h.264 with a bitrate of 3.2Mbps and 192kbps audio.
This is fine for Three's service even at peak times. How many places is EE's LTE service available at and what bitrate does it offer at peak times?
Why would you want to be watching a HD stream on a mobile device anyway? The screen needs to be bigger than 30 inches for you to notice any difference.
1) Unless my maths are wrong then that's only a single stream inside of 3.5Mbit/sec rather than the MULTIPLE streams you were claiming.
2) You certainly won't get 3.5Mbit/sec all over the country at peak times. I'm not even reaching 0.5Mbit/sec at the moment, and that's with 5 bars of signal strength.
3) YOU were the one to mention HD streams. I can however see the difference between HD and SD on a tablet with a better than 1080p screen resolution (hint: you look at tablet screens from rather closer distances than a TV screen).
4) EEs 3G network is no better than 3's, but then you can get unlimited 3G contracts (data, texts and minutes) SIM only for £16 if you're not going to spend most of your time in a 4G area.
I am sorry EE is currently doing a lot of exaggeration which also gave me the bug.
You are right only 1 HD steam.
But I have to disagree a SD stream on a sub 10 inch screen is more than adequate. I regularly watch BBC iPlayer SD content on a 17 inch laptop from pretty close and its more than acceptable.
iPlayer has got the SD stream down to under 1.5 Mb/s.
"Why would you want to be watching a HD stream on a mobile device anyway? The screen needs to be bigger than 30 inches for you to notice any difference."
Maybe on a 30 inch screen sat across the living room from your eyeballs.
On a bus where the 10 inch screen is about a foot and a half from your face, you'll notice the difference.
As for whether it's worth me swapping from the unlimited-means-unlimited rolling monthly One plan from Three, and then forking out for an expensive new phone that has a battery-sucking 4G chipset in it.. nah.
Would have loved to see a Moto Razr HD compared to these. Or even the Moto RazrHD Extreme. Would most likely have blown the socks off even the note's battery life. Just sorry it's still a US-only device!
But as stated by someone else ... what kind of downloads are you doing with your phone that warrants a 12-40Mb/s baud? Should we be worried? Are you running some torrent app on your phone? Or are you using your phone as a concurrent hotspot for your PC's, Laptops, Media Streamer, Email / Web / FTP Server, Massive Data Centre, etc. at home? I'm sure you could do better in that case using a fixed line?
Let's face it, anyone taking on a 4G contract (especially over 24 months) before the other carriers launch their 4G services is kerayzee. The comedy 500Mb cap on a £31 pm contract will be gone as soon as EE have any actual competition and anyone stuck on one of those contracts will surely be kicking their early adopting selves.
The handset costs will also fall exponentially as the actual addition of 4G ability to an existing design is a fairly trivial and low cost process so plenty of 4G handsets will be available subsidised on £20-25 pm contracts too.
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Friend of mine was trying to tell me how shit my phone is and how his contract is awesome because his iToy was "free" from EE and he'll be getting a "free" 4G upgrade soon.
I did the math and pointed out that buying a sim-free phone and going for a rolling monthly contract meant that after the first 12 months I have already spent less than him, and with each passing month I spend even less than he does, for more-or-less the same type of phone plan. In fact I could buy a new phone outright every couple of years and still pay less than he does.
He didn't like that.
It remains to be seen if Orange coverage will improve. Where I live its laughable, you struggle with GPRS never mind 4G. O2 doesn't fair much better but at least I can make a call on O2. Vodofone seems to be the best. (other networks and sub-networks available)
What annoys me the most is that Siri doesn't work without 3G, so the hands free (in car) experience is poor - my old 3GS with Voice Control did a much better job of voice commands, now I just get "I'm not able to do this at this time" - progress eh??
Bottom line - Live outside London forget data being reliable it simply isn't and I can't see how 4G is going to change this (get on a Virgin train and travel up and down the country - do you get 3G for more that 30 mins in 2 hrs?). Come on mobile phone operators you take on average £200-£400 off us each year - you must try harder!!
People don't like mobile masts as they think it fries their brains but like huge TV masts, and in our village repeaters, because they cannot do without Bargain Hunt. Even then some of us have to rely on freesat because we cannot get a terrestrial signal. Mobile signal propagation is challenging, as is any radio signal, and up to now the spectrum available hasn't helped.
Just why do you need to stream that much data to your phone? Call me a cheap skate, but I pre-fill all the content I need onto my device and then I don't need a data budget.
We have all been conned that we actually need internet on the move, just how many pictures of cats do you need to upload to facebook whilst you're on the go?
A tad harsh, but I agree with your general comments. Perhaps if you can't get a decent fixed connection speed you'd want 4G speeds to support 5 simultaneous HD feeds for your household, but if you can't get decent ADSL, what are your odds of getting 4G coverage?
Speaking for myself, I'd rather have a reliable 3G 1-2Mb link that doesn't drop out every few seconds/miles. And I'm not talking about the wilds of Sutherland, but on the train from London to Manchester or the M4 outside the M25.
Following the OFCOM spectrum auction, I think 4G will have a much bigger impact than people are expecting. O2 has taken on a commitment to give 98% indoor coverage by 2017. Never mind the increased speeds, the increased coverage is looking much more interesting.
The biggest problem with 3G is its non-availability over so much of the country more than a decade after the 3G auction. 4G looks like it might finally give a decent communications network.
The article might have emphasized the support of the handsets for the five frequency bands that may be used for 4G. Any missing frequency for a handset will effectively reduce its 4G coverage. EE use 1800 MHz now, the auction has given them 800 MHz and 2600 MHz for later this year. The variation consultation should give them an option of 2100 MHz too.
Pricing is still screwed - I pay about £15 for 10Gb/month on a 30 day rolling contract with Three.
EE want £15.99 for 3Gb and to tie in for 18 months - sometimes I may get 4G speeds but Three and HSPA+ / DC-HSPA is already pretty fast - to the point of not really making a difference on normal use.
EE want £25.99 for 8Gb (so still not as much data) - which is their nearest plan but still almost 2x the price.
That's right, if you are on a 4G network, Windows Phone doesn't hand over from 4G to 3G properly, so the other party can't actually call you. It's a bit of an issue for something that is supposed to be a phone and happens rather more than anyone would like you to believe.
Apparently EE have raised it with Microsoft, Nokia and HTC, but still, I have a 4G phone on a 4G price plan that I can't do more than 3G+ on because the phone software is crap.
To be fair, one of the fixes in iOs 6.1 was because iPhone5 also had this problem, but still, six months later and the Lumias haven't been fixed. I could rant for ages, but frankly right now, I'm a little fed up and subdued and there is little point. I await the reduction in Tariff I get from EE for the remainder of my contract thanks to this...
And I know there are people out there who will say "Serves you right for buying a WinPhone"...
"Windows Phone doesn't hand over from 4G to 3G properly, so the other party can't actually call you"
I didn't experience any such problems with the Lumia 920 that Nokia provided though of course I can't speak for other 4G WP8 devices.
Long ago in the days of contracting, I talked myself into buying an Orange "high speed" card for my laptop (this was in the days before neat 3G USB dongles). What a mistake! Performance was scorching, just about everywhere I didn't need to use it, with Orange's "coverage map" turned out to be as big a work of fiction as the average politician's manifesto. Ten feet outside of central London it was down to a very ropey GPRS signal. Calls to Orange's customer support, whilst polite and as helpful as the staff could be, proved fruitless, and I decided i was being ripped off given the awful coverage. Looking at the coverage map for EE, which is WORSE than the old Orange map, and even without taking into account the "optimistic" picture it shows, there is no way I'm paying out for 4G any time soon!
I'm still at a loss for a use case when I seem to get ~9Mbit on 3G.
I guess... for gaming, or swapping large multimedia files - postproduction maybe? Keeping Debian distributions up to date?
Can't think of many other applications.I can stream HD-quality Netflix films on my Three account, and there's no official fair usage cap.
Note II for £40 on a 2 year contract from T-Mobile (including Employee Friends & Family Discount), and the 3GB £46 package with 40% off when I moved over to EE.
Without a discount, I wouldn't have touched the contract with a barge pole - and agree that the 3GB package is basically the 'minimum' package.
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