Good bye bionic

[jntdroid]

I honestly was trying to avoid any debating of a beaten horse (That's why I said they were equal). Sure, according to the forums, yes the S3 has reception issues. According to the 4 people I know with an S3, they have no issues, whether it's 2 bars or 4. Just like the two others I knew with a Bionic never had data drops. The fact your experience is different than mine is proof neither is superior. What matters is clarity and consistency. I have not had any problems with data or reception on my S3. Wish I could say the same for my Bionic. Also theres a good handful of people who DIDN'T get great results from the ICS leak. And also as another mentioned, rooting/ROMing may not be an option for work phones.

While Motorola may have been king for many years, times are changing, and how great they were decades ago means little when their LTE devices don't seem to have that same quality of excellence. In time I'm sure that will change, but as of now.....And as much as I loved my Bionic, the fact you have to gut it open and tinker with it to get it to work is just a damn shame...


Edit: Also, my biggest issue with the whole "towers" defense (get it?), is my Rezound never ONCE dropped data OR calls. If it was TRULY a tower issue, then all LTE devices would suffer equally. It just doesn't add up....

You hit exactly the point I was trying to make when I asked about Moto's radios being on top. It seems to me it's mostly based on "tradition" - i.e., them being an old radio company that makes radios in a lot of areas in addition to cellphones and has historically done it well. Besides their history and their experience in other areas (which I'm not discounting, but that's not an end-all/be-all), I never hear anyone give any actual facts as to why it's the case - it's all experience-based stories with that "tradition" thrown on top. Throw in a few forums where people jump on the complaint bandwagon, and voila, your "facts" are set.

Here are a few of those preconceived ideas that, while probably have some truth, get thrown around too often, and too often problems (or successes) are blamed on these ideas:

Motorola makes devices that can survive a nuclear bomb and radios to go along with that.

HTC's are just cheap altogether.

Samsung makes pretty devices, but cheap materials, and boy do their radios suck.

LG... well it's LG... they're all cheap.

And I'm in the exact same boat as you k1ng. If it's based on experience, the Rezound kills the competition (at least early on anyway, when the others struggled so much). I've had every LTE phone since the Bolt (except the Charge), and the Rezound is the only one that, from the start, had very few issues with holding onto data. I'm sure the antenna stretching into that cheap back cover helped. I could say the same for the Inc2 - one of the best pre-ICS 3G devices out there.

Again, "tradition" is typically based in some truth, but we can't just assume any problems (or good things) are based on these preconceived ideas that are thrown around so often.

Edit: shouldn't it also be telling that radio software tweaks have fixed most (not all) of the problems on the devices that have struggled? The coding and algorithms that go into these things (4G, 3G, 1X, etc.) has to be more complex than ever before. And then there's also Verizon...

[Tillers_Rule]

To address some concerns:

If I decide to sell the Bionic vs. destroying it and posting it on Youtube, I will make it known. The Bionic reception is definitely better, at work and at home I'm 12 dBm stronger on the Bionic.

My gripes with the Bionic/Motorola/Verizon: I picked up the phone the day the Galaxy Nexus came out due to the Bionic being $100 cheaper. A few weeks later I went and got another $50 back. Had I know this was the forgotten child of Motorola I wouldn't have purchased the phone. I could care less about OS as long as the phone works, but it doesn't and if the OS upgrade is the solution, then release it already. ICS coming in January, February, Late March, early April, June, end of summer, end of Q3, start of Q4. Really? Release the stupid upgrade already. I call Verizon to gripe about my 4g drops. "Software update coming next month, here's a new SIM card in the meantime. Thanks for nothing! If the 4g drop solution is so easy, where's it at??? I'm not going to root my phone to get it. I pay Verizon ~$90 a month for a working phone, make it work, that's why I pay. Signing a two year contract for a phone that works for half that time is unacceptable. Google has Jellybean out now. So the 'flagship' Bionic is now 2 OS's behind. Great job Motorola, or Verizon. I don't care who's to blame. I give Verizon my $$ every month so as far as I'm concerned, they are to blame. I don't care if you don't sign a contract for your phone, I did, as do millions of other people, suckers, whatever. I learned my lesson this time.

Will the signal strength difference on the Galaxy equate to more dropped calls, worse voice quality, poorer service? I don't know, time will tell. But I'm not paying for it and it's just another smart phone. If it's that bad, then on the next phone. It's amazing to me how many people defend such a piece of junk phone as if they have a personal stake in it's design, operation, profitability. If it's that bad, one shouldn't accept it, gripe, complain, do what it takes to make it right. Let the carrier know how crappy it is. In no way should this phone be worse than the OG Droid I had, but it's much worse.

Good night

[FoxKat]

It's also more than Decibels of signal as well. It has to do with sensitivity, frequency stability, RF Interference rejection, signal to noise ratio, noise floor, threshold capture, adjacent channel rejection, etc. The list goes on and on. I have plenty of radios, base stations, walkies, ham, Citizen's band, Business band, and as well as entertainment radios, and I can tell you that some of my best sounding radios don't need much signal at all to sound crisp, clear and quiet. On the other hand, those which "peg the meter" are full of noise and bleed-over. Take a dirty signal and amplify it to the input stages of the receiver and you'll peg the meter but the sound will be horrible. In the digital communication world, noise translates to errors, and errors translates to lost data packets, and lost data packets results in fragmentation, distorted audio and dead silence.

It's VERY difficult to "hear" the difference in radio quality between one phone and another now that we're all digital, but when it was analog it was EASY. Sure, there's "call quality" which is a measure of the quality of the sound coming across, but I'm speaking specifically of communication quality as it relates to getting a specific sound or data packet from location A to location B via airwaves with as little loss or distortion as possible. Some radios had fading and hiss and scratchiness in the background, sometimes the noise was so loud it overtook the audio, until eventually the call would drop. And then there were other radios which would hold the signal, cut through the noise and keep the call.

Back in the Analog radio day, when the Motorola car phones were INSTALLED ONLY, and then someone got the bright idea to put a INSTALLATION KIT into a shoulder bag, build a platform of plastic or metal inside the bag to hold the cradle for the handset, and then a hole drilled through for a hole-mounted antenna with a hinge, and place a 12 volt lead-acid battery in the base under the transciever, the "transportable phone" was born. I was in that business from the start. I worked for Bell Atlantic Mobile and was there from the beginning. I had one of the first installed car phones in my car in my entire region. I can tell you lots of what makes one transciever better than another.

I also held the first Motorola 8000X phone that was ever delivered to any Bell Atlantic Mobile dealership in the Philadelphia region of Pennsylvania (the world's first portable cellular phone - invented by Dr. Martin Cooper at Motorola, no surprise there!). I made calls on it. I've used, installed, serviced, played with, owned and assisted others with literally hundreds of different phone models from different manufacturers, and from car installs to transportables to portables to hand-helds, to today's ultra-slim smartphones (my RAZR MAXX to be included). I have experienced the good, the bad, the ugly and the really good and really ugly. I can tell you that no other manufacturer was more consistent with ANY transciever I've ever compared it to than Motorola radios, and I've tested some really high-end Kenwood, Yaesu, ICOM, Unicom, Lafayette, and the list goes on and on. One thing's for certain...more often than any other manufacturer, the Motorolas did what they were made to do...talk and listen.

Sure, as was said above, all companies can put out a good radio at one time or another, and just like all of them, Motorola had their infrequent bomb as well, but nobody was as consistent across the board as they were, and I believe they still hold that distinction.

Edit: shouldn't it also be telling that radio software tweaks have fixed most (not all) of the problems on the devices that have struggled? The coding and algorithms that go into these things (4G, 3G, 1X, etc.) has to be more complex than ever before. And then there's also Verizon...

And to further piggyback onto jntdroid's comment above, the truth is much of what makes a cellular phone a good phone or data transciever is now on the digital side of the equation. In other words, the radios only take what is coming across the airwaves and produce a waveform of that data into electrical impulses, and vice versa. It's most often the quality of the encoding and decoding of that signal that determines whether the communications are consistent or not. And a big part of that equation is also on the tower side and how it is able to pick up and hold that connection to the portable or mobile phone while it moves hither and fro, and with handshaking and hand-offs transfer to another adjoining tower that has a lot to do with the consistency as well. Some equipment is just better at that volatile connection than others. I like to call it controlled chaos.

You couldn't ask for a worse combination of circumstances under which to maintain consistent communications of high-speed data and voice than cellular communication. You are dealing with mere milliwatts of power (about 250mw on average) from the hand-held or less, an antenna that's surrounded by metal, circuit boards, ICs, a battery and your hands, body, car, house, sky-scraper, earth, and all the while moving, and yet it is able to maintain a near 100% full-duplex communication with only millisecond differences between send and receive, and without losing a beat. It's really quite amazing if you dig deeply and understand what's going on.

So now, you can have the absolute best "radios" on the planet in that phone, but if the digital part of the equation is failing it can "appear" to be a poor radio that's causing the failure, and likewise in reverse but to a lesser extent. So before you start pointing at one or another's "radio" as the culpret in the failures, consider it's now a very small part of the equation, but still mission-critical.

[Bionic_Racer]

Ive had the phone for a while now and have never had any data drops whether in 3g or 4g areas, honostly.

[Tillers_Rule]

Very good history lesson Foxcat! Thanks, I do enjoy reading up on this stuff. I remember sitting in a few all-hands meetings where we got to meet some of those guys (Morgan O Brien, Tim Donahue, Craig McCaw) and back in those days (not really THAT long ago) there was much enthusiasm and excitement to work for the company

A bit on my background, for what it's worth.

I'm an RF engineer with roughly 13 years experience in the cellular field, I've been designing and optimizing cellular networks for the past decade or so. I have plenty of Motorola experience as I worked for Nextel since they were just a baby company. We had nothing but Motorola radios and BTS's, it was a proprietary design that Motorola had exclusive license to. When the first Blackberry came out it was a huge deal. Fast forward we are now shutting the iDEN network down. We shut off 1/3 of the iDEN cell sites just this past June. Yea, Motorola knows/knew their sh!t. In my own opinion they spread themselves too thin, like many companies do. Nextel phones were easy and cheap to produce. They didn't have data (packet and circuit date at 14K or something like that). I was always loyal to Motorola and truth be known, this Galaxy is my first non-Motorola phone since I've owned cell phones. Had an old Startac, then went through a dozen or so Nextel Motorola's, we merged with Sprint and they quit buying us phones, so I picked up the Droid 1, then Bionic. Now I'm trying something new. Signal quality, level, SQE, RSSI, EC/I0, whatever, time will tell what the real world delivers.

Of course Motorola has good radios, they should go back to car stereos and stick to something they know! Obviously a joke, but they do have quite the radio background, but phones are so much more than radios these days.

[FoxKat]

So, Tillers_Rule, you and I do have a bit in common. I agree with everything you're saying and your last line (the part AFTER the joke), is essentially what I was saying in my last few paragraphs, only difference between you and I...I take 3 paragraphs to say what you did in 10 words!! LOL!

And Bionic_Racer, I couldn't agree with you more. I can't remember the last time I lost data or dropped a call, but it's easily years for calls, and perhaps a year or more for the data side of things (other than when the Verizon 4g debacles were happening and was being blamed on SIM cards).

[Dave12308]

It's amazing to me how many people defend such a piece of junk phone as if they have a personal stake in it's design, operation, profitability. If it's that bad, one shouldn't accept it, gripe, complain, do what it takes to make it right. Let the carrier know how crappy it is. In no way should this phone be worse than the OG Droid I had, but it's much worse.

Trust me, if I had even ONE moment where my Bionic had failed me; I wouldn't be defending it at all. But for whatever reason, in MY GEOGRAPHICAL AREA the Bionic is and has always been a rock-solid device. Every bit as good as my OG Droid and in some cases even better. Don't ask me why this is, I have no idea what the tower configuration is in my area vs. areas where people have nothing but issues. It just goes to prove, different people have totally different experiences. Trust me, I am one of those people that have absolutely NO qualms with paying full retail to get a new phone if I am not happy with the one I currently own. If the Bionic really were a "piece of junk phone", i'd have moved on long ago.

[smokeyrd]

I had a bionic before this razr and it was rock solid for a long time....until .905 happened...then it broke. I honestly feel like tueres something going on with moto as to why the bionic and to a lesser extent the razr are having similar problems. Maybe involving the later releases of motoblur? In my experience when running a different rom the phone cooperated with me perfectly but when running stock/root thats when i had issues. Just my 2 cents but i believe the hardware is great...software not so much

Tap tap tappin on my Razr MAXX

[Dave12308]

I had a bionic before this razr and it was rock solid for a long time....until .905 happened...then it broke. I honestly feel like tueres something going on with moto as to why the bionic and to a lesser extent the razr are having similar problems. Maybe involving the later releases of motoblur? In my experience when running a different rom the phone cooperated with me perfectly but when running stock/root thats when i had issues. Just my 2 cents but i believe the hardware is great...software not so much

Tap tap tappin on my Razr MAXX

I will say, given all the issues people had with .905 specifically, THAT'S a build that should have failed the soak test. The soak test thread was FILLED with people reporting issues, but for whatever reason it wasn't stopped in its tracks. I do think that Motorola's LTE radio chip was designed with ICS in mind, and just doesn't always "play nice" with Gingerbread.

[bluezdawg]

To the OP, best of luck with the S3. Been watching the forums and considering heading that direction soon. I've resigned myself to the fact that if you want the latest & greatest, you'll have to do the hardware shuffle, unless of course you are content installing, leaks, mods, ROMs etc.

I'm not going to harp to much about the Bionic, it has served it's purpose and I've enjoyed tinkering with it! But IMHO Motorola wants the Bionic to go away, so I'll play the game, just with another vendor most likely. Was hoping to catch the ICS OTA on the Bionic to give it a ride, but convinced that is not going to happen soon (no time to play with leaks). If it does happen soon, cool. Have done a number of soak tests, but this one has gone quiet.

As far as many of the previous posts, lots of great opinions and experiences which are differing. That's how it is, and that's what keeps it interesting!

Anyway, enough of my babbling I have enjoyed this forum and consider many posters amongst the brightest and most engaging. Will be fun to keep and eye on the forum when I do choose to move on!


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