ROM or stock

[HowardZ]

On my older Motorola Droid X the only reason I used ROMs was to get ICS. Every Rom I tried would break some function. As long as I did not consider the broken function as being important, it was ok. I used CM9, gummy, AOKP, and liquid. Currently CM9 is installed.

On the HTC Rezound, I suspect Roming will be the only way we will see jellybeans. CM10 will be jellybeans. Currently CM9 ICS has arrived for the Rezound.

My personal feelings are that I need to have a compelling reason to install a ROM. It must have some feature missing from the stock operating system which I find important.

My rezound is stock rooted with soff and unlocked, and will probably stay that way. I might play with a GSM ROM in the near future, but only for a little while.

I consider stock the best. I wish I had bought a galaxy nexus from Google and used T-Mobile. Then I would have jellybeans, unlocked phone, and no Verizon bloat.



This is unrelated to being rooted. Rooting allows making nandroud backups and titanium backups. Also WiFi teather, and the capability to perform minor customizations.

I feel very out of place at xda where everyone seems to jump into installing everything they read. They mix and match different firmwares - something I think is simply asking for trouble. Sometimes they get a phone so fubar'd that even installing an ruu won't fix it.

 

[Xander Crews]

The downside to T-Mobile is their network and coverage.
Their 4G isn't really 4G, just a suped up 3G that they say is 4G...but that's supposed to change next year when they launch a real 4G network. And their coverage is spotty.
I just switched from T-Mobile to Verizon a couple years ago because of their coverage. I'm glad we switched. Verizon blows T-Mobile away in terms of the speed of the network where we live and overall coverage.

When I signed up with Verizon, I hadn't cancelled my T-Mobile account yet because I wanted to try out Verizon on a temporary phone number for a few days at our house before I cancelled T-Mobile. It didn't take long for me to realize how superior Verizon was to T-Mobile. When I called T-Mobile a few days later to cancel, they asked why and I said it was because of Verizon's 3G network and coverage at our house. She then told me, "Well, just so you know, T-Mobile has faster 3G than Verizon." I almost choked from laughter. I told her that just isn't true and that I did numerous speed tests. Verizon's 3G was, on average, over twice as fast as T-Mobile's where we live, and that's when we even got T-Mobile 3G at our place...sometimes it would cut out and we'd be on EDGE...which sucks horrible suck.

I am considering rooting & roming my Rezound as well, but I'll only do that if I can run vanilla Android.
My Rezound runs great...and the Sense on ICS is actually quite good...but even with that said, I'd still rather be running vanilla. I just have that desire to be on a clean OS the way Google intended it to be. The last vanilla phone I had was the G1.

 

[HowardZ]

Recently I've started helping xda people with problems. Well I have learned that installing a ruu with a factory reset can't fix every screwed up phone. Apparently some data is stored elsewhere.

Today I screwed up Verizon's apn setting in my own phone by using a T-Mobile sim card and changing its apn settings. The changes stayed after going back to Verizon simm, and the Verizon apn is locked, can't change it.

I restored a nandroid backup, didn't help. I did an ruu, it didn't help. I installed the older .12 ruu, works. Reinstalled the global ruu, problem returns. I had to put back in the T-Mobile sim and undo the apn changes, which wasn't easy to remember. Then things worked again with the Verizon SIM.

The moral is there is magic in this phone. I have no idea where apn info is stored. It isn't in system, boot, hboot, data, nor cache partitions.

Anyway, in my area tests show T-Mobile is similar in speed to Verizon. So it depends if good data coverage exists at areas I live and travel through daily. I have read that T-Mobile has upgraded its HSPA 21 to be 42, twice as fast. but, I think some gsm phones can't do the 42mbps speed.

Anyway, my wife is against switching to T-Mobile because of her iPhone 4s, which probably can't make the transition without jailbreaking. If we switch our four phones to the T-Mobile monthly value plan, then our bill will be cut in half, though that means not getting a subsidized phone every two years.

So I am going to activate the T-Mobile sim to experiment if there is coverage at home. But to test data will require paying $30 for one month of data with 100 minutes of talk time.

 

[Xander Crews]

Anyway, in my area tests show T-Mobile is similar in speed to Verizon. So it depends if good data coverage exists at areas I live and travel through daily. I have read that T-Mobile has upgraded its HSPA 21 to be 42, twice as fast. but, I think some gsm phones can't do the 42mbps speed.

My T-Mobile vs. Verizon 3G comparison was done about 2 years ago. And where we live, Verizon coverage was much, much better and at our house, Verizon's 3G was much faster in numerous tests.
But again, that was a couple years ago. And if T-Mobile has upgraded HSPA, then yeah, maybe it's faster now.
Good to know...because when my contract is up in a couple years, I'd consider T-Mobile again if they are significantly cheaper.
It would be hard to leave Verizon's coverage though. We'll see what happens when the time comes to get a new phone. I'm going to ride my Rezound as long as I can, and when the time comes, my plan is to eventually buy a phone outright, maybe a phone that is 6 months old or so for a few hundred bucks...give or take.
I currently have zero plans of switching to Verizon's new tiered plans. We'd be paying a lot more per month on tiered.