New iDen Phone/Tablet..? Why couldnt stupid sprint make a hybrid like this..

[PwrdByKyank]

Ya look at how others who's customers like to use iden, can come out with devices running on UMTS for 3G and DC on iDEN and even come out with a phone/tablet of it. Ugh, all sprint ever did was say we cant. Woulda been cool though if they had only spent a little more time working bugs out and actually incorporated a iden/cdma or umts hybrid which worked well, wouldnt mind having a little of both worlds ya know?

Also seems like people who are saying boost wont get SDC phones might be correct because im looking at a similar model which is going to release and most likely for boost im assuming and its a straight wcdma phone

IronRock XT626
https://www.bluetooth.org/tpg/EPL_De...roductID=21686

XT611 (possibly for boost?)
https://www.bluetooth.org/tpg/EPL_De...roductID=19242

[bigsnake49]

Well, the second is a WCDMA phone for the European frequencies only. The first is a limited circulation item for NII. The hybrid train sailed a long time ago when Motorola could not make a hybrid that could roam on 850MHz frequencies.

[Evan702]

New iDen Phone/Tablet..? Why couldnt stupid sprint make a hybrid like this..

Because Sprint doesn't make either phones or tablets...

[pcsfan]

Well, the second is a WCDMA phone for the European frequencies only. The first is a limited circulation item for NII. The hybrid train sailed a long time ago when Motorola could not make a hybrid that could roam on 850MHz frequencies.

Trains dont sail and the ultimate failure of hybrids had nothing to do with roaming.More with battery life than anything else.

[bigsnake49]

Trains dont sail and the ultimate failure of hybrids had nothing to do with roaming.More with battery life than anything else.

Sorry, I was trying to choose between two cheesy metaphors. No, the hybrids had two problems. They were buggy as heck and had no access to voice outside of Sprint's native network. They might have had DC but not interconnect. Although people that used their hybrids strictly for DC were OK with that, others, mainly consumers, were not OK with that. Conversely there are places, though rare were you could get Sprint voice but not DC. So you had these inconsistencies of coverage that irritated people.

[pcsfan]

Sorry, I was trying to choose between two cheesy metaphors. No, the hybrids had two problems. They were buggy as heck and had no access to voice outside of Sprint's native network. They might have had DC but not interconnect. Although people that used their hybrids strictly for DC were OK with that, others, mainly consumers, were not OK with that. Conversely there are places, though rare were you could get Sprint voice but not DC. So you had these inconsistencies of coverage that irritated people.

The hybrids would last about half a day with the giant extended battery not acceptable for most Nextel customers.Sprints decision not to have 800 roaming was their call and was a dollar driven one.Nextel handsets had no roaming so where there was no Sprint Iden their was no coverage.Thus Sprints roaming charges on Iden was zilch.If they had 800 roaming it would have cost them a fortune and would have featured Verizons superior coverage.That was not what they wanted to do with the hybrids at all.People were not at all irritated by having CDMA voice and no DC.They were happy to be able to make a voice call with the extra coverage.Idens forte was never its phone side.The CDMA side was always more reliable for voice calls than Iden.People who used their Iden phones for DC mainly did not purchase hybrids for their was no reason to do so.

[NGeorge]

I think the no-roaming issue would have been OK if IDEN interconnect was available. There are MANY areas that have a usable IDEN signal, with little to no native PCS. Had the hybrids been able to use IDEN for voice when CDMA was not available, they would have been much more usable.

Although the coverage of a IDEN/1900 PCS device wouldn't have been the same as having IDEN/800 & 1900 CDMA, it would have been a lot better, as Nextel was pretty good about putting up sites in the "main" areas where Sprint relied on 850 CDMA roaming with PCS (too bad they don't seem to be converting some of these sites to CDMA and are still choosing to rely on roaming--I'm still holding out hope that before IDEN goes completely dead someone gets slapped and they do a flash-cut to CDMA, or put in the CDMA in the very last round of NV upgrades for these sites)

I knew someone who tried a I920 before he gave it up and went back to a I880... the biggest issue was that although DC would be available, voice would not--or he'd make a voice call that would keep dropping in areas where reliable DC was available.

That, along with horrid battery life, had to be the biggest failure. If the phones could have scanned PCS for voice and data--and not finding it, camped on IDEN for DC, voice, and (slow) data--as well as automatically switching to IDEN when finding itself with a CDMA carrier that was "just barely there" when trying to make a call--they might have been much more popular.

Sprint is horrible about putting their mind in that of a consumer in these sorts of respects: *WE* know what is going on--but joe consumer thinks "I can make a ***damn walkie-talkie call, but can't make a ****ing phone call... this thing SUCKS!"... same exact way their WiMax network went down: "It says I have 4G and shows 5 bars... but it keeps saying 4G is disconnected and now it's re-connected... and every time it does that, the ***damn browser says it can't connect to the site unless I completely reload--or the ***ing streaming radio cuts out and says it's disconnected... this thing SUCKS!" -- curse words included because that is EXACTLY the way the average consumer thinks when a thing just "doesn't work right".

--Nat

[Evan702]

I knew someone who tried a I920 before he gave it up and went back to a I880... the biggest issue was that although DC would be available, voice would not--or he'd make a voice call that would keep dropping in areas where reliable DC was available.

Why wouldn't voice be available if DC was available on his i920?

[NGeorge]

Why wouldn't voice be available if DC was available on his i920?

I meant ic902... the hybrid flip. Got the numbers confused lol

[pcsfan]

I think the no-roaming issue would have been OK if IDEN interconnect was available. There are MANY areas that have a usable IDEN signal, with little to no native PCS. Had the hybrids been able to use IDEN for voice when CDMA was not available, they would have been much more usable.

Although the coverage of a IDEN/1900 PCS device wouldn't have been the same as having IDEN/800 & 1900 CDMA, it would have been a lot better, as Nextel was pretty good about putting up sites in the "main" areas where Sprint relied on 850 CDMA roaming with PCS (too bad they don't seem to be converting some of these sites to CDMA and are still choosing to rely on roaming--I'm still holding out hope that before IDEN goes completely dead someone gets slapped and they do a flash-cut to CDMA, or put in the CDMA in the very last round of NV upgrades for these sites)

I knew someone who tried a I920 before he gave it up and went back to a I880... the biggest issue was that although DC would be available, voice would not--or he'd make a voice call that would keep dropping in areas where reliable DC was available.

That, along with horrid battery life, had to be the biggest failure. If the phones could have scanned PCS for voice and data--and not finding it, camped on IDEN for DC, voice, and (slow) data--as well as automatically switching to IDEN when finding itself with a CDMA carrier that was "just barely there" when trying to make a call--they might have been much more popular.

Sprint is horrible about putting their mind in that of a consumer in these sorts of respects: *WE* know what is going on--but joe consumer thinks "I can make a ***damn walkie-talkie call, but can't make a ****ing phone call... this thing SUCKS!"... same exact way their WiMax network went down: "It says I have 4G and shows 5 bars... but it keeps saying 4G is disconnected and now it's re-connected... and every time it does that, the ***damn browser says it can't connect to the site unless I completely reload--or the ***ing streaming radio cuts out and says it's disconnected... this thing SUCKS!" -- curse words included because that is EXACTLY the way the average consumer thinks when a thing just "doesn't work right".

--Nat

The reason the hybrids were intoduced was to at all costs take traffic off of the Iden network which was way oversold and over capacity.In fact initially hybrid sales were restricted to urban markets for Nextel which were way over capacity and if you could make a voice call you either got a system busy or a dropped call.DC on Iden used less bandwith than a voice call and was more reliable.Cdma was far better for voice calls.There was never in their design any intention to allow for voice on Iden .The need was to take the load off Iden and route it to the much higher capacity and far more reliable Cdma network period.Hybrids were never designed to be the holy grail for coverage.Sprint needed to reduce the load on Iden which was not very spectrum effecient to start with.

[NGeorge]

That may very well be true--but by completely cutting off IDEN voice, it made a horrible end-user experience.

I agree that CDMA is much more reliable (and better sounding) network for voice--but I still say that a much better solution would have been to include the IDEN voice, lock it down so that there was no way to set the phone to "IDEN only" -- but scan and camp on IDEN when no 1900 CDMA was around, or if a call was placed and the phone either couldn't connect the call (due to a very weak CDMA signal), or had something below say a -102 signal. The end-user experience would have been nothing any worse than a 20 second wait before the call connected & rang, and only in those cases. If the IDEN network was still full, they would still get a failed call--but it would have given a hell of a lot better chance of connecting a call than without it.

This would have solved the capacity issue (because in urban areas where the capacity was bad you'd be on 1900 all the time anyway unless you were deep in a building), while still providing a good end-user experience.

It's the little touches like this can be most infuriating with consumers. Take my Epic--it's a WiMax phone, and we all know that WiMax coverage sucks. However, I've put an ICS rom on my phone, which only has one signal meter--it shows the CDMA bars, with a little "3G/4G" icon that changes depending on if WiMax is around or not. I know the coverage still blows--but I've found that I leave WiMax on more often because I don't see a separate WiMax signal meter that constantly shows 0-1 bars, then cycles through "searching for network" then shows 0-1 bars again before repeating. It now just blinks between 3G/4G depending on what is there... it shows 4G in the same places it did before--unfortunately it still kills battery and cuts out streaming media when it changes if I forget to turn it off--but it's just a little touch that I've found results in me using more 4G data because it *appears* seamless, just like going from an area with 1x to EV.
Something tells me that if Sprint would have done the "single signal meter" thing from the get-go, there'd be measurably less WiMax *****ing or just "leaving it off". Same thing for the topic at hand--less people saying screw it and leaving Nextel after they tried the "really cool new hybrids" that ended up providing less coverage than they had before. I bet maybe 200,000 or more people would still be around to try the new Network Vision PTT phones vs. run off to Verizon and be happy.

Nat

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