The HTC Thunderbolt is basically useless as a 4G HotSpot, we’ve tested it in 4 major 4G market areas without any improvement in reliability. No wonder the free HotSpot promotion is underway, if I had to pay for this I would be pissed…..actually I am pissed, we traded in a perfectly good MyFi 3G for it… For the first few minutes it works, amazing speed, then it drops signal, we’ve read about all kinds of compliants about it not being able to step down from 4G to 3G during poor signal. This issue is much more than that.
We parked 25 feet from a new Verizon 4G LTE tower, started a ping to a Verizon IP address and within 30 seconds packet loss was close to 50%.
We locked the device into 3G mode and the reliability wasn’t any better… How ridiculous Verizon…..
I just got this phone as an upgrade from the original Droid. I have only used it for about a day so far, but I can honestly say it was well worth the upgrade. 4G is wicked fast. I got 15Mbps down and 25Mbps on my phone. That’s insane! Everything else about the phone feels fast too. HTC Sense comes with some bloatware and small annoyances, but it’s amazingly smooth and does have some improvements over stock OS. The screen, while not Super AMOLED, looks really good. It’s the same resolution as many other phones but it looks beautiful and the contrast is better than I expected.
Battery life isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It should last a full day, but I think i’ll get the extended battery anyway. The camera isn’t great, but it’s not bad. The addition of a front facing camera is nice and the camcorder function takes higher quality video than I expected. The only gripe I have is that the screen squeaks occasionally when pressed, but it’s not too annoying. I wish it had support for more video codecs like mkv, but few phones have that right now. Overall, it’s easily the best phone on Verizon right now. It’s not dual core, but it acts like it, so while the benchmarks may not show it to be as fast as the Atrix or Bionic, it feels and acts just as fast in real-life. There’s nothing to be dissapointed about with this phone.