Phone Moves

Switched up my phone situation again, but I waited a bit before posting. I ported my number out from Google Voice, and the porting process took almost exactly 10 days, start to finish. My phone was in limbo briefly - I could dial out with my number on the new phone but incoming calls rang my Google Voice account. Strange, but all seems well now.

I got tired of having an underpowered Android device, so I looked for something with more horsepower. I made a mistake (Samsung Exhibit II 4G) before settling on a used Motorola Atrix from swappa.com. Really great experience purchasing it, I got a great value. High-end performance at a significantly reduced price - dual core Tegra 2 with 1 GM RAM. Another big draw was Cyanogenmod support for the Atrix - currently nightly-only support but full support coming in CM7.2 and CM9 ICS.

I moved over to Straight Talk, which is an MVNO on AT&T's network, operated by Trac Fone. So I finally have cell coverage at work. Sprint and T-Mobile have literally zero coverage at my desk, but now I have a strong signal with 4G (HSPA+). It's plenty fast, and the Atrix is powerful enough that there are very few web browsing bottlenecks.

Furthermore, I was getting tired of dealing with the drawbacks of Google Voice. In the past I had always blamed latency in voice calls on the combination of a weak handset and VOIP. But it turns out that Google Voice adds noticeable delay, even on cell calls. The free SIP situation was becoming a chore and was not worth the effort, since better call quality at a reasonable price is available through an MVNO. I hardly used any of Google Voice's features, so there was not much to miss. The one feature that I can't live without is texting from the desktop with a full keyboard. But now I'm using DeskSMS with the Google Chrome extension, it's a great solution.

Couldn't be happier. And now that I have an active SIM with my mobile number, it's easy to switch to any other AT&T device in the future - I'm sure I will be visiting Swappa again.