Revolution or Thunderbolt

B

Bohica69

Gawd
Joined
Jul 12, 2005
Messages
676
Well, I have a New Every 2 upgrade still on my contract and want to do it before the tiered dataplans start. Looking at the T-Bolt and Revolution - what's the thoughts on both? If I go the Revolution route, how easy is it to root and remove Bing? What about rooting the T-Bolt?

Thanks.
 
Bohica69 said:
Well, I have a New Every 2 upgrade still on my contract and want to do it before the tiered dataplans start. Looking at the T-Bolt and Revolution - what's the thoughts on both? If I go the Revolution route, how easy is it to root and remove Bing? What about rooting the T-Bolt?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Hardware wise they are nearly identical. TBolt has more RAM and a better camera. Those are more or the less the only "big" differences. Battery life is about the same which means crappy until you tweak it.

Rooting TBolt isn't nearly as simple as Revolution. Revolution can simply use SuperOneClick. TBolt can't. TBolt requires a lot of user interaction and ADB use. There is already a "de-crapified" ROM available for Revolution which does things like remove Bing so I assume it isn't all that hard to remove.
 
I chose a Charge. I would probably get the TB over the Revolution, if the Charge was not available.
 
Yeah, I would go TB over the Revo if just for the kickstand, more RAM and I would prefer the form factor/build quality of it over the LG. The LG prolly has slightly better battery life out of the box, but after you put a custom ROM/Kernel and tweak them both a bit, they should even out.

I would prolly take the Charge over both of them though just for the better screen and considerably better battery life out of the box (and again can be made better with tweaking just the same as the others).
 
I absolutely love my Thunderbolt. Had it pretty much since it came out and I have no complaints other than the battery life blows. Ive got a charger in my work truck and personal car and throw it on there several times a day otherwise I wouldnt make it the whole day with a single charge and thats just with mostly internet.

Other than that, its great. Fast as hell, good call quality and good image quality.
 
Gosh dang it I'm in the same boat. i can't decide which smartphone to get either on Verizon. I currently have an original Droid.
What I like about Android- blinking external led notifications, great gmail support, great internet browsing.
What I like about iOS/iPhone 4- battery life, build quality, stability.

If the iPhone 4 was LTE it would be a no brainer for me. With my Droid I can't stand the bad battery life, flash is pointless cuz it's too slow, and it freezes and lags all the time. But I do love the gmail support (i've read it's not as fluid on the iPhone) and the external blinking LED lights notifications..

Gah I'm so confused and time is running out. I can say that I've never been interested in rooting/tweaking/hacking so that makes me lean towards iPhone 4. But I don't know that I want a 3G phone with a lackluster browser (although iOS looks promising) at this point and right before the iPhone 5 releases. Someone that's not a fanboy help me out PLEASE. Battery life and internet browsing are my two biggest concerns..
 
shoota said:
Gosh dang it I'm in the same boat. i can't decide which smartphone to get either on Verizon. I currently have an original Droid.
What I like about Android- blinking external led notifications, great gmail support, great internet browsing.
What I like about iOS/iPhone 4- battery life, build quality, stability.

If the iPhone 4 was LTE it would be a no brainer for me. With my Droid I can't stand the bad battery life, flash is pointless cuz it's too slow, and it freezes and lags all the time. But I do love the gmail support (i've read it's not as fluid on the iPhone) and the external blinking LED lights notifications..

Gah I'm so confused and time is running out. I can say that I've never been interested in rooting/tweaking/hacking so that makes me lean towards iPhone 4. But I don't know that I want a 3G phone with a lackluster browser (although iOS looks promising) at this point and right before the iPhone 5 releases. Someone that's not a fanboy help me out PLEASE. Battery life and internet browsing are my two biggest concerns..
Click to expand...

Same thing here. I'm still using my obsolete/slow as balls Droid. Although anything that's came out this year would kill my Droid in every category (except maybe battery life), nothing available seems worth upgrading to yet, IMO. Seeing all the Samsung GS2 reviews and videos on it makes it seem to be the phone to have for a while. Even if it does arrive 6 months after launch overseas. I don't even care if it's 4G/LTE. 3G has always been fast enough for what I do on my phone, or even when I tether on my laptop, plus that just means better battery life too.
 
Yeah I hear you. I'm playing with my wife's iPhone 4 right now and for the life of me I can't double tap to zoom to work right in Safari, it's so damn frustrating.
I also checked my data usage and found that I've never used more than 1gb so maybe the new tiered system won't affect me...
Checking My verizon account says I can upgrade at a discount now but if I wait until Sept I can get a loyal customer additional savings, anyone know what that is exactly?
 
shoota said:
Checking My verizon account says I can upgrade at a discount now but if I wait until Sept I can get a loyal customer additional savings, anyone know what that is exactly?
Click to expand...

Not sure about that. I'm eligible for upgrade on there too and all the phones are priced $10 under new contract prices (i.e. Thunderbolt for $239 instead of $249), but it says I'm eligible for New Every 2 on August 27, which I guess will give me a little more off, but I'm not sure. I'm not seeing anything about loyal customer additional savings and I've been with them since 2005.
 
Checking My verizon account says I can upgrade at a discount now but if I wait until Sept I can get a loyal customer additional savings, anyone know what that is exactly?
Click to expand...

Mine was $30.00
 
I did a little Googling and found it can be 30/50/100. Mines prolly 30 too.
What's the easiest 4g Verizon phone to root? I'm a noob at rooting remember that.
 
shoota said:
I did a little Googling and found it can be 30/50/100. Mines prolly 30 too.
What's the easiest 4g Verizon phone to root? I'm a noob at rooting remember that.
Click to expand...

Revolution is technically the easiest to root because it uses SuperOneClick. Charge and Thunderbolt take a bit more work. TBolt is probably the "hardest" to root because it involves the most work.
 
so which rom is the preferred rom for these phones? i'd like to have Google as the default everything and not bing
 
shoota said:
so which rom is the preferred rom for these phones? i'd like to have Google as the default everything and not bing
Click to expand...

No clue. TBolt and Charge don't have Bing. Revolution I don't know about, but it is never hard to remove all the bloat.

When picking ROM's it is always user preference. For example I've gone though about 6 different ROM's on my TBolt.

Tesla Coil, Gingeritis, CyanogenMod 7, Das Bamf 1.x, Das Bamf 2.x, Das Bamf Sense 3.0. They are all good ROM's but each has quirks. CM7 is far from complete however it is the only pure AOSP built ROM for TBolt.

I'm currently running the latest version of CM7.1 and loving it. It still has problems with the RIL and has other issues but the CM TBolt devs have done a spectacular job so far. I find CM7 to be unquestionably faster in all aspects (network speed not included where that's the same across the board) compared to anything with HTC Sense in it.

I liked the Das Bamf ROM's. They are solid ROM's but Sense is a bloated pig. The port of Sense 3.0 that the Das Bamf team did, in my opinion, is probably the best Sense ROM for the TBolt. However, Sense 3.0 is slow and laggy. The unresponsiveness gets old after awhile. Sure you can go back to a Sense 2.1 based ROM but then you lose all the goodies from Sense 3.0 and some are very nice. For example the Sense 3.0 lockscreen is probably the greatest lockscreen I've ever seen for Android. I love it. However, that one feature is not enough to make me go back to Sense 3.0 when CM7.1 is running so well now.

So I expect you to do a lot of ROM swapping in order to find exactly what you want. That's part of the fun with Android though. You can do whatever the hell you want with it and nobody can tell you otherwise.
 
So the Sense UI that ships with the tbolt is 3.0? is it laggy right out of the box?
 
shoota said:
So the Sense UI that ships with the tbolt is 3.0? is it laggy right out of the box?
Click to expand...

TBolt will not officially get Sense 3.0. It has Sense 2.1. Sense 3.0 is a port from another phone. The Das Bamf team did a pretty damn good job on it. However, it is still a port and will never run 100% correctly in my opinion.
 
ah ok. well i'mleaning towards tbolt but i have to admit the battery life on 4g has me worried
 
shoota said:
ah ok. well i'mleaning towards tbolt but i have to admit the battery life on 4g has me worried
Click to expand...

All depends on your configuration. I get 12+ hours on mine now with 4G. You can always turn off the 4G if you don't need it right that minute as well.
 
Don't you have yours rooted and tweaked? I just spent the last 20 minutes reading the multitude of ticked off tbolt users because of the battery life.
Man I seriously cannot decide which phone to get. iPhone 4 is looking good because of the battery life, Android is more familiar to me. Not getting a 4G phone at this point seems dumb but none of them get great battery life when using 4G.
What can I expect with a very minimal configuration on the tbolt? all radios off except 4G, gmail sync on 5 or 10 mins, no facebook or IM apps, one weather app..
 
shoota said:
Don't you have yours rooted and tweaked? I just spent the last 20 minutes reading the multitude of ticked off tbolt users because of the battery life.
Man I seriously cannot decide which phone to get. iPhone 4 is looking good because of the battery life, Android is more familiar to me. Not getting a 4G phone at this point seems dumb but none of them get great battery life when using 4G.
What can I expect with a very minimal configuration on the tbolt? all radios off except 4G, gmail sync on 5 or 10 mins, no facebook or IM apps, one weather app..
Click to expand...

I got my TBolt the day it was released. Rooted it the second JCase and the AndIRC team released the rooting and S-OFF instructions. Yeah, battery life could be worlds better, but this is what happens when you adopt new tech immediately. 3G did the same thing to phones at first and then the tech matured. Whatever replaces 4G LTE will do the same as well.

My battery life is quite acceptable. I get 12+ hours on a charge and I use my phone pretty heavily during the day. This doesn't mean I stream Flash video all day though. I simply run clean ROM's and low voltage kernels. You can see what my TBolt is running right now in my sig and I'm loving it.

In the end it all comes down to how much tweaking are you willing to do to get good battery life on the TBolt. The Revolution isn't much better battery life wise either. Charge I know had issues but I think some of that has been corrected.
 
I'm just comfortable with the rooting process and installing roms and such.
I'm headed into the Verizon store right now to play with the phones :) this is hard lol
 
shoota said:
How about the Charge? Anything not to like about it?
Click to expand...

Not sure honestly. I haven't kept up with it. I do know the battery life is better then TBolt and most people seem to be generally happy with the Charge especially once you get rid of the bloat.
 
shoota said:
How about the Charge? Anything not to like about it?
Click to expand...

Sure. The battery life is TERRIBLE; one of the reviews, I think the Anandtech one basically confirmed that it's pretty much just as bad as the TB. If you're not rooting or using Go Launcher or something like that, the TouchWiz UI is really, really ugly. It's just a single-core phone using the slow-ass RFS file system and it tends to lag a bit. It doesn't currently support Hulu or Netflix, and the fact that it's been out only like a month and doesn't come loaded with Gingerbread is kind of pathetic.

With that said, I have it and I mostly like it. It's blazing fast.
 
I'm seriously considering the Droid x2 since its cheaper and has decent battery life. Anyone want to chime in on this one?
 
If 4G is what you're looking for, the T-Bolt getts the nod. If you are sticking with 3G, get the DX2. I stopped by Verizon this week to play with some phones. The QHD screen on the DX2 is sick. I would go so far as to say it blows away my Super AMOLED screen. The Tegra2 chipset is extreemely snappy & buttery smooth. I couldn't put the phone down.
 
Frobot said:
Sure. The battery life is TERRIBLE; one of the reviews, I think the Anandtech one basically confirmed that it's pretty much just as bad as the TB. If you're not rooting or using Go Launcher or something like that, the TouchWiz UI is really, really ugly. It's just a single-core phone using the slow-ass RFS file system and it tends to lag a bit. It doesn't currently support Hulu or Netflix, and the fact that it's been out only like a month and doesn't come loaded with Gingerbread is kind of pathetic.

With that said, I have it and I mostly like it. It's blazing fast.
Click to expand...

Yeah, anandtech showed the stock battery life for all the 4G phones was about the same under heavy use conditions. Anecdotes, and most of the less rigorous reviews, showed the charge to have better battery life.
 
shoota said:
I'm seriously considering the Droid x2 since its cheaper and has decent battery life. Anyone want to chime in on this one?
Click to expand...

A not so great screen and a locked bootloader (so no custom ROMs for the time being).
 
Well I unfortunately went with the dx2. Big mistake but not entirely my fault. The screen freaking blows as has been talked about a bunch already. But its not my fault because the stupid verizon store had a dx1 on display for the dx2. So the whole I was playing with it I thought I was playing with the dx2. Man was I shocked when I took my first look at the screen when I got in the car. I was pissed so I went back in, figured out it was a dx1 I was looking at the whole time, told them I didn't want to pay the restocking fee and they said no. It was all I could do to not freak out.
So now im seriously considering eating the restocking fee and getting an phone 4. There just aren't any android phones that excite me or dont have a glaring flaw.
 
Last edited:
shoota said:
Well I unfortunately went with the dx2. Big mistake but not entirely my fault. The screen freaking blows as has been talked about a bunch already. But its not my fault because the stupid verizon store had a dx1 on display for the dx2. So the whole I was playing with it I thought I was playing with the dx2. Man was I shocked when I took my first look at the screen when I got in the car. I was pissed so I went back in, figured out it was a dx1 I was looking at the whole time, told them I didn't want to pay the restocking fee and they said no. It was all I could do to not freak out.
So now im seriously considering eating the restocking fee and getting an phone 4. There just aren't any android phones that excite me or dont have a glaring flaw.
Click to expand...

Lol, wow. That's pretty shitty, but I wouldn't be that upset with a DX2. Yeah, a lot of reviewers knocked it for its pentile display, but despite that, a lot of them still listed it as the best display next to Samsungs. The easiest way to tell the difference between the DX and the DX2 (besides being labeled differently on the back) is the DX2 is missing a dedicated camera button.

So what glaring flaw does the DX2 have that the IP4 doesn't have besides the subjectively inferior screen and maybe the front camera? Otherwise, as far as hardware goes, the DX2 improves on the IP4 in almost every category unless you just prefer the smaller screen/size of the IP4.

I almost stopped in the Verizon store while I was out today too just to query about the tired data/grandfathered situation, but decided not to since I would be too tempted to walk out with a new phone just as you did because my Droid was seriously pissing me off earlier (3 restarts/lockups while navigating :mad). But that was prolly my fault since I've been experimenting with Compcache again and it never works well for me. I'm still holding out for the Function/GS2 though. The Droid 3 is actually temping for me though since I love having a keyboard and the specs are great aside from the low RAM it's been reported to have (512 MBs, hope it's wrong and it has more). But the real deal breaker will be a locked bootloader, which I'm sure it will have. But I'm hoping (not expecting) since Moto unlocked the Atrix, they'll launch the D3 unlocked. If they do that, then I think I would go ahead and grab it since my Droids unlocked bootloader is really the only reason it's lasted me so long.
 
In all honesty I could have kept using my DROID 1 and been ok and I've never ran it anything but stock.
As I've been playing with this dx2 im getting used to the screen. I do miss the smaller size though as reaching across this phone with just my thumb is hard. That's what I would like about the iPhone. And its better battery..
 
shoota, did you check out the Samsung charge or t-bolt? IMHO those are much better phones then the d2x.
 
I sure did but they're expensive and I don't want to deal with their battery life. I'm not into rooting and all that stuff for some reason so getting a phone tweaked to perfection isn't prolly gonna happen. I'll more than likely get used to this dx 2 I might just have to whine a little along the way lol
 
BGK said:
A not so great screen and a locked bootloader (so no custom ROMs for the time being).
Click to expand...

Um. What's wrong with the screen? It looked fantastic to me.

shoota said:
Well I unfortunately went with the dx2. Big mistake but not entirely my fault. The screen freaking blows as has been talked about a bunch already. But its not my fault because the stupid verizon store had a dx1 on display for the dx2. So the whole I was playing with it I thought I was playing with the dx2. Man was I shocked when I took my first look at the screen when I got in the car. I was pissed so I went back in, figured out it was a dx1 I was looking at the whole time, told them I didn't want to pay the restocking fee and they said no. It was all I could do to not freak out.
So now im seriously considering eating the restocking fee and getting an phone 4. There just aren't any android phones that excite me or dont have a glaring flaw.
Click to expand...

I'm confused. I can't for the life of me understand how a DX1 would be better than a DX2.
 
I'd say neither in terms of the Revolution or Tbolt. Wait for the Bionic which should be out at the end of the month if you really need LTE.

I'm in Chicago, an area loaded with LTE, and I still might get a Droid 3 because of the keyboard and better battery life.
 
I got the X2 and it was buggy as hell until I rooted it. I used Gingerbreak and titanium backup and froze and deleted a bunch of the bloat.....great phone now.....now if only it had gingerbread. The nvidia chip is quite nice too. check out some of the tegra games. It also is not compatible with netflix out of the box....but that is fixable....
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top