My fiancée Janelle and I had been thinking about adding her to my T-Mobile plan for a while, but she was still under contract with AT&T on her family's plan and wanted to keep her existing black HTC One and port her phone number. Turns out that the only way that AT&T would unlock her phone was to terminate her line at the same time, losing the ability to port her number.

To get around this, we ordered an unlocked Nexus 5 from Google for her to use for a few days until her HTC One was unlocked, then to replace my Samsung Galaxy S3, which has a cracked screen (my 3rd party insurance requires me to send the phone in for service WTF). We'll probably unlock the S3 and sell it on eBay. We ordered the 32GB Nexus 5 in "bright red," which looks intensely safety orange under a lot of lighting conditions.

IMAG0460.jpg

So far, I'm quite satisfied with the Nexus. It's much faster than my S3 in every way. The S3 has started to lag more with newer versions of Android, and it doesn't support T-Mobile's LTE network. With the Nexus 5, I'm regularly seeing 25-29 Mbps download speeds, faster than the AT&T LTE in this area, which is might be due to added spectrum that AT&T had to sell to T-Mobile on account of the failed merger. Boot time is of course faster than on my Samsung and carrier bloatware riddled S3. The only hiccups are that T-Mobile's visual voicemail doesn't support unlocked Nexus 5s at this time, and T-Mobile's Wifi calling doesn't work on unlocked Nexus 5s. The 16GB Nexus 5 through T-Mobile and the 32GB unlocked Nexus 5 through Google are both ~$400, so I'm okay with losing out on Wifi calling in exchange for 16 extra GB at the same price.

Since the camera was controversial on the last forum, here's a couple of pictures under challenging lighting conditions at my local bar, The Beetle Bar and Grill

HDR+ mode off
HDR-.jpg

HDR+ on
HDR+.jpg

Low light camera performance isn't as good as Janelle's HTC One, but it's definitely better than my Galaxy S3's camera was.