Upgrade Woes

For a while now, I’ve wanted to upgrade my phone to the Galaxy Nexus. It’s got a ton of features, not least of which is the fact that it comes with Android 4.0 ( upgradeable to 4.1 now! ). I’ve been able to experience a lot of the 4.0 goodness using a custom rom, like the voice search/typing, the Android version of the Chrome browser, and a lot of the other things that make Android 4.0 pretty awesome.

However, as fun as it is to play with the custom rom, it doesn’t quite live up to what the real, full version of Android 4.0 is. For one, because it’s a custom rom that’s been hacked to run on my phone ( a Telus HTC Desire HD ), it suffers from the occasional glitches.

Unresponsiveness, freezing, random reboots, and a very glitchy camera are just a few of the things that I’ve been putting up with since I modded my phone. Most of the time, these things don’t bug me too much. Occasionally though, my phone will reboot or freeze up when I really don’t want it to, and I’m starting to get tired of it.

In the interest of getting myself a new phone, I did some research and pretty much fell in love with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. It was the first phone to natively run Android 4.0, and has some pretty sweet features. The one that I’m the biggest fan of is the fact that it’s got a NFC ( Near Field Communication ) chip. That is a little chip that lets it do some pretty neat stuff, first among which is that it lets the phone act as a credit card in certain situations. You know those “PayPass” things you see in some stores? Those use NFC to communicate. It’s how you’re able to just tap your credit card on the pad to pay for a purchase.

Anyways, I decided that I wanted to upgrade my phone to the Galaxy Nexus. I saw that Telus  gives their customers the option to upgrade their phones, so I looked into that. It’s a little ridiculous. When I signed up with Telus, I got my phone for $79 because I signed up for a three year contract. Basically, I got a huge discount on the phone, which I slowly pay off over the course of my three year contract. To upgrade, I have to pay the full cost of the new phone, plus the remainder of my device balance – which would come to nearly $900.

However, if I just switched to Wind Mobile, I’d pay the remainder of the device balance with Telus, and the signup costs with Wind Mobile. That total is only about $400.

So, I guess unless I can get a deal from Telus, in the next month or so I’m going to be switching to Wind Mobile.