Alright I don't have anything ugly yet, but here's my family's experience of switching over to Verizon. I'm skip rating some of the obvious ones like Verizon signal and network, as it is known and given for the reliability.
1. 4 line family plan ... took 2.5 hours. We only switched 2 lines from another carrier and 2 lines are new. It took only 15 mins for us to decide the phone, between doing the paperwork, activations, copying data from previous sim card, backing up data... its a long time in a store. Grade: B+
2.Verizon store was helpful in nature inspite of heavy traffic in the store. We had to interact with more than one rep for general information, paperwork and backup process. Say one person wsa getting to back of store to get our equipments, the other was still stopping by and getting our Qs answered. Grade: A+
3. Backup process... tks for Android we had Google to backup our photos, contacts, apps etc . Ideally this should be done deal... however two of our lines, we had handed the phone back and got new phones. most our communication is in WHATSAPP, to switch over to new device we needed a one time password sent via text message to old phone. Both family members and store employees missed. But being a popular app, this should be part of backup and restore process. Customer using Whatsapp or any other messaging app should be checklist. For those phone numbers ported over, there was no issues since text messages reached to the new devices. As well for the regular text messages, we realized we should have enabled Hangouts as default messaging app in old phone that would have carried over all our texts from old phone to new one via Google Sign in. So not a fully pleasant experience moving the 2 lines that did NOT have port-in , we expected the rep to educate us on these Android messaging apps when switching over.. Grade: B+
Now coming to using the apps in new phones
4. Messages App : the text messaging app is far superior. really like it and wouldn't go to any other app now. i even tried going to Hangouts, I can see how dull Hangouts is compared to the "vibrant" Verizon Messages. Grade: A+
5. My Verizon Mobile and Info zone: very clean and usable. It provides My Account information in quick view. Able to identify data usage for each line. the individual members of the family plan were able to see the bill and usage. Needing to communicate the bill amount to each would be difficult. This is neat. Grade: A+
6. Bench-marking Apps : I use a number of apps from Play store say Qualcomm Trepn Profiler, Antutu benchmark and others. I have used these in previous carrier as well without any limitation. The new phones we got say "turn off network connection to run benchmark app" and the app never opens. What??? I don't think this message is coming from the app itself since i have used this in my previous phones and other carriers don't restrict the apps. I'm guessing this is Verizon's settings on general category of profiling apps. Grade: C
7. HD Voice / Advanced Calling : This is the voice over LTE. Had trouble with calls dropping. This was not even in building. It was in parking lot and on road. Turned it off for now. I'm interested in trying the video call inspite of data charges. However wouldn't want the regular voice calls to be affected with quality. Grade: C
These are my major "switcher" experience.
adding to app list
8. NFL Mobile from Verizon : Awesome!!! Grade : A+
HD voice / Advanced calling only works if both parties have phones that are capable and also when one phone drops from the network the call will automatically drop due to the phone out of coverage area is acting as a phone without hd capabilities. Hope this helps clear that up a little.
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