To Buy or Not To Buy

Image courtesy of "Google"

So, I am quite upset at this exact point in time.  My digitizer on my phone broke(for those non-phone nerds, the digitizer is the part of the phone that registers touch inputs).  So with the broken digitizer my phone basically is the most expensive battery powered pocket watch ever.  It cannot make calls, text, or do anything remotely useful.  Last night I attempted to change my cell service to an old Blackberry (Blackberry can go die in a hole, oh wait they already did, BURN!) But that did not work, so right now it is day 3 with no phone, and I hate it.  How did people live in the olden times? What did they do on the bus? When they were bored? It must have been an awful thing.  I also can't contact anyone, at all my mother nor my friends.  Today, I am will hopefully get the HTC Hero to connect to the network, the Hero is one of the first Android, made in a time a before time.  Ok, they might have been a hyperbole, but it actually is really old.   Anyway the Hero is not a long term solution, so now I am presented with two paths, buy a digitizer for about $60 to repair my screen on the Optimus G.  Or buy a new phone, even though my contract is not yet expired.

 Normally I would just buy a digitizer, but my phone has been having other problems as well, sometimes whenever I type huge blocks of text, it will delete it by pressing the back button with no way to stop it. It's to unpopular a phone, so many companies do not support games on it, and it has random glitches, where it thinks the keyboard does not exist. Not to mention WI-FI needing to be constantly reconnected.  So, at this point I know I want a new phone, but the choice is quite hard, because my contract is not yet expired on Sprint, and once it does my dad is moving us to a new carrier.  So, it needs to be a quadband phone, meaning it can get into any network, CDMA, GSM, LTE, or WCDMA.  Which narrows my options to really only one phone, the Nexus 5.  The Nexus 5 is made by a partner ship between Google and LG(why they don't use Motorola, which they already own is beyond me).  This is really nice because it is subsidized by Google, and is the phone made by Google to show off Android to developers, and consumers.  Also if I got the Nexus 5, I could design a new case for it, which is always fun.

On another 3d printing note, I did not win the contest for the Ultimaker.  However, they were nice enough to ship me my entry to my house for free.  It looks really great, it shows how great the UP is at making things, honestly the layer stacking compared to my Printrbot, make the Printrbot look like shit.  Then again that is expected as the UP is the same size, but three times the cost.