Phone Recommendations?

[egparadigm]

Hi guys,

I'm thinking about buying a new phone. The things I really need for the phone are being able to enter reminders easily (and possibly hook up with a calendar on my mac?), obviously phone and text, and would be good to be able to send and receive emails and occasionally check Google Maps. Obviously the easiest thing for finding your way is to use GPS, but that obviously means you need to be connected to the net.

I want to keep costs to a minimum. I think I want to spend around ?100 and I want to be on PAYG. I spoke to a guy in a phone shop and he recommended the Orange Dolphin plan. Basically, provided you've topped up by ?10 that month you can surf the net for free. This sounds reasonable to me. It might be a little more than I spend currently, but not much, and if I start spending more than I can afford I can always stop paying and re-evaluate.

It would also be cool to try out some of the Android 'apps', maybe the odd game. It's just a question of how irritating I will find using a touch screen to type on. So it sounds like a fight between a Blackberry and some Android phone or other.

What I want to know is what the build quality/reliability is like on Android phones? I had a Sony Ericsson some years ago and the directional stick broke, so that I could not access half the content of the phone. Are touch screens reliable? Do the other buttons ever break?

Do you have any recommendations for Android phones? Do you find the touch screen irritating? Any way round it?

Thanks all!

[ETC]

http://shop.orange.co.uk/mobile-phones/San-Francisco-from-Orange-in-grey

is superb so they say, buying one this week so ill let you know what its like, sure some members already have one though

[averybluemonkey]

Might be worth also considering a Nokia Symbian device as Ovi Maps offers free turn by turn navigation for car and pedestrian and you can pre-load the maps so there's no need for it to connect to the net (unless you have AGPS turned on for a faster initial position lock), unlike Google maps.

[egparadigm]

http://shop.orange.co.uk/mobile-phon...Orange-in-grey

is superb so they say, buying one this week so ill let you know what its like, sure some members already have one though

I spotted that a little while ago. Looks quite good. The other one I've noticed is the Samsung Galaxy Europa/I5500. The potential downside with that one is that it's got a smaller screen, so could be a bit cramped.

Interested to hear impressions on those if anyone could oblige.

Also, are there certain handsets that are better for games? I mean, do they all have tilt sensors and whatnot?

[EvilBoris]

I'd personally avoid any Symbian device like the plague

[averybluemonkey]

Personally I've found Windows 7 quite a big step back in functionality compared to my old E71 and N97 Mini, and my friend who recently switched to Android has had similar issues, though not quite as bad. The lack of proper multitasking in these other phone operating systems is a major pain in the backside and the fact they have such poor battery life makes them a bit of a nuisance frankly with regards charging. With only being used for music and the occasional light internet browsing I'm having to recharge my HTC Trophy 7 every 2 days which is a joke, especially when it takes about 3.5 hours to charge.

[EvilBoris]

Nokia are ditching Symbian in favour of another non-nokia OS on their top end phones which says a lot about it's quality/stability. It's being kept on for cheaper models, just be aware that if you are keeping the phone got a couple o years, boggling bugs/missing features may not be sorted out.

[yesteryeargames]

instead of starting a new thread
anyone know of any good deals on pay as you got for either an iphone 4,

htc desire o2 payg or htc mozart orange payg phone, ( which is better out of those 2 )
for general features and internet time with the pay £10 deals or pay as you go internet use


any help would be much welcome thank you

[egparadigm]

I think I'm erring on the side of the San Francisco, unless anyone disagrees with that choice?

I tried a friend's Blackberry and it was more frustrating than I was expecting. I could probably get used to it, mind. I will probably have a similar experience with a touchscreen one. Never had a phone with internet before... :/

Are there any cheap places online to get phones? If I buy through Orange I will get a spectacular £7 off from my phone fund. I've had Orange for at least 8 years.

[egparadigm]

I just watched a video review of it that says you have to use Orange's 'app' for email (gmail aside), which you must pay £1 a week to use. Is this true, or can you not just download another 'app' for this purpose?

http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/mobile-phones/orange-san-francisco-review-50001481/

Above comment @2 mins, 13 secs.

[egparadigm]

Well I phoned Orange and apparently they do "pass on the costs of providing email", whatever the hell those are. I can use webmail through a browser in a worst case scenario.

Despite this annoyance, I pressed ahead with buying a San Fran. It really does appear to be good value. The crap/bloat-ware on there could become a serious irritant, but I suppose rooting the phone is always an open possibility. We'll see, and I'll update with my impressions.

One brilliant turn of fortune was that when the Orange website wouldn't work I had to phone to buy. The guy asked me what my phone fund total was. "£7, a handsome sum" I replied. Then he said "We'll knock £30 off the phone, as you're already a Orange customer, how does that sound?"

May yet unlock the phone and switch to another operator, as the caps are 500MB as opposed to Orange's measly 100MB.

[averybluemonkey]

Nokia are ditching Symbian in favour of another non-nokia OS on their top end phones which says a lot about it's quality/stability. It's being kept on for cheaper models, just be aware that if you are keeping the phone got a couple o years, boggling bugs/missing features may not be sorted out.

Not sure what you are basing this statement on. Some info:

http://blog.symbian.org/2010/11/12/j...w-at-see-2010/ (about 1:20 onwards talks about software updates)

http://www.nokiausers.net/General/Jo-Harlow-Video-Interview-Long-Live-Symbian.html

What "non-Nokia OS" are you talking about?

[EvilBoris]

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/33967/nokia-ditching-symbian-for-meego

That's what I'd based it upon

http://meego.com/

maybe there is a bigger strategy involved or perhaps Symbian just can't keep up with the other smartphone OS's so is now being reserved for cheaper phones and meego will be all slick and shiny for the top end phones.

[averybluemonkey]

Meego is a Nokia owned and developed OS, based on Maemo which was used on the N900 that shipped a year or two ago.

The N-series is just one of 4 brand lines the company runs, it is the number that follows the letter that actually corresponds to the expense and power of the device, so you can see equally powerful handsets on the C, E and X series as you can on the N series.

Symbian OS is the most efficient smartphone OS out there, I don't see any reason why it can't compete.

[egparadigm]

I said I'd report my experience here. Well, Orange customer service ineptitude aside I'm really quite happy with the phone.

There is loads of guff from orange on the phone, but using LauncherPro it is possible to simply hide these and use progs from the Android Market. K9 happily grabs my email and there's no charge for using it as far as I can see (I have yet to use any Orange data because they still haven't credited me my £10 top-up – just been using WiFi at home.)

The typing experience was very frustrating at first, however I think I've got used to it now. It seems to have some kind of accidental input correction, which mostly works. The only really frustrating part about it is when you're entering passwords. Although the show password option shows you the last letter entered, it is difficult to know sometimes where you went wrong.

Also loving the ability to sync up my events and contacts with my computer. The only thing I can't figure out is why I can't download email-only contacts to my phone. Furthermore, the Mac's Address Book doesn't seem to download all the contacts from Gmail.

One good plus point is that Google Maps has been recently updated to cache offline, so I can use it away from a network.