Phone dead, would like something fancy

[Supergrunch]

So today the screen of my phone (Samsung J700) decided to die horribly making it utterly unusable, and it was getting kind of old anyway, so I'm looking to get something new. Despite having only had simple and PAYG phones in the past, I'd quite like a smartphone, mainly for their internet access which I'd use a lot. I also send quite a lot of texts, but don't call all that much. Looking at the specs of things it seems I'd prefer Android for its speed and customisability, but have no idea which model to get. Nexus one seems cool, but are the HTC things better? I'd ideally like to balance price with awesomeness.

 

Thanks people.

 

Edit: Oh yeah, ideally I want to stay on Vodafone because it's the only network with decent reception both at home and at university.

[Cube]

What price are you looking at per month? Here is what I recommend (especially as

 

£20 - HTC Wildfire

£25 - HTC Legend

£30 - HTC Desire or Samsung Galaxy S

 

The Galaxy S is probably the best one.

[McPhee]

HTC Desire HD will be out in a matter of weeks. It's worth baring in mind if you're looking at the Desire or Galaxy.

[The fish]

The Desire is your best bet, but, as McPhee said, the Desire HD is out shortly, so either go for that or take advantage of the price drop of the Desire or the Galaxy S that will follow.

 

As everyone seems to be saying, Android is the way to go.

[Ten10]

HTC's press conference is happening on the 15th I believe where they will be revealing the Desire HD among other devices such as the HD7.

 

As for current market the most powerful android phone on the market is the Samsung Galaxy S, followed by the desire.

[The fish]

Personally, I'd avoid the Galaxy S - I find the plastic case makes it feel like a cheap iPhone knock-off. I know it's nothing of the sort, which makes it a shame, really.

[Supergrunch]

Thanks guys. I spent a while looking at reviews and ended up going for the non-HD Desire - wouldn't get the HD one, and not really able to wait around for price drops as I have no phone currently. But yes, hopefully I'll like it...

[Diageo]

I've heard only good things about the HTC Desire. Tech savvie friends and tech ignorant friends all enjoy it.

[Supergrunch]

Well I have it now, and am somewhere between those two descriptions. And I enjoy it.

[Diageo]

Care to give some impressions?

[Ten10]

Yeah I love my desire, but as I've promised it to my mum sooner than later I'll be moving up one to the HD and letting her have my current one. Which I don't mind too much as t-mobile still haven't given their customers the sweet taste of froyo.

[Supergrunch]

Care to give some impressions?

It's cool, although I still haven't finished customising it and working out how everything works. So far I'm liking the screen resolution and contact syncing, and it's cool that everything's so customisable, although I've yet to look into themes (I want something steampunky ultimately). The camera (5MP) seems pretty great to me in natural light, although in artificial light and with flash the quality drops off quite a lot. For video, the frame rate seems reasonable if not amazing - I'd guess 15-20 fps, but am not sure. After quite a bit of troubleshooting I managed to configure the phone to recieve emails from my university webmail via IMAP and send them out also, which will undoubtedly be useful in the future. Texting works like a dream - the predictive text is pretty good and auto-saving new words to a dictionary which you can go to and edit is very nice. Other nice features are the ability to unlock the phone with a pattern, and the reduction in volume of the ringtone once movement is detected, although I'm not sure how common these features are on smartphones. I've yet to experiment much with calls or music, but so far my one problem is that it's a little too easy to accidentally call contacts by touching their name - I'll have to see whether I'll wish for a noise reduction system like on the nexus one. And everything is nice and fast, thanks to the 1GHz processor I imagine. Finally, internet browsing is good, with two-touch zooming, auto-text fitting, and good youtube, although that's probably too data intensive for me to use often. I hear some flash video like iplayer and 4od doesn't work on the current version of Android (2.2), but haven't tested it and probably wouldn't use these much either. All in all, it seems like a very nice phone to me (someone unfamiliar with smartphones), but I'd like to explore it more.

 

Oh, and there's a pdf viewer. I will use that a lot to save on printing and/or lugging my laptop around.

 

Edit: One other minor problem with the browser - unicode support is not perfect, but I wouldn't expect it to be. Plane 0 looks entirely supported, but I'd also like planes 1 and 2. Nobody except a linguist is going to use these though.

Edited September 16, 2010 by Supergrunch

[Charlie]

It's cool, although I still haven't finished customising it and working out how everything works. So far I'm liking the screen resolution and contact syncing, and it's cool that everything's so customisable, although I've yet to look into themes (I want something steampunky ultimately). The camera (5MP) seems pretty great to me in natural light, although in artificial light and with flash the quality drops off quite a lot. For video, the frame rate seems reasonable if not amazing - I'd guess 15-20 fps, but am not sure. After quite a bit of troubleshooting I managed to configure the phone to recieve emails from my university webmail via IMAP and send them out also, which will undoubtedly be useful in the future. Texting works like a dream - the predictive text is pretty good and auto-saving new words to a dictionary which you can go to and edit is very nice. Other nice features are the ability to unlock the phone with a pattern, and the reduction in volume of the ringtone once movement is detected, although I'm not sure how common these features are on smartphones. I've yet to experiment much with calls or music, but so far my one problem is that it's a little too easy to accidentally call contacts by touching their name - I'll have to see whether I'll wish for a noise reduction system like on the nexus one. And everything is nice and fast, thanks to the 1GHz processor I imagine. Finally, internet browsing is good, with two-touch zooming, auto-text fitting, and good youtube, although that's probably too data intensive for me to use often. I hear some flash video like iplayer and 4od doesn't work on the current version of Android (2.2), but haven't tested it and probably wouldn't use these much either. All in all, it seems like a very nice phone to me (someone unfamiliar with smartphones), but I'd like to explore it more.

 

Oh, and there's a pdf viewer. I will use that a lot to save on printing and/or lugging my laptop around.

 

Edit: One other minor problem with the browser - unicode support is not perfect, but I wouldn't expect it to be. Plane 0 looks entirely supported, but I'd also like planes 1 and 2. Nobody except a linguist is going to use these though.

 

 

 

I was torn between the Desire, a Blackberry of some sort and the new iPhone a few months ago. After playing on the Desire in a shop I decided to go for the iPhone. The Desire is a fantastic phone and if it weren't for the music playing capabilities of the iPhone I think I probably would've got one.