teh Forum

i need to lock into a new smart phone and contract if necessary. any new cool phones on the horizon that i should hold out for? any cool phones out now that i should snag? where are all the android devices? i've found two phones and an arcos media player that run android, that's it.

The iPhone looks like a cool phone but I didn't get one for a number of reasons. I don't like that it can't function as a mass storage device. I don't like that you can't install your own memory card and instead have to pay a ton for a fixed amount of ram from Apple. I don't like that you can't bluetooth a file on your iPhone to another device. All three of these are sort of related but it is just lame that you cannot natively access a file on your iPhone and do what you want with it. File access seems like such a basic feature to have. I don't use MMS that often but I've used it enough out of convenience to miss it and the iPhone didn't have it at the time I was interested. It is supposed to be available now after you upgrade your iPhone. AT&T gave a really weird explanation for why the iPhone didn't have MMS claiming it was a bandwidth issue but I have AT&T and I have MMS so I don't know what the deal is with iPhone specific MMS. Maybe Apple is doing something extra with their MMS like they did with voicemail? I heard that Apple wanted Verizon(i think) to be the carrier but Verizon turned Apple down because they wouldn't add support for the voicemail feature the iPhone has that no other phone has where you can delete messages from your voice mail without listening to them. Another problem I've heard about with the iPhone is that there are hardware related connectivity reliability issues where calls are more likely to be dropped if an iPhone is used in a call. If two iPhones are used to make up a call then the odds of dropped calls increase further. I also don't like touchscreens so that was another reason I didn't get an iPhone. I don't like the fact that you only have one button on the iPhone so getting around is limited. I think the iPhone has more emphasis on looks than functionality although the iPhone browser is pretty good.

The android phones are very cool and can do pretty much anything it seems but they are a little too complicated and take a little bit longer to navigate than if they were simpler. There are soo many options on the G1 making it very configurable. I actually have gone back and forth in determining whether or not to get one but in the end I went with the simpler blackberry. The touchscreen on the android could work a little bit better than it does but it has a full qwerty keyboard and a trackball so it is pretty nice. I like the feature that the android has where you have three desktops. I DON'T like the feature where you have to have a USB headphone adapter instead of a standard stereo jack to listen to music. The battery life on the G1 could be a little bit better too. I believe both the battery and headphone issues were addressed with the myTouch android phone but that has a touchscreen only and no keyboard. You can get a portable charger for the G1 to combat the lower battery life. The phone is a bit bulky if you care about that. I think the myTouch is supposed to have some special kind of touchscreen material that keeps it from getting too greasy but the myTouch still has a trackball too. There are a ton of apps on the android to download. The screen looks pretty good and is 480 x 320 which is the same as the bold and the iPhone and is an actual LCD screen instead of the more color limited capacitive touch screen that doesn't look as good.

I had a blackberry curve but it sucked because it was it wasn't very responsive due to the slow processor. The keyboard also sucked as it was too hard to use. Sending text messages sucked because you could only send one at a time so you had to go through the whole process of choosing who to send a message to instead of the phone automatically creating a new message. I really miss the predictive text feature that was in the windows versions of smartphones like the the blackjack and motoq. The only thing the blackberrys realistically do is capitalize new sentences and insert apostrophes BUT they do actually have dictionaries built in so you can hide how bad you are with spelling. The 1EVDO based blackberrys seemed to be just as fast as the 3G but I want to say the 3G seemed a bit faster. I would have stayed with Sprint but I wanted the blackberry Bold and only AT&T had it at the time. I wish I was still with sprint as AT&T hasn't been as reliable as Sprint was. Sprint now has the Blackberry Tour which is an upgraded version of the Bold with a bigger screen, an upgraded OS, a 3.2 MP camera, and longer battery life. It supports playback of more video formats too so you can see more youtube videos. The bold and the tour both the cpu maxed out at over 600mhz so they are pretty responsive. Oh the Blackberry STORM sucks ass though because of the touchscreen and they have had some hardware issues with it as well so I would totally stay away from that phone. One of the things that really stands out with the bold or the tour is the screen. There is simply no phone that can compare to how amazing the screen looks on either phone - it is pretty scary how insanely good the display looks. One reason is because the blackberry bold screen is about 7/16 the size of the iPhone but the resolution is the same so the dot pitch for the Bold/Tour is really high. Oh the tour actually has the highest resolution display too I think at 360 x 480 where the others are 320 x 480. The keyboard on the bold/tour is really nice and keys are big and they have some youtube guy typing out 75wpm on that phone somehow. The battery life is good but if you watch movies on your phone(you can convert .AVIs you get illegally off of bit torrent to run at the 320x480 resolution and it will look pretty amazing) you can really drain it down pretty fast as the CPU is doing quite a bit of work. The sound on the bold/tour is pretty amazing too for being a tiny little phone - I think it has two speakers so it is actually stereoscopic sound. Email of course on the blackberry is pretty much perfect and will work with anything I think. I had problems getting gmail to work with my old windows smartphone(never got it to work actually). When an email arrives in a gmail account the blackberry notification of its arrival is instantaneous.

Anyway, I think the more technically oriented you are and don't mind the size of the phone the more you would like the G1. The G1 is more like a computer than a phone. I probably would have gotten it if the battery life were better and it didn't have that weird USB headphone issue. I use my phone to listen to music all the time and is now my thumb drive so I keep software or whatever on it. Oh, forgot to mention the GPS works really well with the blackberry and you can get a full featured navigation program for free called Gokivo navigator. Of course google maps is supported although I think google maps on the iPhone is better than the blackberry. There aren't that many apps available on the blackberry as the G1 though and of course the iPhone has a ridiculous amount of apps. Not sure if the iPhone has the capability to edit word/excel docs though. I can edit/create both word/excel and view power point apps on my phone. You could do it on the curve but it was so slow it really wasn't something that was that usable...

The myTouch seems pretty cool, although a bit girly for some reason to me anyway, and it is an android phone that has more battery life than the G1 and a regular stereo headphone jack. I think it is smaller too.

The Motorola Cliq is pretty cool because it has a magnetometer so you can actually have a working compass in your phone which helps when you are looking at a map that can be oriented it for you...I really wish my phone had that feature. The cliq has an accelerometer, and proximity sensor too. I have always been impressed with Motorola products. The cliq also has the standard 3.5mm stereo headphone jack. Not sure about battery life on the cliq though. I think if I were to get a G1 I would get the cliq..

we should implement a voting system so i can one-up rick's response.

so we're very much on the same page. you could even say we park our cars in the same garage. i don't want the iphone because it's always been way too restricted and i don't need access to 50,000 apps, just a dozen or so that actually do the things i want. i have coworkers that have the G1 and the myTouch and i don't like either of them, but i really like what i'm hearing about android and am hoping to see more handsets (<---my dad still refers to phones as these) running android very soon. i might hold out a little while longer, but i'll definitely check out the cliq.

i have a dell netbook with mobile broadband and i take it and use it everywhere, but i still have a phone and ipod touch that i have to carry around with it. so if i want a single device with all these capabilities, the closest thing to it is an iphone, which lacks a ton of functionality that i have with my netbook. or i can ditch my phone and ipod and use my netbook to play music and call people via skype, but i'm not doing that. i feel like we should have or are very close to having a more compact device that can do all this.

have you guys seen the new archos media players running android? they're very enticing. there's a lot of talk surrounding apples new tablet, but it sounds like it's going to be an oversized ipod touch which isn't really that cool. these archos devices aren't phones either, but they sound way more cool than the new apple tablet. they have massive storage capacity (320GB) and hdmi out, so right there i can use this thing to carry all my media with me and hook it up to any huge display anywhere i want. it also has USB, so i could get a little compact keyboard and hook this up to any huge display to act as a monitor and use it as a general purpose computer to do work anywhere i go. it has wifi, so i could download/upload my work to the cloud, or a flashdrive. it has a 7" screen, so i could prop it up in my kitchen counter while i'm cooking and watch a cooking tutorial. truth be told, i'm not mobile enough to need or do all this, but the possibilities are really cool and i wonder how far off we are from having phones that can do all this.

Yeah is kind of hard to decide which one to get really and honestly I would not be perfectly happy with any of them just yet. I really want a more capable browser and my phone could run faster. The RIMM OS on the blackberry multitasks though which is kind of cool so you can listen to music while at the same time run the navigator program which will mix in the audio from both apps and you can switch back and forth to whatever display you want. The blackberry is also very secure BUT here is a ridiculous thing with the blackberry - if you were to oh I dunno be moderately drunk and screw around with trying to hack my password on my phone you would blank my phone completely and then you would get access to it and make as many calls as you want...pretty stupid - however you would never get a chance to see the contents of my phone.

Also if you turn encryption on for everything the phone will have some bugs with the media player - it will always scan for songs every time you want to play music. The only way to get rid of this problem is to turn off the encryption BUT if you were totally paranoid about someone accessing your memory card it would be entirely encrypted. There is low level password only "encryption" too.

One other thing that is very cool about the blackberry is an actual no stupid fricken outlook contact format import/export only feature.

I think it is entirely stupid that you would EVER have to install outlook just to export your contacts. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just export as a spreadsheet? Well it isn't completely a spreadsheet but who cares it is close enough being a .CSV file. Yeah, you can actually just export ASCII text if you want...wow how hard is that to have instead of having some stupid Outlook requirement.

I actually kept a spreadsheet of contact info because I lost my phone contacts a few times and when I got my blackberry I was actually able to import it with barely any formatting change just by copying the name column and number column into the exported .CSV file and then I just reimported...Should have always been that simple.

The Archos browser looks very cool especially that it is able to handle flash objects but I have to wonder about the Java and AJAX support. Probably the coolest portable media device I have seen though. Wonder what Apple thinks of it? I wonder if that is why Apple haven't released the tablet yet...

There is a 500GB Archos 5 available at Best Buy

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 8116483753

I have the HTC Touch Pro II, and I find it's processor a little slow most of the time. It has the same CPU as the Touch Pro I. The screen is amazing, however (800 x 480!) I'm still running Winmo 6.1, with no official update out at present, even though AT&T released their TP2 with 6.5.

On the horizon, the HTC Touch HD2, with capacitive screen (like the iphone) and 1ghz snapdragon processor, might be a better bet, if you like windows mobile. Still no tangible keyboard though.

http://www.htc.com/europe/product/hd2/s ... ation.html

I think my next phone will be an android, if they ever make one that meets my needs.
G1 = Physical keyboard, but ugly as sin.
myTouch3g - Beautiful, but no physical keyboard.

Looks cool but the snap dragon probably isn't snappy enough to prevent the phone from running really slow.

I'll tell you what I don't like. Blackberry-Anything. I have an 8900, and it angers me every chance it gets. (have to have one for work) I hate the Blackberry Enterprise Server, I hate Blackberry devices, etc. etc. etc. etc.

etc.

So there you go. Don't get one...

Oh yeah? Well I hate EVERYTHING!!!

Oh yeah? ... 'cause... yeah!!!!

All right I suppose it is time I weigh in on this thread. This is the most topical discussion we've had in years.

I jumped into the Smart Phone game a year ago almost to the day, buying the HTC Touch Pro.



I'm going to go into more detail here, but to summarize my experience: The phone has a bit of a steep learning curve - even just for using the normal touch screen features. But once you get used to its idiosyncrasies it is extremely powerful. And if you get into just a little bit of casual hacking, it unlocks a whole new world of mobile features that now that I am used to I could never go back to living without. I am very happy with the Touch Pro, even a year later - and there is nothing on the market (and I believe McNevin would agree) that is a substantial enough upgrade to tempt me away ...yet.

So when I bought the T.Pro I immediately dove under the hood to try to do some light customization. The one thing that cannot be argued is there is an enormous community of WinMo power users out there and for them, the T.Pro represented the long awaited uber-device they had always wanted. The scene embraced the phone and immediately set to tweaking and hacking roms.

The two headquarters for the hardcore are PPCGeeks and XDA-Developers.

However I wasn't quite ready to jump into the Rom game yet so I just downloaded every little tweak and fix and stupid toy I could find. I installed and played with most of them but only found about 1/3 of them useful (like changing from Sprint's stupid clock to the HTC default flip clock - as easy as installing a little CAB). Windows power users will find navigating under the hood of Windows Mobile as familiar as putting on an old pair of sweatpants. The only somewhat annoying thing is that Windows CE has been around so long that there are a ton of buggy apps out there that were made for 100MHz crap-phones with 320x240 screens. I few apps felt like they were designed for Win3.1. I also spent a chunk of time trying to get emus to work, and while some games would run - the display and interface were way too messed up to make it an enjoyable experience. I eventually gave up and haven't tried again since that first week (though I probably should look back into it considering I still have a gig of roms sitting on my storage card).

After about 6 months of using my modded Sprint Rom I decided to finally take the plunge and install a custom scene Rom. I had looked into it in the past but just didn't get around to it. But since WinMo 6.5 had hit the scene I had to jump in. Why did I wait?! It was way easier than I expected and after some initial problems with a Rom that I just didn't like I settled on the fantastic EnergyRom (now known as Photon).



WinMo 6.5 is an evolutionary leap forward. Like Windows98 to Windows98 SE. Everything just works faster and seems smarter. This is mostly due to the hard work by people at HTC on the really fantastic HTC TouchFlo3D2. It is a great front end and makes HTC phones what they are.

Sure there are some bugs... in fact my phone is quirky. But I am used to them and the phone is damn powerful - it really is like having a PC in my Pocket, which is exactly the experience I wanted. But I can't just throw my phone to someone and say hey look how cool this is. They touch it once, it jumps to a different screen, then they get lost... like i said it has a steep learning curve. But I couldn't go back. Here are some reasons why and tips for WinMo users:

The Phone is fast - I have no problems with the CPU. I can load up Opera, Google Maps, Office, or the awesome YomoReader (best RSS reader out there - trust me I have tried them all) very quickly. It could use more memory for sure, but it is certainly fast. The secret to problem free operation is to reset the phone once a day. Sounds lame but reboot is fast and it isn't a problem because of the next point...

Like any smartphone, the T.Pro sucks down the power (especially with a tweaked rom). I used to ration my media playing or GPS usage. But then I got clever. I ordered a 2nd battery online for $5. Now if I am going out for the day I can just grab my other battery and swap them in the afternoon. It isn't a hassle at all and has completely changed the way I use my phone. I can leave it on GPS and playing tunes and all sorts of features all the time. Not having to worry about the battery has really made the phone more useful. More than any other feature out there, not having a replaceable battery immediately makes the iPhone a nonstarter for me.

Sprint EVDO 3G rocks! I have 3G almost everywhere I go. How did I not have internet in my pocket before? The phone even uses Verizon towers. Sorry McNevin - I don't know why you refuse to believe it but CDMA still kicks GSM's ass. The best part is how well the tethering works. I plug my phone into my laptop all the time and, whoop! broadband on the go. And all for my same monthly cellphone bill. This is a huge feature. (Hear that beeeph you could ditch your netbook's monthly bill). I can even turn my phone into a 802.11g wireless access point!

Apps - while the apps scene on the iPhone is incredible (and I am bit jealous of a few of them), there is pretty much anything you would need for WinMo too - and for freee. Midomi is a great Shazam replacement. The game support is massive. And pretty much anything else I have looked for I have found - I just usually have to look on a PC.

So how about the competition?

Someone buying a smartphone today would probably want to buy the TouchPro 2 because of its bigger screen - but the specs are the same and I like my D-Pad so there is no reason for me to upgrade. But there has to be an upgrade sometime right?

I love the iPhone because of how well it works. The apps are amazing and I imagine if it was jailbroken you could do some cool stuff. But there are just too many things that suck about it (especially the battery) and AT&T's 3G (and everything else) blows goats. I also just feel like Apple tries too hard to control your experience. I will never be happy if I can't tweak every little thing.

Android certainly shows a lot of promise. I have recently started using more google apps (calendar and tasks) and can see the advantage of a google phone. But the killer handset still hasn't hit. Let's see it HTC - what have you got for us?

Blackberry? Meh - not for me. I already have more features than the super high end Bberries.

Next gen WinMo? WinMo dev will have continued to improve (Mesh on phone and over-the-air sync pls!) and there will be at some point there will be a handset upgrade worth shelling out for. If the killer Android app isn't out by this time next year I will probably do just that. But for the next year I should be fine sticking with the T.Pro. It was worth the wait.

Verizon dumping CDMA for GSM-based LTE in 4G networks - Thats why...

Yes the free tethering, and use of the phone as an 802.11 access point are awesome, and also supported by my phone/carrier as well.

My major gripe, is also mentioned by Enderzero. The fact that the OS has been around for so long, there is a million apps floating around that are older than dirt. Non of them seem to work either, and yes do in fact look like they were designed for Windows 3.1. There was no good place to get winmo aps, however XDA has a hacked copy of the Windows Marketplace. After only 3 weeks since the marketplace launch, we're finally starting to see a good flow of quality apps coming out. They are all designed for current hardware too!

Hacked Marketplace:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=568806

WVGA fix (This helps with old games like doom):

http://forum.xda-developers.com/attachm ... 1251165483

Ack, looking at modifying the registry on a phone seems ridiculous to me. It is easy to blame Windows for this - not only in the fact that Windows runs on the touch pro but because we got used to having to deal with its idiosyncrasies. It is amazing what we are willing to put up with because of what we get used to. I think for most people the Touch Pro is too esoteric.

Speaking of Windows the Archos 9 PCTablet just came out and runs Windows 7. It would be cool if it had built in internet connectivity that worked like Clearwire but you can always just get Clearwire usb to go with it but I would rather not have something sticking out of the side of it. The battery life sucks on the thing though at 3-4hrs anyway. They are using a 1.8" HD so the capacity is smaller than the Archos 5/7. It looks pretty cool and is supposedly at $500 which would be pretty cool. I am almost considering getting one because of how lazy I have become where I write emails in bed and watch movies on a notebook computer.

http://www.archos.com/products/nb/archo ... dj&lang=en

It will be interesting to see how the Apples pctablet compares when it comes out. The next crunchpad looks pretty cool too though:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/03/cr ... prototype/

256bit_l2icks0r! wrote:It is amazing what we are willing to put up with because of what we get used to. I think for most people the Touch Pro is too esoteric.

I agree with that - but not for me, and not for the "scene" that is into it. I would rather have a phone with lots of power and features that can be tweaked out of it than a phone that just didn't have them.

Re: the archos tablet - I think I would rather buy a netbook. But I don't want a netbook because I think I would still be frustrated by 11" being too small. I have my phone, 14" laptop, and Desktop PC. Those 3 fit my needs nicely.

wow that cruchpad looks cool.

i think i'm gonna pick up this new android 2.0 phone, the droid, coming out friday before any more cool new phone announcements come out cuz i need a phone already. it looks like a solid phone, some big names are calling it the iphone killer (shocker!), but after reading a few reviews, it doesn't sound anything close to that. same size as iphone, but heavier (which i like for some reason), bigger screen, higher res, 32GB storage, fast cpu, removable battery (don't really care), and physical slider keyboard. don't know about the apps yet but the street view nav looks incredible. the voice recognition on the mytouch phone running android 1.5 is by far the best i've played with, could be better on 2.0. if not, cool. and finally, i'll have a google voice app on my phone to make my google voice account feel less like a web service and more like a phone service. apparently browsing the web on the high res screen makes for a huge improvement in the browsing experience and a major selling point for me. the phone has this huge gold button on the slider keyboard that looks like a fingerprint scanner (and a huge waste of precious keyboard space), but we'll see. news on this and more...to come.



how did i end up settling on a motorola phone?

I think the Driod's possible $99 price tag is great. I think it isn't that pretty to look at, but It is way better looking than a G1. Seems all the pretty androids only have virtual keyboards. Well except The Samsung Moment.

the tag on the droid is $199, I just pre-ordered it at best buy yesterday, about to go pick it up in a few. while there, i was playing around with the samsung moment and the keyboard layout is kinda whack. three rows - top row for numbers, second and third rows for everything else crammed into this funky layout that I could see myself getting used to if i wanted to. aside from the keyboard, the samsung moment is a pretty cool phone, i just don't understand how or why they screw up the obvious things like the keyboard layout.

Oh sorry, the 99$ tag was for the DROiD ERIS, or basically Verizon's version of the hero (no keyboard).

Well congratulations on jumping into the Android world, I'm excited to see how modable the android platform is. Please keep us updated.

Weird, the shots of the Moment that I saw had the space bar crammed between the B, and N keys, but standard qwerty, with dedicated number rows, besides that.

I'm still android curious...

Cool. You should install the HTC front end and then no one will know you have a motorola. Seriously. And let us know how it is.

The phone is great! I'll post my list of likes and dislikes a little later, I've been really busy. More to come very soon...

The official Windows Marketplace is out for WM6.1 (Even though I think I'm the only one running 6.1)

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/ ... place.mspx

Opera Mobile 10 Beta out today as well:

http://www.opera.com/mobile/

Update:

My worst fears were confirmed by XDA, it will wipe your previous opera, and a hard reset is needed to restore your original.

I dont like the sound of these changes either, which is sad because I was hoping a new Opera would tide me over till Fennec.
(What happened to a late 2008 Fennec beta, and a 2009 release?)

-zoombar doesn't work natively
-screen rotates only on keyboard slideout, not with g-sensor.(I suppose this can be solved with g-sensor utility programs)
-no precise zooming. You're either zoomed in or out. No in between. And you can't zoom further in.
-no more realtime text reflow. Text are formatted into columns so they can be read zoomed in.
-vertical scrolling is not locked. That is, when you scroll vertically to read a column of text, sometimes your scrolling may be off to one side. In v9.5 and 9.7, this slight horizontal movement is ignored intelligently. This isn't the case for v10
-can't disable java-script
-the browser occupies the whole screen. You won't even have access to your Start Menu and taskbar.
-config:opera does not work.
-browser string opens mobile sites by default.

Yuck I'll wait thank you very much.

I know, they pretty much ruined the best thing in mobile browsers, WTF!

I found a thread on XDA that has download locations for just about every version of Opera, 9.5 - 10 so you can get opera back w/o a hard reset.

You can forget about 10, but I'm toying with the idea of installing Opera 9.7

(T-Mobile TP2 default is 9.5.16643)

Hmmm... Guess what... I really like my Blackberry Curve 8900 now. I've been playing with the GPS, I fixed the things that were broken, reinstalled (and set up properly) the BES at work, and now it... works... It's small, has good battery life, is pretty quick most of the time. The only thing I hate about it now, is T-Mobile. Plenty of dropped calls, or calls that never connected in the first place, the worst coverage area in Washington, and I get "duh..." from even their upper tiers when I call them.

Anyway, the phone itself is quite cool. I ordered the 9700 Bold model for testing purposes. Now that I kind of like it, I'm going to grab some apps for it, and see how they are.

I think you will like the 9700 better. The keyboard is a lot better and the phone is quicker because of the 624mhz CPU as opposed to the 512mhz in the curve 8900...quite a ways away from the curve 8300 series that used a lame 225mhz which made the phone barely usable.

The display on the bolds is unmatched by anything, especially the one you have because it is the larger display.

The apps are pretty cool but I think Sprint may have the best mechanism for getting them as you don't have to use a paypal account or anything - it just works like you would expect it to.

Sprint was pretty good with a $99 unlimited everything plan and the EVD0 network was fast. Reliability was good too, AT&T is not very good as I get some bizarre behavior.

Just got the 9700 Bold. I really like it. It makes a good phone (slightly narrower than the 8900,) the screen is really nice, and I like the little optical track-ball replacement (even though I love those tiny track-balls already.) You're right about the keys. They feel better, and are easier to type on (maybe because they're angled like some of the older BBs.) It's running on their faster network now (3G is it?) so the GPS loads and tracks much more quickly. It seems slightly lighter than the 8900 as well. The keys light up a little more nicely (more evenly.)

Now, if T-Mobile didn't have a 75% dropped call rate, and a busy signal when many people call my phone, I would absolutely love my BB experience. (and I've nearly forgotten Blackberry hell from yesterday.)