Phone Upgrade

[mrcinquecento]

just seen on tesco mobile i can get a nokia n8 free on a 24 month contract for £5 less a month than i'm paying now, and im not even paying for the phone as part of that copntract with o2!, tesco deal has the same talk minutes and internet useage but with a text limit i dont have atm,seeing as i'll get nowhere near the message limit (currently at approx 400 sent texts a month and the limit is 5000), that's a good trade off for the phone IMO, definitely going to look into that tomorrow

 

[mrcinquecento]

See, bar its tiny keypad (and you've seen first hand how my text messages end up mate), I'd recommend the HTC in a flash.

i have big hands, little keypads dont agree with me :laugh:

 

[muppet42]

Standby for a rant-ish ramble lol...

Well, my mate's got the HTC Trophy which is a WM7 phone and he hates it. Got it via the work and more often than not uses his HTC Desire instead as it's a heck of a lot less buggy. Well, kind of.

Said HTC Desire is okay - the build quality's decent and the actual phone's not too bad BUT there's loads of niggles that bug the hell out of me. Onboard memory sucks (about half a gig) and that wouldn't be so bad you'd think given it's got an SD Card slot. However, the geniuses at HTC and Android decided you can only save a small proportion of an app onto the SD Card, meaning you run out of space rather quickly downloading apps like Google Earth and such. I've only got a small fraction of what I had on my 8gb iPhone 3G and I'm struggling for space You can get round this via rooting the phone (essentially jailbreaking) but the widgets that are oh so cool can only work with an app that's completely on the phone either way. Oh and don't even mention the nightmare I had trying to find a music player that could actually find most of the album art. The inbuilt Android/HTC ones and even WinAMP are useless at it unless you put art work in each and every bloomin song folder.

Also, various bugs like the camera crashing if you don't open it in portrait mode - though even that's an intermittent fault rather than one that happens consistently. The Maps app generally crashing full stop and numerous random issues with apps not being as polished as the Apple equivalent mean I'm kind of wishing I'd paid the extra £130 odd for an iPhone 4.

I do think if they sort the memory issue and the latest versions of Android are more stable then it'll be the phone to have as it's got nice features. Plus I still like the openness Android brings, but I've been on the verge of selling my Desire on numerous occasions over the past few weeks and months.

I think it's more disappointment more than anything else as the only issue I'd heard of before I got the phone was the battery life, which does indeed suck terribly. Also gets stupidly hot using the GPS for satnav btw. It's almost feeling like my old Moto v635 all over again though at least with that it wasn't hyped up so much via reviews and such, I kind of just bought that based on reputation of other handsets in the Motorola range.

The rest of the phone works pretty well. I like the integration with Facebook and such with the contacts and I also like the widgets and apps when they do work and you can actually have the space to install and update them - I've found myself having to delete some apps to update others(!)

After that glowing review, anyone want to buy my phone? :laugh:

 

[mrcinquecento]

doesn't sound so promising for the htc then :laugh:

 

[Gregry254]

I have the HTC HD2 and have had it for about a year now I think.

This phone is mental I have had windows mobile 6.5 on it, Android on it and now I have windows phone 7 on it

If you get bored of the OS on it then BOOM within 10 minutes you are set up with what would appear to be a new phone I have been using wp7 now for a month or so and not had one problem with it.

You can pick them up cheap enough now on ebay if you find a decent deal.

Just a thought

 

[imported_Jodie]

I cannit really comment, i have a tocco light which i hate, but will not replace as i drop it too much LOL

 

[imported_abyss113]

ive been running the new HTC Desire HD for a month or so now which gets rid of the crappy windows and replaces it with android so far no crashes and its fast and a bit better memory storage and useage also the benfits of a steel casing instead of a crappy plastic phone means its a good solid weight and at teh moment quite glad i got it camera is also very good on it

 

[clock34]

i use the htc desire and over the last year and a half never had it crash once, never had a single problem, had the phone replaced due to the charger siocket breaking but app wise not found any issues....


maybee you have a bad one? is it completely up to datE?

 

[mrcinquecento]

had a play with the nokia n8, didn't like it enough to go for it. the phone itself felt nice to hold,it was quick and smooth through apps etc but genuinely, the OS really didnt work in it's favour, it just didn't feel very user friendly or nice to use, it would defo get frustrating very quick, so that's out.

 

[muppet42]

i use the htc desire and over the last year and a half never had it crash once, never had a single problem, had the phone replaced due to the charger siocket breaking but app wise not found any issues....


maybee you have a bad one? is it completely up to datE?

Completely up to date and there's no issue with the memory card as have formatted both via the PC and via the phone's onboard formatter. The app storage thing can't be solved by anything else other than having a different phone, basically one that has more onboard storage. The crashes I have don't freeze up the phone or anything, it's the app itself that crashes or has an issue. Some of the apps are also on the phone rather than the SD card, so again, this seems to say it's not an issue with the card.

Reason I mention the SD card is I know some people have had problems when they've got a replacement card, which I've done. I am wondering if that could be the case with mine, but I'm waiting till a major firmware update gets released for the Desire and if that doesn't sort things, I may pop the old 4gb card back in and see if that sorts things. Reason I don't just do it the now is it means deleting all the apps I have and re-downloading them, which is just a pita.

Don't get me wrong, the Desire is a decent phone. It just doesn't feel as together as the iPhone did though it's a lot faster, the camera's better, the screen's better, etc it just feels more than a little on the unpolished side.

On Windows Mobile, I'll reiterate what some have said before - it has potential. From what I've heard, MS haven't yet released one update for it and as far as I know, it's rather needed. The website I always go to that I've mentioned before has a great in-depth review of it here... http://www.mobile-review.com/review/windows-phone7-en.shtml ...think it goes into all the good and bad of the OS. If I had the choice of a mobile in the near future, I'd wait for the IP5 or get an Android one with a larger onboard memory and a better battery.

 

[clock34]

aye get the memory thing, but you gotta think that the desire is one of the first outlets of android. iphone is now on ip4 aswell as all the updates and the cost of buying one, there alyways going to be more 'polished' but id still never ever own one haha

 

[muppet42]

aye get the memory thing, but you gotta think that the desire is one of the first outlets of android. iphone is now on ip4 aswell as all the updates and the cost of buying one, there alyways going to be more 'polished' but id still never ever own one haha

Yeah, totally see your point. Apple's a total bastid for openness and options to tweak, which is where OS' like Android come in and the main reason why I switched. But then, iOS is something you can just pick up and know how to use, Android not so much. Android's been around for a few years, first one I knew of and that really hit the UK market was the G1...

...which interested me a bit even then, though that was pretty much when I got the iPhone. Back then, Android was pretty raw as far as I remember but given it's Linux origins, easy to develop apps for so that I heard was never a problem even early on. I was so anti-Apple up to actually getting one as well, ended up caving when I could get a refurb for free on my contract and thought what the hell :laugh:

Honestly, I still rate that 3G as the best handset I've ever had. Ended up getting slower as the OS' updated and moved on from the hardware, but it's still a real piece of design. Flawed of course, but I liked the simple/clean design and the sheer quality of it in terms of the build along with the ease of navigating everything and surprising responsiveness of the screen - something I'd felt lacking in previous touch screens I'd used.

It's not like I find Android hard to navigate or anything like that but I just think it's not quite as together as I said. I guess I'm still in the getting used to phase even a few months down the line. Got till next June and my next upgrade to get more used to it or sell it on :laugh:

 

[clock34]

i cant use iphones. completely confuses me, never owning a apple i just dont get what all the icons (safari and all that)mean so it would take alot of getting used to... i think that big difference in the design/wording of the thing make me not want to ever get one and people who use them find it hard to switch back as they get the same but in reverse.

 

[ycming]

Get this bus!

Snake 2 for the win!

Ming

 

[muppet42]

Had a 3310, was my second ever phone after the ye olde 402 (also known as the 5110). Was a great phone indeed and remember a mate finding the next model up, the 3330 with the amazing ability of WAP :laugh:

Know what you mean Steve, Apple's got a very specific way of doing things which I know some people don't get on with. Had went from a Sony Ericsson w880 (least reliable phone I've ever had by the way) to the iPhone and I just picked it up. There were small bits I needed to find out for myself, but I never needed to look at the online manual. With the Desire, I've not had any major issues understanding anything, but the forums have been utilised far more for some of the issues I've been having.