I need some opinions beyond my own. Hopefully from people who have experience of the above mentioned phones.
I currently own an HTC Touch Pro phone. The phone itself is great. It’s small. Powerfull. High-res screen. And has a slide-out keyboard.
But the OS is pants. Microsoft Mobile 6.1. Amongst other things, the things that are wrong with it stay wrong with it because MS don’t update it. It’s also a pig to use. For example there are about 8 stylus-clicks and one power button click involved in silencing an alarm.
I have an Ipod Touch 2nd Gen. When in Wi-fi range it piddles all over the HTC for useability. I can type fast, send emails quickly, browse the ‘real’ internet (not the pathetic WAP you are forced to use on the HTC). I could go on listing ways the iPod is better than the HTC (or more to the point - than WM6.1)
My mobile provider now has the iphone 3gs. Trouble is, the cheapest contract price is about £35, with the phone costing £570 (down from a ‘replacement’ cost of over £900). My current contract is £14.
They also offer the HTC Hero. If I take it the phone will cost around 200-250, and I can stay on a £14 contract. And it runs on Google Android.
But it isn’t an iphone.
How does Android square up to the iphone software? How does the Hero square up to the iphone 3gs?
Anyone own an Android based phone? How do you find it?
I have a G1 and really like it. With Android 1.5 it provides what I need - email (yahoo & gmail), solid video & audio, bluetooth a2dp support, lots of apps etc.
I did have to go with the oversized battery, because I listen to about 4 hrs of music/streamed radio a day.
No, it’s not an iphone, but I like it better than what I’ve seen of the iphone.
I have a Touch Pro 2 (although it’s a newer revision than the original, with the 3.5mm audio jack), and I absolutely love it. Two of my iPhone-toting work colleagues are slowly being seduced by it. HTC’s TouchFlo 3D is [I’m told] improved from the original Touch Pro, and Windows Mobile 6.5 is due October 6.
I agree with Gleena, I love mine too. I really thought I wouldn’t like or need all the bells and whistles, but I was wrong. It’s all great. Highly recommend it.
I don’t see how you can go wrong with an iPhone, especially since you already have the iPod Touch. You know you already love that, so imagine adding a phone, video camera, and 3G/GPS technology to that.
Have you considered the Nokia N900? It should be coming out in a month or so. Basically it has close to the fullest feature set of any phone with a slide-out qwerty keyboard, big touchscreen, 5mp camera,GPS etc. as well as a Linux-based OS called Maemo which Nokia has used on its tablets. It’s probably the closest you can get to a PC experience on a phone and it may be the coolest gadget of 2009. There are a ton of videos on Youtube which give fairly detailed previews but you can start with this quick promofor a flavor of how it looks.
I must admit, I’m tempted by the iphone. But I’ve decided on the hero for these reasons…
I can carry on paying 14.99 a month (ok so I was out by 99 pence) as opposed to the minimum of 34.99 for the iphone contract. (this is the clincher folks. More than twice the contract for a phone I’ll hardly ever use as a phone???)
I already have an ipod, so do I really need another apple application/music/web browsing thing? I was tempted by the apps that will take advantage of the camera, the compass, and the increased power of the iphone 3gs but for me I think they’d be gimmicks I’d get about 2 days of fun out of.
Anything’s got to be better than my WM6 based htc touch pro.
The hero is LOT cheaper on contract subsidised phone replacement.
I don’t have to buy a micro-sd card because I’ve already got one which I’ll take from my htc touch pro.
The Nokia N9000 looks good. But a month? I want my technology RIGHT NOW! ( ) (plus, my provider is slow to provide new technology. They’ve only just started offering the iphone 3gs. They don’t even advertise that fact anywhere! I had to ask them to find out. So I imagine I’d have to wait longer than a month, if ever)
I get to not be just-another-drone-with-an-iphone.
The major hangup that people seem to have with the iphone is lack of keyboard. You don’t seem to be bothered by that with your touch, so I vote iphone.
I’ll also recommend to people that don’t like the lack of keyboard to give in a little bit to it. The auto-complete and -edit are really well done. I see a lot of new users stopping, backspacing over their mistakes, and carefully picking out each letter. Just let the phone do it for a while, so you can learn how badly you can miss, and when you need to go back.
The touch needed a keyboard because at the time touch screens weren’t good enough for reliable typing. now the HTC hero and the ipod/iphone have good enough touch technology that typing on the screen is as good as, if not better than typing on a little hardware keyboard on which you have to apply a certain amount of pressure, which introduces mistakes. On the iphone/ipod/hero you just touch it and it just… works. So yes, I can quite definitely do without the HW keyboard (which I hardly ever used anyway)
) (plus, my provider is slow to provide new technology. They’ve only just started offering the iphone 3gs. They don’t even advertise that fact anywhere! I had to ask them to find out. So I imagine I’d have to wait longer than a month, if ever)