Smartphones - thoughts?

[Tony Greyfox]

My current contract is coming up soon, and I'm considering the options available for new phones. Presently, I don't use my phone more than occasionally, but I've been around friends with smartphones and the various things they've been doing with them have me thinking they might be useful. (GPS is great, especially!)

So I'm curious: who's got smartphones? Which ones do you guys like and dislike, and which plans do you find work for you in terms of data, phone minutes, and such?

Opinions appreciated!

[Lune]

Blackberry Curve 8900 from Rogers, more than happy with it.  It was really useful when I was in sales, for speed of receiving emails, and instant messenger support is great.

[Kithop]

Originally got an HTC Dream from Rogers, loved it, especially w/ Cyanogenmod to replace the stock out of date firmware, but it's a bit short on memory... gave that one to my g/f and got a Google Nexus One now - I hate software keyboards, but otherwise the phone is amazing.  Unlocked direct from Google, so you pay like $600 up front for it, but no contract, you can pop the SIM out and use it with whoever, and you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, software-wise.  512MB of RAM and a 1GHz Snapdragon make it very snappy, too.

Stupid thing now is they discontinued selling the N1 direct, so you have to pay a bit extra and register as a developer with Google to get it as the 'Android Development Phone 3' instead, but it's otherwise the same I believe.

[Wyrd-Hotd]

The New Galaxy <--- Iphone KILLER.  Nuff said.

I work at Visions electronics, and one of our guys went to Bell Training, said its amazing.

[drewdle]

I thought this was going to be an opinion piece on smart-phones in general, not on the various kinds of smart-phones. I was all ready to whip out the hate sauce. Now I'm just disappointed and empty. For what it's worth, I hear the HTC Dream is pretty awesome, from a few people. There is also the trusty BlackBerry, although I've never been able to figure out how to use one when friends show me theirs. I'm not a huge fan of cells, and am not at all enamored with the "constantly connected" element that smart-phones bring with them.

To each their own. I was just itching to whip out the hate sauce.  O0

[Vanilla Skunk]

I find it funny when I whip out a full keyboard phone because someone needs to use a phone, the person goes to dial, and comes out with something along the lines of: "You dial, this thing has too many buttons."

Duh, the numbers are white, and the letters are black.  Ignore the extra keys if you're just gonna call someone, dumbass. :P

[Acco]

I'm personally waiting for the GSM version of the droid 2. If it doesn't have a slider keyboard, I don't want it. Specially since android's onscreen keyboard sucks such massive dong.

500MB of data is probably enough for most people.

For all it's faults, iphones has a great app selection, relatively easy to set up, easy to use, and decent battery life. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise - especially android fanatics. Ideologically, they're right. Apple's walled garden sucks if you wanna do certain things with your hardware. Realistically, you can get by just fine within the garden. There's more than enough choice within it, and the phone operates well enough without jailbreaking.

But for me, I want a hardware keyboard, so I'm dumping my 3GS at some point. But... as far as a phone goes, it was pretty decent at it.

[Kithop]

There was a time when you couldn't actually use SSH on an iPhone unless you paid something like $10 for the app, or jailbroke it.  Being a SysAdmin, you can guess the route I took with my old one... not to mention having a terminal with a full BSD userland and the ability to add more open source command line utilities easily from the Cydia repository made it incredibly powerful and just what I needed.

Then Apple kept trying to un-do the jailbreaks with each firmware, started acting like a dick about it, and around the time the 3GS came out it took a long while for people to figure out how to hack it and get it broken.  All the while, Google starts coming out of almost nowhere with the Android thing.  Yeah, most telcos lock their phones down, but with the Nexus One, Google hands you the keys and says 'look, if you mess up the software, it's not our problem' (when you unlock the bootloader with a simple one-line command from the official SDK).  Slap on Cyanogenmod or any other number of custom ROMs based off the official Android Open Source Project pretty much with Google's blessing, and you can not only have full access to your phone, but there are people that have even gotten full Debian ARM installs working.  And if you DON'T want to go that route, you can still slap in any ARM Linux binary utility manually and run it from within the Android terminal.

Yeah, the iPhone is really nice, and you can do a LOT of stuff in their walled garden, especially if you're not an overly technical user.  But for IT people like me, it's obvious who wants to cater to our needs. ;P

[Acco]

But, the N1 is only one example of an unencumbered phone. A good majority of the phones shipping with android have a locked down bootloader - ie, droid X, droid 2 (both of which pretty much represent the pinnacle of android phones available now). The Milestone - the GSM version of the droid 1 - also ships with a locked down bootloader.

The phones that google itself wants to put onto the market - yeah, they're unencumbered. But a good majority of the new android phones entering lack such features as easy rooting.

And I'm pretty sure that this conversation is completely unneeded for OP's question - as he's not a sysadmin. As a casual user, I'd argue that he could go either android or iphone and be reasonably happy with either choice. Maybe even blackberry.

[OberonSnowcat]

Well as another casual user it really depends on what you want to do with your phone. Personally I have a Blackberry Bold 9700 and I find that it does everything that I want out of it an more. It may not be a huge media powerhouse but it has a decent browser, especially when I get the 6.0 OS upgrade for it, and it excels in messaging and e-mailing.
Again it really all depends on what you're looking for, though I must admit there are times that I am tempted by all of the fancy Android phones I find they are all brought down to earth again by such a simple thing as how accurate and reliable their keyboards are, how long the batteries can last when subjected to one of my intense, hours long, IM conversations, or how well put together the units are none have matched, in my eyes at least, my trusty Blackberry. The software may be locked down like nobody's business and it may not be flashy or shiny but it does the job and that is all that I ask from it.

[Acco]

Yeah, pretty much what Oberon said.

On the topic of plans though... Really does depend on what you're planning to do with it. Most users use under 500M a month. Hell, even I use less than 500M when I've got uncapped internet at home... but when you need to tether, it's nice to have a larger cap. Especially when it's 6GB = $30 currently from most of the major carriers.

There are combined smartphone plans that cost about 45 + tax... arguably, unless you need everything plus the kitchen sink, you'd be safe enough to go with one of those and be fine.

And then there lies the issue of contracts. Up to you. Cancellation fees are a bitch. Keeps you roped into your plan until you're done.

[Tony Greyfox]

Cancellation fees are why I'm waiting for my Solo plan to expire (sometime soon) before I do anything else. =P

Thanks for the tips, folks. Should be useful when I do figure out what I'm doing.

[Silvermink]

I'd seriously consider the Samsung Galaxy S right now. I'm still using my iPhone 3GS, which I recently unlocked (which allows you to fix a lot of the niggles), but I still prefer the open-source model.

[Vanilla Skunk]

Another thing to think about:

Most cell phones these days are not readable in the sun, especially Samsung and LG phones.

They use the same kind of TFT display that laptops use, which are difficult to read unless their own lighting source is sufficient with the ambient light.  I recently had to remove my SGH-i616's screen cover, which I just found out is tinted, just so that I could read my screen in the sun at maximum brightness.

My older phone, the Nokia E62, you can read in any regular light, without having to make the backlight come on.  Most Nokia phones, and certain other brands have super shiny backings to allow daylight reading.  Panasonic Toughbooks use a similar technology, but not quite as shiny.  Nokia's version gives you the CD rainbow effect in the sun, Panasonic's is softer.

Blackberries have a light sensor, where when in the sun, they will light up the backlight to an insanely bright level so that the screen is readable in the sun.  I believe the iPhone can do the same thing, but I've never owned one due to my Apple grudge from the 90's when they were causing drama in the computer market back then.

[Acco]

Yeah about the iphone in the sun thing. Light goes up to max to be visible in direct sunlight.