Phones - Why should I upgrade?
 

I own a HTC Desire. Its a pretty good phone.

Come Feb, I get my free upgrade on my contract.

Cloudchaser, explain to me as thoroughly as you can, what I will be able to achieve with a newer phone, that I can't achieve with my Desire.

And no, I do not give a single **** about the iPhone. I don't want one, I have never wanted one, I will not want one, and I cannot envision a situation in which I would want one.

With that said, what new **** is happening on phones that'll bring me such a significant improvement in my life as to take the upgrade, rather than ask for a cheaper contract?

My main bugbears on phones are -

1 - Battery Life.
2 - Battery Life. - A user replaceable battery is also a good thing.
3 - I'd like something I can slip in a pocket and be comfortable keeping there. My Desire allows that, and as long as I'm not stupid and don't keep keys there too, I've no reason to believe it'll start looking shabby or break. I don't want something I have to baby or keep in a case. Gimme a phone I can work with. I know touchscreen is ubiquitous, but the Desire's screen is more than tough enough to not get scratched in my pockets, so I'm looking for that or better. (Gorilla glass?)

Wow, you are so angry! Bikes, My Pony and now phone battery life.

I'll try and say something: I don't really know that much about phones, and not having much time I use the iPhone.

If you want a great touchscreen that won't break, I'd advise you to give at least one sh*t about the iPhone.

Seriously, a few mates and I were having a quad bike race in the lake district earlier this year, and my iPhone fell out of my pocket and was run over by the quad bike behind and ended up in a muddy puddle.

And guess what? It still works perfectly. There is a small hairline crack in the glass, but is invisible from most angles.

I'd also recommend the T Mobile Unity, which is very cheap but can do everything a blackberry can, and is a lot more reliable.

Hope this is mildly useful.

I feel the same exact way dude. I've had the same little Samsung for the past 4 years now (the one that flips both ways), and I haven't even considered upgrading to a smartphone for several reasons
1. Love the battery life on my Samsung. I charge it once every 4-5 days.
2. Love the durability. It's a brick compared to those newfangled smartphones, which, if you drop once at the wrong angle, reward you with a shattered screen or malfunctioning touchpad.
3. Love the size. It's seriously probably half the surface area and mass of your average smartphone.
4. Those smartphone data plans are ridiculous, and getting ridiculous-er by the day. I mean, sometimes I wish I'd hopped on the smartphone bandwagon at the beginning so I would've grandfathered into a decent data plan like my brother did, but such is life

I guess there's no reason to upgrade yet. A Desire can still do what most new day smartphones can do. If you like it, keep it.
Wouldn't want to be without a smartphone anymore, but if you have one that works, there's no reason to upgrade just yet.

I have an iPhone, but my mom has the Samsung Galaxy S2 and she loves it. You don't need a case for that one. In fact, you really don't need a case for any phone. People are so obsessed with keeping their gadgets in mint condition. A scratch is not going to seriously affect the phone's ability to function properly. The downside to the S2 is that it's fucking huge because the screen is 4.5". It's thin but I imagine it would be uncomfortable to have in your pocket. It's also expensive.

I heard the Samsung Galaxy Ace is good. It's like the S2, but smaller. It's about the same size as an iPhone so it will fit nicely in a pocket.

HTC is also good, as you already know.

If you want something that doesn't break easily, I advise you to stay away from the Blackberry. They are absolute shit. Before I had the iPhone, I had a Blackberry Curve and it fell off a coffee table and broke open. Also, my dad had the Blackberry Torch 9810, the touchscreen one. The battery life was terrible and the screen shattered when he dropped it from a short height.

If you go the smartphone route, plans can get expensive. But you can save a crap load of money by blocking the 3G/4G (whatever it is now) data usage. I did that with my iPhone and now I don't pay more than $30 per month. Most of these smartphones can pick up WiFi signals (the Samsung and iPhones do, I know that for sure), and so many public places have free WiFi, so you don't even need a data plan!

My plan for data is £25 a month for 500MB, an extra £5 for every additional 500MB block. I rarely use it all, much less twice over.

Blackberry, I suppose I should have mentioned. I kind of forgot they exist, but frankly, dextrous though my fingers and thumbs are, as a guitar player, Blackberry typing is a nightmare for me. I was never going to consider one.

They are really hard to type on. The T Mobile unity is the best I've encountered for that.

Okay, yeah that's about $40 here which is about what I paid for 500MB of data. I had that plan for about 3 months, but I wasn't using enough of it to make it worth every penny, so I cancelled the plan and blocked data usage so I would rack up any extra charges if I accidentally used it.

I think Blackberry is on it's way out, really. People like apps and stuff now, and Blackberry doesn't have nearly as much selection as Android or Apple do. I think the only thing they have going for them is BBM, but now iPhones have the new iChat/iMessage feature (and you can send messages to iPod touches and iPads over WiFi) which is free unlike BBM, and I heard that Android might introduce something similar in the near future.

I've had an iphone and blackberry.

I'll start with my blackberry curve 9360. Its balls.
+Emails are like texts straight to your phone. Its right handy.
+Its slim
+the camera's quite good for a 5mp
-Its been turning off randomly when it has charge in it.
-Its slow.
-The battery life is awful.
-The apps are useless and ****. There's like no free decent games.

Can't be arsed writing about the iPhone. You hate them anyway. One thing I will say is that imo there is no better phone.

Bbm is free...

Not here. Maybe the app is free, but when I had my Blackberry, my carrier at the time charged me like 20 cents for every BBM message (sent and received), because I didn't have a plan that included BBM. I rarely used it and so I didn't think it was worthwhile to purchase the add-on plan, which was an extra $20/month and included stuff that I didn't really need, like call display, call answer, and call waiting.

If you have a choice between upgrading to a phone whose features you don't need or care about, versus reducing the contract payments of your current phone that meets all your needs, you should obviously go with the reduced contract.
I probably don't need to explain that any further, but I'll do it anyway...
Even if you wanted cool bells and whistles of a new phone, you'd still be coming out ahead with a prolonged contract costing you less money in the long-run that you could be buying hookers and blow with.

If you don't want to upgrade, my suggestion is to keep your current phone.

This is a lot of information about my history with the now discontinued razr.

I have an iPhone it's nice.

I would keep the phone you have now if you like it and you don't want to upgrade.

Its not that I don't want to upgrade, I just want to make a decision on if its WORTH upgrading. I could go either way.

As someone who has a fancy smartphone and is now back to a ****ty not-so-smartphone, I say this quote is more than enough reason to go for a cheaper contract. I mean, cmon, hookers and goddamn blow.

That being said, I had an EVO 4G. Great phone, if you're someone that spends a lot of time dicking around on the internet, or want to record videos and post them to your facebook so you can pretend like you have friends that care about the boring things you do in your life, or if you want to mess around with weird little apps that do things like tell you the ohm rating of a variable resistor. So really, a great phone for a dork like me.

But if all you really want a phone for is making phone calls, texting, and using as a goddamn watch, then I don't see a point in upgrading. Most of the stuff on newer phones is really JUST bells and whistles, or an excuse to be lazy, or some horrid comibation of the two. My EVO got thrown against a wall by a psychotic bitch, and so now I'm back to my five year old LG Rumor2, and though it glitches out on me sometimes, I can still get everything I need to do with a phone done.

The iPhone rocks. There's three reasons I don't want one though
1. Price
2. Apple
3. iTunes

But they are very good phones.
As for BB: The more expensive BB's (Bolds) are usually the better ones.
I've got a 9700 bold myself and it works perfectly. It's incredibly fast (faster than any other smartphone. It should be as it's got quite some limitations :)), the battery life is three full days.
I have to agree with you on the apps, there's not too many really good ones. Not legally free, at least. But I like my blackberry. Sound quality is decent, the camera is remarkably good, the speed of the thing is absolutely astonishing.
Downsides are some limitations to the OS. For instance; I can't set different types of notifications for all my e-mail accounts. I've got my personal account I would like to check all the time, but I've also got a forumaccount for my own forum that I only want to check every once in a while, manually. Can't be done. I also dislike the fact that there's no calender information on the homescreen. You have to open a window to see what appointments you have coming up, not practical. Another problem is that it can't handle big web pages. They're awful on phones, I know, but I don't mind waiting. The phone just goes 'this web page is too big, can't be opened'. ****. Doesn't happen too often, but it is still annoying.
Seems pretty serious, but most of the time the things I mention aren't that bad.
What I really dislike is the fact that the blinking light that tells you you've got an e-mail or sms or whatever, just keeps blinking untill you open the message. I wish there was a button to turn it off. Sometimes I want to read it later and I don't want that light to be blinking all the time. That's really the most annoying thing about the blackberry. I know you can turn the light off, but I like the idea of having a light that tells me that something 'has just happened'.

Anyway, as a phone, a camera and an internet device (facebook integration is really epic, as is MSN, Whatsapp, BBM) it's perfect.
As an alternative to a netbook, like thos new day iPhones and Android phones are, it isn't. Too limited.

But then, my BB was 15 bucks... I mean, come on :D.

Can I just point out that MP's says nothing about the quality of the camera?
It only says how big the image gets, but a big blurry image is still worse than a small sharp image :D.
It's somewhat like a TV. You may have a big ass TV, but that doesn't mean it's got a better image than a really small one :)

Come to think of it; with those tiny plastic lenses most phone camera's have, the only thing loads of MP's will do is show you very precisely how bad the lens is. Anything above 2mp in a phone camera is pretty useless.
Come to think of it, anythinga bove 5mp in any camera is quite useless unless you want to make a picture the size of a building :D.

s_k - Congratulations. You've managed to ramble on for two pages about absolutely nothing the thread was asking for information on.

Kindly **** off.

Edit: Also, having recently done some research about DSLR cameras, you're talking out your ass about cameras too. Away with you!

Are you serious? I only use BlackBerry smartphones now, for quite a while and have never broken the phone. The battery life has been excellent; my friends phones don't last nearly as long, and I only have to charge once every 3 days or so - even if I listen to internet radio. They're way more secure than the security nightmare that are iPhones, come in far more options, and function with flash SD cards, so their memory is far more expandable than the iPhone.

I seriously can't stand iPhones. BlackBerry > droid > iPhone, in my personal experience.

As an aside, I have thrown my phone in anger on numerous occasions, dropped it from tall heights, out windows, etc. and it just has some light scratches.

I'd say no, but you do seem to not like the lacking battery life. This may be useful.

I think you will find pros and cons to all smartphones. That being said, I use and iphone and couldn't be happier. It's been going strong for a year and half. At first I had a case, but then just got rid of it. I just have a protective anti scratch invisibleshield on the touchpad. It doesn't have a scratch on it (aside from normal wear). I charge it once a day...sometimes every other day depending on how much I use it. The apps are awesome. Having the internet on hand nearly anywhere you are is the tits. That doesn't mean its for everyone, I guess. Here's why smartphones are great for me:

If I don't know the answer to a question, it bugs me all day. Having wikipedia on hand at all times works for this.
I need to check my email a lot for work. I don't know what I would do without that.
Now that I'm thinking about work...I use the decent camera to take pics of stuff I'm working on.
Sometimes I don't have my ipod on hand and some music is called for. Pandora.
I like to keep up with the latest gadgets.

If none of that sounds appealing to you, I doubt you need to upgrade. Get a cheap phone. As far as games go...I loved them for 2 weeks. I was seriously glued to my iphone. That wore off, though, so if none of the stuff smartphones are actually useful for appeals to you, then why bother?

^Well said!

^^^ You know duga's my favourite member here?

Another fantastic post. hey are infrequent, but he's not bad at all.

Haha...I drop by every so often to impart my wisdom.

You should see the mess the "Evolution of Music" thread has ended up. That Steveeden guy wrote a gigantic post saying something to the extent of "I am here to condescend".

Anyway, I nominated you as this year's best member for this kind of thing. Keep it up!

I need a new phone too.
Just a question how do phone generations work. Is there some kind of phone season where everything is new? I wanna know when would be a good time to get a new one.

Yeah he's pretty incredible!

Nope! Not really. It's tricky too, because of how much they constantly change. One phone might be better than another, but then the newest version that comes out might be better than the competitor's. Only until the competitor comes out with another phone and so on.

anyone here using iPhone S? any feedback?

The 4S? It's just like every other iPhone except for Siri, pretty much.

That pretty much sums up the iPhone for me as well. Originally, I only bought it because I was becoming increasingly paranoid about needing a camera on my phone for some reason, and I had money to blow, so I went with the iPhone 4 just to throw around cash like a true gangster...

It wasn't until I got it that I realized how useful it is. Prior to that, I was all "pshh, you silly people and your silly iphones. I have a phone that calls people, and that's enough for me."

Then I was all, "nevermind..."

I know I could live without it.
But, life just wouldn't be as convenient.