h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As my old phone is slowly dying I am now thinking about buying a smartphone. Or not. I don't know. I especially don't know which smartphones are good. I had a look at them in a shop and for me one is like the other.


If you have a smartphoe what do you like/dislike about it?
Which smartphones would you recommend?
Which smartphone should I never buy?


Please help me.

I would say...don't overthink it.

Don't by Nokia because Symbian/Windows won't give you the apps.

iPhone if you want one.

Otherwise...your choice will be between Samsung or HTC, pretty much. The Android desktop on the HTC seems to me to work slightly better than the one on my Samsung Galaxy S - but so what.

Meh. Whatever you're given you'll be happy with. Just get the one with the best deal. Try and get all-you-can-eat data, or at least >1GB.

You've not needed one until now so you probably don't need to make sure you've got one marginally better than everyone else - and it would only be marginal.

I'm happy with my Samsung Galaxy S2 - a lot of people, especially iPhone users, are astounded at how large the screen is.

Gruesome #2 has an HTC ChaCha (which is one of those ones with a qwerty keyboard and - gasp! - a facebook button) she likes it, but I think the screen is too small for web browsing, but she's very happy with it

both of those run on Android.

Colour me a fanboi, but...

iPhone. I mean... why wouldn't you? If you're on a contract, you can get a 3GS essentially free. Once you work out how it works (and it's NOT intuitive), iTunes is actually an excellent way to manage your music collection and podcast consumption. And iOS is just so... nice.

My home currently contains an Android tablet, an Android phone, a Blackberry and two iPhones. I've tried using all of them. I'd *hate* to be deprived of the iPhone. If I never saw the Android or BB devices again, I wouldn't care.

There's a reason Apple products inspire almost religious levels of devotion among those who use them.

There are, of course, reasons to not like them, but none of them are compelling to me.

Especially if you've ever owned an iPod, it's a no-brainer.

Note: iTunes is not intuitive. iPhone is.

The iPhone has achieved, for me at least, something people have been predicting now for a couple of decades: convergence. To the point that I don't really think of it OR USE IT primarily as a phone.

It is a sufficiently good music/podcast player that I never carry anything else for doing that job. It is a sufficiently good video and still camera that I almost never carry anything else to do that job. It is a sufficiently good pocket web browser that, well, is there anything else that does that? It's an alarm clock, it's my on-the-go portal to hotmail, Youtube and IMDb, it keeps me up on the cricket scores and facebook, it plots graphs for me from data I enter (engineer...), it tells me where the weather's good for paragliding, it listens for ten seconds to ANY snatch of recorded music and tells me the title artist and album, it tells me what planets I can see from where I am, allows me to set up programmes to record on my Sky+ box while I'm away from home...

What do I *dislike*?

Incoming text messages cause it to make one of just six noises. Given that my choice of ringtones is essentially infinite, this is nothing short of stupid.

Er... that's it.

iTunes, for me, makes the whole iExperience something I want to avoid.

iPhones are rather lovely though. I prefer not to give them my money though.

thank you all for the answers so far

I have never owned an iShomething and am not a big fan of Apple products I'm afraid.

I think I'd mainly use it for internet, checking emails and stuff.

Another iPhone fan here, I'm afraid, as is the whole family.

I've yet to meet an owner who isn't totally satisfied, and wouldn't dream of switching to another make.

Their relatively high resale value indicates that they are a desirable item - I upgraded to the 4 recently, which leaves my my old handset to sell, and it's worth about £100.

I've always used Nokias, becasue they're basically free, and I can do TXT, voice, the internet and E-mail on it, which basically covers it all, I'd never want to use a phone for music, as I've a small Mp3 player I can use for that, and feel its better to do that on a seperate device, thus doubleing the effective battery life of both.. All the other 'must have aps', seem to be 'why on earth would I want that aps', so that has never bothered me.. Oh, and they're fairly indestructible phones, and so with the cheapness of them, lossing, having stolen, or breaking it doesn't matter anyhow, I'd not carry £££££ in my wallet, and so carrying round a phone worth more than my monthly income seems a pretty daft thing to do as well Over-engineered for the job its meant to do IMO

IPhone for me and, as hoo said, it's all about the convergence. I had an original Palm pilot and a bag type cell phone back in the day. I longed for technology to achieve a single, pocket sized device. Having gotten used to using a stylus, I wanted no keyboard. Easy synching and easy updating.

Contacts, calendar, email, Internet, Tom Tom gps app, diet and exercise app, books, bar code reader with pricing information, banking app, real estate app, and many more.

And Angry Birds app.

Hoo, do you have the light saber app?

oh oh I want one of those!

O do agree with SoRB (universe shudders) iPhone 3GS if you can afford the higher monthly fee.

"Hoo, do you have the light saber app?"

Can I nominate this for dumb question of the week?

(Just teasing.)

Avoid Apple if you care about self-determination. Call me stupid, but when I buy something, I want to actually own it. Myself. I don't want the ghost of Steve Jobs dictating what software I'm allowed to install on a computer I've bought and paid for.

And a computer where installing VLC Media Player is illegal is a computer I want nothing to do with.

I don't have a smartphone, and didn't think I wanted one, but a couple of times recently it would have been handy, so I've been thinking about it. Of course, what I really want is the Mozilla Seabird, but unfortunately it doesn't actually exist, so I'll probably have to settle for Android.

http://mozillalabs.com/conceptseries/2010/09/23/seabird/

TRiG.

I love my HTC.

Hate the poor battery life but can't fault it otherwise. Does everything the iPhone does.

How much do the monthly payments come in for, for some of these? Thanks to juditious prudence over the years I've unlimited TXT and internet, and more than enough voice, and I think its just a tad over £15 a month, and they generally give me a free phone every year or so, *looks guiltily at pile of three unopened boxes of phones* I'm not a fan, as I think I said before, of err did you call it convergence? Overreliance on one item in my If it goes wrong, breaks, gets nicked, lost, you've lost your phone... your diary... your MP3 player etc., all in one go..

Very few apps but extremely sturdy:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VIho5Z5_10U/TVRFNZSHtTI/AAAAAAAAAqw/DLF3H5nFcRY/s1600/old-cellphone.jpg

Cheap, too!

You will get as many different opinions as there are Hootooers I guess.

I have just got over the poor battery life on my new BB Torch 8310 and I love it.

Battery life is likely to be poor on any and depends largely on how much you use it and whether you have GPS / Bluetooth / Wifi switched on an whether you use it.

Good luck.

PP

"Avoid Apple if you care about self-determination. Call me stupid, but when I buy something, I want to actually own it. Myself. I don't want the ghost of Steve Jobs dictating what software I'm allowed to install on a computer I've bought and paid for."

I could understand that attitude if what we're talking about is a computer. But we're being asked about PHONES here. That kind of idealistic, open-sourcier-than-thou snobbery is exactly why an iPhone is the better choice for most people. If you do care about what you call "self-determination", you're part of the less than 1% of geeks who give a shit. And Apple don't care about you, and well they shouldn't because you and your ilk are not where the money is.

Meanwhile, people who can just about operate Sky+ (but probably still have it plugged into their plasma screen's SCART socket...) don't give a monkey's about VLC, but think coverflow is cool.

And they DO "own" their phone, by any man-in-the-street's definition of the term. What geeks persist in failing to realise is that the vast majority of us DON'T CARE. We want something that just works. And the iPhone just works. And unlike the Mac in 1992 (which also just worked, unlike Windows at the time) the price premium isn't prohibitive, and there's not a global behemoth mopping up their ideas and doing them cheaper and nearly as well, the way Microsoft was doing with Windows as of about 1995.

'That kind of idealistic, open-sourcier-than-thou snobbery is exactly why an iPhone is the better choice for most people.'

Could you please explain that again?

Really, I don't want this thread to get an Apple vs Microsoft fight...


What specific advantages would an iPhone have compared to Samsung or HTC?