The Mobile Phone thread

Yeah, that one's definately as girls phone. I take it you have one as well? ;)
 
It looks like Microsoft could be set to announce a rival to the iPhone at E3 next month.

As spotted by Neowin, an intriguing new update has appeared on the Twitter page for the Microsoft Office 2010 team.

It reads: "June 2009 will be an important month for Zune lovers."

A follow-up message has since popped up, saying: "New product launch, that's all I'm allowed to say. Hold off from buying an iPhone/Pre."

So will June bring news of a new Zune? Will the announcement be made at E3? Will it have phone and gaming functionality, just like Apple's offering? Or is Microsoft finally launching a service that will let "Zune lovers" actually have sex with their machines? Probably not the last one.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/new-zune-announcement-coming-at-e3
 
I need a new phone - I dropped mine and the screen has broken (it's a crap phone anyway).

I want a Pay as you Go for under £70, anyone got any suggestions? :)

EDIT: Sorted thanks to Jumbo :D Just ordered a Nokia 6124 for £65 :).
 
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It tends to sell for about £140-150 delivered on eBay for a used one, boxed with all the original accessories. If you unlock it you'll get more though.
 
Hey guys, I'm looking for a new phone but my contract hasn't expired so I need an unlocked phone that will work with T-Mobile. I don't really want to spend more than $200, and the cheaper the better. Any ideas?
 
iPhone beater?

YouTube - HTC HD2 hand on - Engadget

HTCHD2.jpg


1ghz processor and a 4.3 touch screen just to name a few WOW features of this device
 
There have been about 20 phones since the iPhone that have been labelled as iPhone beaters but none of them come close cuz they cant provide the service Apple give you. This is just one of many.
 
jonneymendoza said:
how is it copying iPhone?
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It's a complete rip-off it has similar design features and almost identical functionality. All it does differently is that it boasts better specs e.g. Better camera, processor etc

It's trying too hard to be a better alternative to the iPhone, it has no individuality and certainly wouldn't draw most off an iPhone as it offers nothing new or revolutionary. At least the blackberry storm has individuality and doesn't need to try and replicate iPhone features, it has it's own style.
 
mjsmith2k said:
It's a complete rip-off it has similar design features and almost identical functionality. All it does differently is that it boasts better specs e.g. Better camera, processor etc

It's trying too hard to be a better alternative to the iPhone, it has no individuality and certainly wouldn't draw most off an iPhone as it offers nothing new or revolutionary. At least the blackberry storm has individuality and doesn't need to try and replicate iPhone features, it has it's own style.
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But when Iphone first came out it diddnt revolutionalise anything. it diddnt even have 3g connection for christ sakes.

For me the iphone is nothing special at all. style over substance. The next Iphone they will slap on a 5mp camera and people will fall for it all over again as "revolutionary".:YAWN:

How does this device i linked have a similar design? the OS is completely different. Can you have animated wallpapers in an iphone? do multi tasking? customize your home screen to look exactly how you want it?

Even the Android devices out are 100 times better than the 2 year old iphone OS.

I fail to see how its copying a iphone when its running a completely different OS, has better spec and more features. Is it copying the iphone because its housed in a black rectangular shaped case same as the iphone and have multi touch support? Thats the only things its "copying" from the iphone so to speak.

I dont know how you can label this as copying the iphone when it is completely different. Did you not watch the videos and read the spec of the phone before making a judgement or did you just look at the pic and automaticly made the assumption that its a copy cat?

good video comparing the two like for like. YouTube - HTC HD2 vs Iphone 3Gs Comparison

Dont get me wrong, Iphone is a decent device. good for gaming and has large amount of apps but imo its VERY OVERRATED and yea i used one, my bro has one so i have had a few hours of play on it, and not to mention i have started developing apps for it at work using objective C(which is a pain to learn compared to Android)
 
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How can you say the iPhone didn't revolutionise anything? From a hardware perspective it was fully optimised and capable of running applications and games smoothly; the design of the phone was catered for ease of use and was simple, stylish and effective, pioneering touch screen technology on phones. It pioneered the multi-touch function (for scrolling/selecting/resizing - building upon their MAC OSX software and hardward on the touchpads of the new Macbooks) and introduced motion sensors or ease of use and ergonomics (landscape/portrait orientation, shake to shuffle etc). It's taken a number of years since for other phones to have anywhere near the same level of touch screen technology. I know I've owned most of them; Nokias, LG cookies the works. None have been as responsive and as smooth running as the iPhone when it first came out.

From a software perspective, the OS was completely revolutionary, simple, stylish effective and mainly not excessive or overcomplicated. It was one of the first commercially available phones to support a fully functional web browser that loads complete webpages smoothly, not dumbed down mobile versions, native Youtube support, and led the way with social networking applications and connectivity. These are all positives without even going into the user interface rotating screens/keypads shake to shuffle, double-tapping the home button. All the functions you need are there at your finger tips. Best of all these are all of these functions above are besides the fact that it has a great phone interface, quick and easy finding of contacts, effective touch dialling, shortcuts the works.

Of course I watched the video, it looks likes a good phone, it has great specs but there is nothing there that revolutionises anything. It has a radio/flash for the camera/removable storage....great. It not original and certainly doesn't make me want to buy one over an already fully capable iPhone. If anything, they've cluttered to screen too much and they've gone overboard on the features. The side scrolling, multiple home pages these are just adaptations of an already effective iPhone interface. Therefore, all of these 'extra' features they are boasting are all quite meaningless in your day to day needs on the phone. Not to mention the fact this phone has a stylus included. The whole idea behind the touch screen phone is that everything was there at your fingertips, if you still need a stylus to perform some functions there's something wrong with the design somewhere. Just look at the user interface and the software, it's remarkably similar. Similar icons on the desktop, similar touch scrolling, similar toolbar at the top, overall a similar look and feel. You could have the same debate over Mac OSX and Vista.

This whole debate reminds me of what happened to the iPod and MP3 player revolution. Even though MP3 players were out years before Apple attempted to release a product on the market, they were expensive and unnecessary when you could use a much cheaper CD or MiniDisc Player. However, the iPod revolutionised the MP3 market, it was a simple, effective and stylish alternative and ever since other companies have tried to replicate it's commercial success. Take for example the Zune, that was an attempt at replicating the features of the iPod, in particular it had a similar menu system, rating system for songs and used similar tags. They thought that adding new features or better specs will make it better product. This is not true, if anything they ruined the whole purpose of what the iPod originally stood for. A simple and effective OS that does not over-complicate or overclutter. It did what you wanted it to do and had a solid user-friendly operating system underpinning it.

Apple have always been the best at designing the most ergonomic, stylish and intuitive product on the market, that's why they'll always be so successful.
 
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jonneymendoza said:
Dont get me wrong, Iphone is a decent device. good for gaming and has large amount of apps but imo its VERY OVERRATED and yea i used one, my bro has one so i have had a few hours of play on it, and not to mention i have started developing apps for it at work using objective C(which is a pain to learn compared to Android)
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All I can say to you is that I've got a HTC phone that I bought for £500 from play.com which is very similar to that. I have to be honest, it was cool at first but two months later I bought the iPhone on contract and I havent touched the HTC phone since. The HTC phone on specs alone is better than the iPhone but like pretty much all gadgets, the novelty runs out eventually. Some last longer than others but at some point you do look at other phones and wish you can have something new. The iPhone is not one of those phones.
I honestly love my iPhone just as much today (maybe even more) than I did when I first got it, which was about half a year ago now. I regularly check out GSMArena.com when I'm bored and always see cool new phones but I never wish for something new cuz the iPhone gives me everything I want. If someone offered me three brand new phones of my chose in exchange for my iPhone then I'd honestly turn it down without thinking (assuming selling those phones and buying a new iPhone wasnt an option :LOL:).
To me its more than a phone. Its more like a companion. Its kinda like carrying a mini C3PO with you or something.
 
I was thinking about getting the HTC touch Pro2 sine it was just made available here in the US onVerizon which I had fir over 5 years. I liked the idea of the Qwerty keyboard but have heard it's prone to the bluescreen/freezing issues, I went with the iPhone instead and am more than satisfied, there is very little you can't do with one these things.
 
I've had plenty of experience with both an HTC and an iphone and many other touch screens, and nothing will EVER beat the iPhone touch screen.
 
i am thinking of buying a ipod touch but wanted to know a few things.

Can any game and app from the iphone work with this device?

what are the difference between an iphone and ipod touch besides the phone capabilities?

What is the battery life like on a ipod touch(want it to last 15hours for long flights/journeys).

Cheers in advance.
 
I have DL'ed a bunch of free apps, my current fav is Trapster - it let's you know where the police have set speed traps in tour daily commute, it's basically a radar detector that verbally let's you know if your approaching a speed trap. Google Earth is also very cool - you get never get lost again.

With over 80000 apps and many are free, I believe you can also get them with the iTouch, but if you get the iPhone, you get an iPod built in, perfect for me since I never had one. I have the 16gb iPhone and I can thousands of songs and bids/movies right in my hand. I paid $200 US and my plan is about $54 a month - not bad price for what this thing does.
 
i dont want an iphone. imo i see the HD2 as a better device used for phone usage. i am considering a ipod touch just for music. nothing else and am looking at the 32GB one.

i have a very very old creative zen touch 20gb which has served me well and looking for a suitable replacement for it. This ipod touch seems to fit the bill.

what is the battery life like? is the statement below valid?

hi,
A few days ago I had the idea to actually test the ipods battery life. there are so many "rumors" in this forum on how long the battery actually lasts and how it is drained faster and whatnot, I just decided to do some testing to get some actual numbers.
So, I don't know if this is interesting to you, but I just thought I'd share my results with you.

(btw, my iPod is 8GB, week 47 and SSH was turned off during all tests)

First Test: Music Playback
So first of all I wanted to test the battery life when it comes to music playback. for this test, I created an on-the-go playlist with 10 songs. EQ was set to "Classical", sound check was on and volume bar at ~90-95%. all the files had covers. So I just started the playlist, switched the display off and let it do its job.

Result: 24 Hours

The iPod finally died on me after 24 hours. Since 20 hours is the official number by apple, this is actually quite good. Note that this number may be less in reality, since I had the display on for like 2 minutes or so during that 24 hours which is very likely to be more in reality. But still, you will end up with more than 20 hours.

Second Test: Wi-Fi
So now I wanted to know how long the battery lasts with wifi turned on and in use! For this test I created a webpage that automatically refreshed itself every 10 seconds, put a header in the page to make sure it wasn't loaded from cache and to be absolutly sure every time the page was loaded it showed a randomly created sequenze of 100 characters.

Result: 3 hours

That was quite a bummer. I expected it to be low but THAT low? Well, 3 hours, that's it. For those who are interested: With every page-load there were aproximatly 4 kilobytes of data downloaded. In 3 hours that makes something around 4MB of data downloaded.
Please note that my display brightness was set so around 25% with auto-brightness turned to off. So if you have your display brighter your battery might even last a lot shorter!

Third Test: Display
So after doing the first two test I figured that they were quite uncomparable, since the display was running the whole time during the second test and not at all during the first test. So this third test was basically exactly like the first test, but with the display running all the time. With this test I wanted to know how many power the display needed and how many was actually drained by wifi itself.

Result: 9 hours

Well, somehow what I expected. This means that both Wi-Fi and display are draining the battery almost equally. Wi-Fi a little more than the display but that might change if you touch the display alot or if you have your display set brighter than I had mine.

Result:
The iPod shows quite good results when it comes to music playback, but both Wi-Fi and the display are sucking a LOT of energy (From the 21-hour-difference between music playback only and wifi turned on and in use 9 hours were caused by display and 12 hours by wifi).

I know that there are lots and lots of tests that would be interesting (video playback, wifi on but not using it, SSH, ...) but I didn't have the time to do some more. Maybe I will if I feel like it. I don't know if this is even remotly interesting for you guys but maybe it is, so here you go.
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matt1288 said:
I've had plenty of experience with both an HTC and an iphone and many other touch screens, and nothing will EVER beat the iPhone touch screen.
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word on that...i used a lot of touch devices over the past 2 years, but the iphone i have now...nothing comes close. think of apple what you like, but their software and hardware is the best around.
 
Jonney, that review must be from the original iPod Touch, the newer models have a longer battery life. Apple say around 30 hours and they're normally pretty accurate with their claims.

iLounge said:
During our testing, the new iPod touch ran a looping playlist of test 640x480 videos for 7 hours and 52 minutes before expiring, a two-hour boost over the prior version that put this model in the same league as last year’s iPhone 3G and the 120GB iPod classic for video playback—with Wi-Fi off. By comparison, when we ran an audio runtime test with Wi-Fi on—the way Apple measures it—the new touch ran for 30 hours and 20 minutes before expiring, just surpassing the company’s 30-hour promise. Oddly, we found that Apple has changed its performance estimate for the second-generation iPod touch to claim the same 30 hours. In any case, the device does match or outperform the company’s claims when used purely for media playback purposes, and when Wi-Fi was turned off, audio run time jumped by 2 hours and 4 minutes to 32 hours, 24 minutes.
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[Source]

I'm very happy with my new one.
 
Mart said:
Jonney, that review must be from the original iPod Touch, the newer models have a longer battery life. Apple say around 30 hours and they're normally pretty accurate with their claims.



[Source]

I'm very happy with my new one.
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ahh i see. this bit is worrying:

moreover, Apple’s continued tick-tock policy of releasing iPod touches and then subsequently charging for later software upgrades to unlock the hardware they have inside has become nothing short of annoying;
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That's how they make $1.67 billion profit in a quarter.
 
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