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Which Cell Phone?


BlueWyvern

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So I have an iPhone 3G... hate it with a passion... worst mistake I ever made.

I want to get an android device and I am open to whichever carrier...

at the moment I have been debating between the Motorola Droid and the HTC/Google Nexus One

I hear that theres random issues with the Nexus not getting 3G all the time, but wanted to get the opinion of my fellow hak5 fans.

Thanks

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Im curious as to your reasons against the iPhone as well. I dont like them either, but thats just my opinion. Im not big on the whole touchscreen thing, I think it doesnt really add any feature for me and I hate greasy fingerprints all over my screen. I prefer to press a real key when typing on a phone, which is one of the reasons I dont like the iPhone. The other, the cost, and for what it does, I dont want to have to jail break it to do basic shit while paying for stuff from their appstore just to fatten Apple and AT&T's pockets.

My phone is a Black Berry Curve 8830c, and for the most part, it does everything I need it to(although the irc client I'm using isnt that great, it does work). It would be nice though to have some more tools on it, but mine is cell only, no wifi service (aside from BlueTooth,which I disable anyway).

Some tools and features I have on there: an ssh client, irc, tethering, email, (even managed to get logmeinfree to work so I could RDP into my desktop, but kind of wonky and difficult to use) GPS with Google Maps as my default mapping software, TV, Radio, Pandora, Opera, and some other stuff I'm forgetting. I like that I can open PDF's and Word docs in case I need notes on a job and that I can get online with it as well as email, but I'm not a phone addict to begin with, so there isn't much I would need with an Android or an iPhone for that matter. I have no need for wifi cracking tools or playing doom on my phone, so the less crap I have on there, the better.

I picked up two BlackBerry phones for $149.00(after mail in rebate and contract crap) but for what I paid and what I use it for, this was more than affordable and worth every penny. I wont get any kind of roaming or data overage charges either, since I have the everything plan, which covers unlimited text, email, internet, data, etc. Tethering was not included in the plan but thats easy enough to get working these days.

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I could care less about the keyboard... I am having difficulty making an informed decision over which of the two devices is better. I didn't care for the software keyboard at first but now that doesn't bother me.

You summed up some of the reasons I had but in addition... The GPS Sucks horribly... it can't locate me in the middle of a wide open field with a clear blue sky.

The Phone Lags like a game of Quake over a 28.8 modem and I'm not talking internet connection speeds here...

I dropped the phone once onto carpet... CARPET and there have been two cracks forming and getting longer/bigger ever since. Not to mention the back is so scuffed it's ridiculous...

Any Case you would buy for the phone makes it feel like crap or removes ability to dock it.. oh and not to mention since it's a piece of 30 cent plastic, but says iPhone on it, it's instantly worth about 30 dollars.

Other "High Quality" Apple Branded Accessories are just as cheaply made.

The App Store is annoying as all shit, I have had apps on the new version not work and found out apple has to review even critical app updates the same as a brand new app for their store

I can't attach files to emails

Search results (on youtube for example) are COMPLETELY different from results you would get on a PC.

(Perfect example would be to search for "Pork and Beans" trying to find the music video by weezer, on the PC it would be in the top results if not #1, but on the iPhone it won't even come up as a result)

I can't record videos without using a 3rd party app (Qik)

Whenever I unplug the headphones that came with it after a call, it starts playing a random song from my music library (yes I am on the latest firmware, yes I am jailbroken, yes I have tried restoring) and none of that works.

The battery life is the worst I have EVER seen. Talking for approximately an hour Kills about 50% of the battery.

3G data is not much better, to my dismay the only thing that can fix that is to use the phone on Edge >.>

The sensor that turns the screen off when you are on a call and the phone is by your ear doesn't always work. for example last night I was making a call and trying to put it on speaker phone, every time I tapped the screen it would go blank instead of activating the speaker. I don't know if this is when it is sitting flat on a desk being the issue instead of me holding it to turn it on. Annoying either way.

Bluetooth connectivity gets sketchy at times with earpieces but not with the built in Bluetooth speaker in some cars.

I could probably go on... but I'm going to stop here for now.... I attempted to take a picture to show how bad the cracks are (and the scuff too) I have a feeling that by the time my contract expires in august the two cracks will meet and the back of the phone will fall off.

57097996.jpg

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Smartphones generally aren't known for their longevity on a single charge, but one thing I would say is that I've purchased a double capacity extended battery for my HTC Kaiser and I'm extremely glad I did, it feels like I can use it for as long as I used to use a dumbphone for, except with smartphone functionality, that's one thing I would miss on the iPhone.

At the end of the day though most of it is personal taste, I'm sure lots of people love the iPhone and I'm equally sure that plenty of people can't stand the Kaiser. I personally quite like Windows Mobile for its stability, flexibility and sheer power, but I can understand those who appreciate aesthetics a little more than perhaps I do. I haven't yet come across anything it won't let me do, however, and that's important to me.

More on topic though, I've used Android on emulators, my Kaiser in the form of an unofficial port and a friend's myTouch 3G and I have to say I quite like it. It's pleasant to use, looks decent enough, and isn't quite as locked down as the iPhone. On the other hand, it feels to me like it expects you to do things its way and isn't designed for you to go messing about with stuff, and it could use a little more polish before it hits it big. It's snappy enough even on my Kaiser (which is a little aged now) and does most things just fine. Hardware I'm not so experienced with, unfortunately, so I can't be of much help there.

Finally, if you don't mind something other than Android (though an unofficial port might surface at some point), the HTC HD2 looks like a very tasty device indeed, perhaps something more suited to an iPhone convert like yourself, a nice looking and quite large (4.3"?) 480x800px touchscreen, 1GHz of pure balls and plenty of RAM to back it up. Yeah, sure, it runs Windows Mobile, but HTC do a nice enough job of giving it a bit of a lick of paint, and it's rumoured that it'll get Windows Mobile 7 later on, whenever that decides to surface.

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I dont even think the iPhone uses a real GPS, I think it uses wifi and cell coverage to triangulate your position, but I could be wrong. Johnny Long had the same problem where he lives now in Africa. He ended up havign to buy a seperate GPS. The GPS in my BlackBerry works great, and I have never had a problem getting a GPS signal with it, even when I am in the deadzone (no phone call or data coverage) over by my moms, the GPS part of the phone still worked, although I couldnt download images for the map from the internet through google maps, it did track my movements around her area, just no diagrams of the streets and shit. Havent messed with the built in map software from sprint too much, cause google maps is nice enough to give me satelite images of the areas and I can just search on it like you would from a pc.

My phone does 3g video built in, no 3rd party app needed, but its not the greatest quality. Pictures and Video require excellant lighting and a steady hand. Wonder why Apple wouldnt include a program when their phone obviously is video capable?

You search results are probably two things. 1, AT&T probably proxy/filter a lot of things to speed up their coverage, and 2, not all videos on YouTube will play on my blackberry either. Some videos on youtube are encoded for 3g, but not all of them. I imagine Google is smart enough to recognize your phone and decide to remove results that are not 3g encoded as well, since most phones arent doing flash video, but only when they have a 3g copy. For example, I cant play videos from Vimeo, but I can from youTube, but again, only if they made 3g copies on their end.

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I know it is not the encoding of video on the youtube end of things. To test this I created an account on youtube, added the official video that i know i couldn't find in search results to my favorite videos list.

went on my phone searched for the video, no dice

signed in and searched for it, still no dice

went to my favorite videos, hit the bookmark (or w/e you want to call it) and BAM Video Played.

It could be AT&T doing this to speed up their network, but a network that filters results is useless to me. aside from that, I put my phone into "airplane mode" to disable the Cell antenna or w/e the heck it does. jumped on my wireless to search again and still no dice...

granted this is a youtube video... but still, this is america we are talking about.. Freedom of speech and all that.

Very Annoying Indeed...

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I know it is not the encoding of video on the youtube end of things. To test this I created an account on youtube, added the official video that i know i couldn't find in search results to my favorite videos list.

went on my phone searched for the video, no dice

signed in and searched for it, still no dice

went to my favorite videos, hit the bookmark (or w/e you want to call it) and BAM Video Played.

It could be AT&T doing this to speed up their network, but a network that filters results is useless to me. aside from that, I put my phone into "airplane mode" to disable the Cell antenna or w/e the heck it does. jumped on my wireless to search again and still no dice...

granted this is a youtube video... but still, this is america we are talking about.. Freedom of speech and all that.

Very Annoying Indeed...

That sucks. Just another reason not to get an iPhone, censorship and filtering. I'm even happier I didn't get the iPhone now, when so many people told me not to get a BlackBerry and switch to the iPhone because the BlackBerry was an old mans phone, or for coporate people. What a crock of sh!t.

Let me ask you this, how much do you pay out of pocket for the initial purchase of an iPhone, what are your monthly bills like, do you get capped on any parts of usage, and do you get extra charges when you use it out of state, country, etc ? Also, what does an iPhone do that makes it so exclusive above other smart phones, most of which can do copy and paste natively? What would be the selling point for an iPhone? and this is not apple bashing, but a serious question, because I hear the people who make fun of BlackBerry owners calling them CrackBerries and what not, what is it that is so Viral about the iPhone that makes people want it, and once they get it, will they keep it or switch?

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well the iPhone or as I like to call it the whyPhone (as in Why did I buy this piece of crap). at the time had the cheapest monthly # of minutes with a so-called unlimited data plan. I don't know exactly what the iPhone itself would run a month as my wife and I are on a plan together now. I want to say the 3G plan was 80 dollars, with unlimited data, and to get that on any other device (Unlimited data that is) would be an EXTRA $80.

I think that was my most alluring fact about it, at the time I was giving up my old Windows Mobile phone (HTC Wizard) aka Cingular 8125. which I loved dearly, especially once i added an external Bluetooth GPS and the TomTom Software.

One thing I believe that Apple/The whyPhone has that windows mobile devices and blackberries do not is their "App Store" with a bazillion and one apps to waste your money on that you will use for about a week to a month, then delete off your phone. Android is coming close to being a real contender here, one of the reasons I like it tbh.

And when I heard it had a built in GPS, I thought well that's just awesome... I can carry one less thing with me and still have a GPS with Turn by Turn Directions. Boy was I wrong there >.>

Cut and paste is in the iPhone firmware now but it's very hokey... it's similar to windows mobile in the sense that you keep your finger/stylus in one spot and then size it out to what you want to cut/copy and do the same thing for paste.

speaking of text entry/modification that is another thing i really hate about this piece of shit... im typing a name for example, and it corrects it to some other word or some crap, because I didn't stop typing to hit the little x on the suggestion box. I would rather it come up and have the suggestion, but unless i hit it... keep going. I'm sending texts to my friends.. not writing a corporate Memo! My friends don't care if they get "teh" instead of "the"... they know it's a typo and move on with the message. I have yet to find a way to disable this feature...

There are some selling points for the iPhone, but the main one being is you enjoy Steve Jobs sticking a little something up where the sun doesn't shine, and twisting occasionally......

I personally did not like the blackberry because it reminded me too much of palm, having their software installed for syncing and all that. Don't get me wrong... the iPhone has it too... but it of course uses iTunes which I already had installed for sorting my music and tagging correction through TuneUp.

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In all honesty, after reading that I can suggest only one thing, that you get an E class Nokia. They are bullet proof phones, just not that exciting. I own a HTC Hero (along with a BB Curve 8900, Nokia E71, Nokia N810 and iPod Touch) and virtually all your complaints could be made about Android, my honest opinion is that if you can work around the kinks in android then its pretty good, but for instance... yay multi-tasking, but why the fuck isn't there a task manager or an easy way of swapping between apps? Instead my phone gets slower and slower until I use a 3rd party application to eventually kill everything. App store is cool, but if I need to update 15 apps, I have to manually run the update process and click update 15 times. Widgets are cool, but I want a decent home screen that shows me emails, appointments, texts, missed calls and updates all in one place. 9 bazillion apps, but do we really need 30000 identical notepad apps? Or skins for random apps that cover every single NFL team in the US? And why can't I search the app store in a logical fashion?

Android is basically a geeky, younger brother to OSX Mobile, and while it has potential its far from perfect. The state of updates and versions is a nightmare, currently you can get phones with 1.5, 1.6, 2.0 and 2.1, so quite a few apps won't work on whatever you buy and you have no idea if your phone will be updated to a newer version or not. In all honesty, I wish I'd waited and got a HTC HD2 or a Nokia n900.

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I juist got the Tour 9630 last week (the Tour2 9650 is coming out soon..kinda pissed about that since it has wifi), and I think its a pretty good phone. I had the Curve 8330 before that, and it was a really solid phone. I could throw it across the room and it woulnt even be scratched (warning: YMMV). Battery has been somewhat disappointing so far though, and the phone does not vibrate that hard. The camera is top notch; it takes really good closeup macro pictures. I am a big fan of Blackberries, and would recommend them to anyone.

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