Monday 18 June 2012

Browsing phones.

There's been a lot of new phone designs appearing in the last few months, and I'm already thinking about moving on from the HTC desire that was acquired in Dec 2010, after the contract has expired.

The Desire has been a mixed bag. I like the availability of contact information on a real screen, but have been frustrated by the munged OSX compatibility (another nail in the coffin of OSX computing). Mostly it's been good, but sometimes has run slow and often complains about a lack of memory, even though most of my apps are on the SD card - I've had to be really ruthless with the few apps I have installed. In terms of usefulness, the screen is a decent size provided one does not need to view detail, thus simple text pages and images are OK, but web pages are too much faff to bother reading. Facebook have sensibly managed their data presentation, and the app is probably partly to thank for their present success. Finally, battery life has been *mostly* acceptable, with the phone often doing 3 to 4 days with occasional use compared to many similar phones that struggle to manage more than a day.

There will be a major temptation to just root & Cyanogen-mod the phone once the contract has expired, getting a SIM only deal from O2 or Tesco to save money, instead of just selling it on. Although it would be nice to try something else.

There's been a lot of talk about the new HTC one series, some good and some bad, and Samsung's new galaxy III sounds as though it's good (and Apple have tried to block it, which is a definite endorsement) so in abut 15 minutes on Saturday I had a quick hands on with the SIII and the new HTC range.

First impressions: I will probably not be getting a SIII or a One X or S: they are simply huge.

The smartphone upper echelon market is curious - I can't see how the different makers differentiate themselves. All the above 3 phones are basically similar to look at and hold, and to someone familiar with Android 2.2, the OS interfaces looked more or less similar. The Galaxy did some pretty things with transparency and backgrounds and all phones worked smoothly and quickly, but I could never have told you one felt better than the other. In terms of functions, again they were mostly similar except that the SIII camera is seemed very much better than the HTC cameras in terms of image quality, and, all other things being equal, that would clinch a deal for me.

But not all things are equal.

I tried HTC's newest One offering, the One V, and that made me wonder.

The One V had a smaller body, very similar in size to my Desire, but slimmer and with an angled lip at the bottom. Screen resolution is the same, but it felt really nice & solid in my hand, as though the body were metal instead of plastic.

But.

There's always a trade off. This is HTC's budget 'One' phone, and it has suffered in the execution. Worst of all is that they have crippled it with the same stupid 512Mb memory limitation that is present on my 3 year old design phone, meaning that storage space will always be inadequate and the phone will run badly when a 'reasonable' range of apps is installed. They also used a slower 1GHz processor, and while that might give good battery life, it was also laggy, and the phone lacked fluidity compared to the other higher spec models and even to my old Desire.

Disappointing.

It may be very tempting to return to a dumb phone with a decent screen, that will sit more comfortably in my pocket and last a couple of weeks between re-charges. However Nokia announced a new Symbian phone (the 808) recently with a 41Mp camera. I have no need to stick with Android, and subject to testing, that could be a real possibility. The bit they get consistently weak is screen quality, and this one seems to be no exception. Sadly the Nokia shop in Banbury is closed now.

As always, my desires for function and form, as with so many other areas, run counter to fashion. With prices now tumbling I'm even tempted to look at an iPhone 3GS, though the thought of being required to do all computer-phone interaction through iTunes makes me feel a little sick. That's assuming I could overcome my dislike enough to buy another Apple product.