Liking android, worth the jump now?

Streeteh

Streeteh

Streeteh

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My contract is nearing an end and my rather naff Bold 9000 is on its last legs. I've been looking into phones and the iphone doesn't do it for me which led me to the next obvious choice; Android.

I really enjoyed using the handsets i've tested and feel it's the way to go. The Desire HD is a wonderful handset however it's still a little pricey (£25/month for a 24 month contract) and other phones are on the horizon. The battery life does also concern me.

Is it worth taking a leap for the HD, or is there something better (and affordable!) coming up soon? I envisage the SGS2 being mega pricey. I know nothing about the Nexus S or the new Desire variant, are they worth a punt over the HD?

[EDIT] Silly me, i forgot to mention what i need it for! Uses i envisage are (in roughly importance order):

Music playback (Flac support is relatively important to me, yes i know that no phone will do that quality justice, but my collection is in that and it's nice to just drag and drop rather than convert)
Email
Internet browsing
GPS for satnav and sportypal
Games
Video playback

Oh yeah, and for calling people.
 
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I'm seeing a price on the Samsung Galaxy S II (16GB) handset only as £544.99.

Other phones coming up which may be of interest:
HTC Desire S
HTC Wildfire S

Rgds
 
£500+ for a phone just seems insane to me i'm afraid, or rather, insane for my needs.

Will have a look into those two variants, ta.
 
Could you buy a second hand (but good condition) HTC Desire and just get a SIM Only contract? (£10p/m gets you quite a lot these days on sim-only).
 
I'd recommend these two with an audiophile slant.

Samsung Galaxy S (~£350 new or free on some rubbish £15 contract and decent redemption deals)
Motorola Defy (~£250 new or free on a £15/£20pm)

I think both use Wolfson parts/IPs but they certainly have better audio quality than phones like the Desire (haven't tried the latest DHD/Z, HTC could've improved since then?)

With powerAMP and decent headphones your flac collection will sound great. (mine does on the Defy :))

Also watch out for the Sony Ericsson Neo. (There are other cheaper ARM11 phones around if your prepared to take a performance hit, like the £99 orange SF)
 
I'd wait for the Galaxy S 2, it'll be around £30 per month when released but you'll have a phone that will still be good in 2 years time, see some deals here - http://www.mobiles.co.uk/orange-samsung-i9100-galaxy-s.html

If thats too much, get the original Galaxy S as that can be had on £15-20 deals, some even work out at £12 or so per month via redemption (cashback system) - http://www.mobiles.co.uk/samsung-galaxy-s.html

For a really good all-rounder, look at the HTC Incredible S, its battery is better than the Desire HD and its generally more polished but a tad more expensive - http://www.mobiles.co.uk/htc-incredible-s.html

The one good reason to take HTC over Samsung is for the HTC Sense UI, it makes the phone generally a lot better in many respects.
 
It's not it's conflicting :)

senseUI is HTCs excellent user interface + additional apps (Android skin) It's certainly better than Samsungs version, touchwiz and Motorola's dull attempt.
Luckily Android is highly customizable, so you can change many parts of the UI to suite your taste (with launchers, widgets, apps, keyboards from the market etc) It has little to do with the audio quality, which both SGS and Defy excel at.

If you don't want to play around with the software then a Desire HD/incredible S would be a great choice as your still going to use...
...powerAMP is one of the best Android music players and has its own codecs for flac + a 10 band equalizer, pre amp etc, you'll use this over the stock player which probably doesn't support flac.

All of these phones are excellent btw (same generation hardware, run the same apps etc) so try them out at a big phone shop and pick your fav/one that suits your budget. :)

(As Robbo said, I'd be tempted to wait for the next gen SGS2 on contract, if you can stretch to £30/£35 :p)
 
Second Hand + Sim Only is a good way to go if you have fairly low minutes requirement. £10 GiffGaff goodbag is everything I need, and you can get some nice second hand Android phones for £200-£250. Works out at around £20/month if it were a two year contract, but obviously you aren't locked in to anything.
 
It's currently a coin toss between the Galaxy S and the DHD. Unfortunately £30 is just too much per month for me, also as the S2 is so very expensive i'd be constantly worried about losing/breaking it and end up paying for insurance too knowing me.

Best deal i can find right now is for the Galaxy S and is £25/month for 300 mins, inf texts and 500mb internet (is this enough for most people?) with £55 instant cashback via quidco and the first 9 months free by redemption.

That works out at £13.33/month, very, very tempting. Though this cashback lark worries me, never done it before, is mobiles.co.uk a reputable site? They're owned by the carphone warehouse group so i can't see them being all that bad.

It's also on Orange, never had any experience with them, i assume they're a bearable provider?
 
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As you just said the above please note I work for EE, the parent company of Orange etc...these thoughts are my own. That said - the Samsung Galaxy S has native support for FLAC which is pretty boss. If you're willing to put a custom ROM on it then you can switch to voodoo kernel ( http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=806195 ) which has a whole project surrounding it trying to improve the sound quality.

If you don't want to put a custom ROM on it then that's fine too, the base quality is pretty good and the phone's a good all rounder too.

As for if Orange is good or not - grab a free sim from us and check out your signal at your place of work and home. SIM signup is here: http://freesim.orange.co.uk/
 
Streeteh said:
Best deal i can find right now is for the Galaxy S and is £25/month for 300 mins, inf texts and 500mb internet (is this enough for most people?) with £55 instant cashback via quidco and the first 9 months free by redemption.

That works out at £13.33/month, very, very tempting. Though this cashback lark worries me, never done it before, is mobiles.co.uk a reputable site? They're owned by the carphone warehouse group so i can't see them being all that bad.

It's also on Orange, never had any experience with them, i assume they're a bearable provider?
Click to expand...

Orange are a fine provider, I've had no issues with them.

Mobiles.co.uk are excellent too, they are a part of the carphone warehouse as you said, just cheaper. Long story short with Redemption, you pay your bill, then send it in within a period of days and you'll get your caashback or whatever.
 
I always forget how helpful people in this subforum are...

Cheers guys, i've got two weeks til my contract expires, i think i'll nab a PAYG orange sim and see how it performs and likely end up with a Galaxy S on the above contract. If anyone sees any errors in this plan please do let me know :p

Thanks again.
 
Nothing wrong with that, as long as you are happy to be sending bills back in (for the cashback/deals) and can follow the instructions they give you. Its not difficult but they rely on people forgetting to do it to make money.
 
Robboftw said:
Nothing wrong with that, as long as you are happy to be sending bills back in (for the cashback/deals) and can follow the instructions they give you. Its not difficult but they rely on people forgetting to do it to make money.
Click to expand...

I am confident i can manage it, however upon inspecting the terms more thoroughly i have one slight confusion. It states that if you are getting cashback for a certain amount you need to send the bills at different times. I assume the times at which i need to send my bills is determined by the TOTAL cashback not the monthly cashback, anyone know enough to shed some light on this?

I'm getting this information from the table here:

http://www.mobiles.co.uk/cashback.html

I assume since it's 9 months free at £25/month, that puts me in the 'Claims of £100 or more' bracket?
 
As one of main requirements was a decent GPS i would reccommend a DHD as the SGS's GPS is a bit hit and miss.
 
The only upside to Android phones coming out too quickly is that you can pick up what are still superb phones for peanuts secondhand..

I've been doing this for a while, just get an almost new phone for half it's original street cost.. e.g. a Desire HD, mint, unlocked, 2 months old, £240

Apple of course get the timing 'better', they only have 1 handset from 1 manufacturer.. if you took HTC/Samsung in isolation, their timings aren't too bad.. but get them all together, and yep, it's like a constant upgrade fest..

I think an approach somewhere in-between would be perfect, if Google specified fixed reference hardware platforms, with screen size/resoltions and a few other key hardware features locked down, they could refresh those every 18 months or so, and having just a handful of fixed platforms to cater to, they might be able to optimised for those (I'm thinking a low/mid/high end kind of hardware setup)..
 
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