Help a phone dunce

[Cemetery]

Hi, I am not really a phone person having owned a grand total of 2 in my life (30 now) with the first being PAYG and in general costing me less than a fiver a month... current contract I am on is about £20, but I really do like gadgets and since the iphone came out have been tempted to get one. However from what I have heard they are a bit restrictive in what you can do in terms of have to use itunes etc. The HTC Desire seems to be commented on as pretty damn good so my list of questions are as follows:

* Between iphone & the Desire, which is 'best' & why (gonna be subjective I know)

* A guy at work has a Desire as an unwanted upgrade & is selling it at £350 (not locked to any provider apparently) with 11.5 months warrenty left, is this a good price?

* If I did buy the handset rather than get one through a contract which I assume long term would be better, what kind of contract would be a good deal to go for (data probably going to be the main use)?

* Is getting insurance worth it? Never bothered with it before as the phones have been cheap and I aim on not dropping or losing them

I truely know very little about what you can get from the providers if you push & my contract expired a while ago so is just rolling along month by month now. I suspect if that cost is reasonable though the phone will be bought soon by someone else, hence the questions.

Cheers in advance.

 

[kona786]

AFAIK HTC phones carry 24 months warranty

 

[admoo]

snip

It comes down to personal preference. There are a lot of nice neat features to the iPhone that can make it really easy to use for general day to day use. And it also has the largest App Store, with a lot of well known developers supporting it.

That said, I have a Desire because I generally don't like the way Apple restrict their devices so much. I find their OS pretty dull, and theres a massive lack in customisation in general; you can only just (after 4 years of iPhones) change the background picture, and rearrange icons into folders. There's also no Adobe Flash on the phone, so Flash videos are a no go.

The apps are alright on the Desire. Some are really good, but I still feel that Google need to get the support of more devs to really push the Market forward.

Errrrrr, I dunno what else to say really, I'm tired and ranting

Also £350 is probably too much. I reckon £300-320 is probably about right.