Smartphone with radio and mp3

stephenclutton

Hi and happy New Year
I'm after user experiences to help my decision making if possible.
I've currently got an mp3 player which is getting more and more unreliable plus my old Sony Ericsson phone is starting to get a bit creaky.
So with this in mind I am considering killing two birds with one purchase and combining functionality. As I also have a reasonable commute the entertainment plus utility of being able to check train running times make a smartphone appealing.
I'm not going to stretch to an I-Phone or similar top end device but have been looking at HTC Wildfires and the like.
Can anyone who has one of these or similar let me know how the radio and mp3 stack up in terms of functionality and usability as this would be my main usage during my commute. I know that dedicated devices would have best performance but pocket space and budget are considerations.
Thanks for your help.

Cash-Strapped.T32

Orange San Francisco, aka ZTE Blade.
Also uses a real 3.5mil audio jack, not some proprietary thing.

Runs Android so take your pick of MP3 or other media player software.
FM radio built into the phone.

Most people are saying very good things about it's ease of use re; web browsing, and the thing has a GPS chip, so you can D/L mapping software on your PC or wherever & navigate without using an internet connection to get your location (some software might use it to help speed up the initial-fix)

£90 new, £150-£125 on ebay.. :eek:
Can't go wrong mate.
I was looking to make the same upgrade for the same reasons, but I managed to get decent sat-nav working on my Win-mo device so I've managed to put off the upgrade for maybe another year yet. :money:


If you want to go old skool MSE, HTC Tytn II.
Uses both a touchscreen and a slide out qwerty KB so neatly bypasses the quirks which annoy some users of win-mob.

Looks more like a normal mobile phone, and the screen is only 320x240pix (same as most BB curves), but much smaller than the Blade.
Put it this way, you wouldn't want to watch a film on the phone, but an episode of Family Guy would be fine.

FM radio, runs Win-Mob so again, take your pick of media-player software, dated now but fully functional web browsing with progs like Opera, Skyfire etc.. and again, GPS chip onboard.
Probably about £30 on ebay nowadays.
Proper mse.

Best of luck mate, let us know how it goes on.

*EDIT* Before anyone pulls me up on it - I just remembered the Tytn's (or Kaiser's) screen is actually larger than I said, it's something like 240x420 or some such, slightly larger than the almost standard 320x240 of blackberry-sized phones.