New smartphone - opinions?

foxtrot_mike

Mark_In_Hampshire wrote: »

Hi

I have an HTC Touch2 smartphone which I bought about 18 months ago.

The finish is all faded, the battery is dying already, the screen was and is too small to use comfortably, and the Windows Mobile operating system was and is absolutely dreadful.

I had the same thing with the HTC Touch 3G, and it was awful as you said, i sold it within 5 months.

I'm certainly not going with windows again and im not sure I can touch HTC because their sense software was equally garbage that was on there and just got in the way even more.

flyingscotno1

Orange San Francisco however is not flash compatible IIRC. Wildfire may well be but seen would be meh. Try an original HTC Desire. Been out for 15 odd months so many deals to be had.

dulcificum

BBM is only used by idiots who don't really understand how phones work!

Mark_In_Hampshire

Cheers for all the replies people.

The Desire S is a bit more than I wanted to spend at 329.00.

The Desire appears to be around 319.00

http://www.play.com/Mobiles/Mobile/4-/13665745/HTC-Desire-Android-Sim-Free-Unlocked-5-Megapixel-Touch-Screen-Mobile-Phone/Product.html

But there's one called the Desire z which is cheaper @ 269.00 and is very well rated/reviewed

http://www.play.com/Mobiles/Mobile/4-/16440101/HTC-Desire-Z-Android-Sim-Free-Unlocked-5-Megpaixel-Touch-Screen-Mobile-Phone/Product.html

Current network is O2, would probably stay with them, or go to Three (dearer for calls but I don't make many, and the only one with a really strong signal), the ones above are all unlocked (I don't think I've ever had a network locked phone or would like to have one)

Is Blackberry Messenger more or less similar to MS Exchange (push email, email anywhere e.g. the mail folders, contacts and calendar on my phone are the same as Outlook Web version which are the same as Outlook on my PC and all are in sync all the time)?

I am tempted by the Blackberry devices because they have a proper keyboard (so does the Desize z however) and seem well optimised for typing stuff. But I have no need of any kind of subscription service for email from Blackberry, don't want them involved in email delivery or getting in the way of MS Exchange (e.g. POPing that mailbox and dragging the mail onto a Blackberry server for me to pick up) - is that roughly what it does, if so, does it have to do that?

I need the phone to be able to render Flash movies so as to listen to BBC7 on the iPlayer. The phone I have does have Flash on it ("Flash Lite") but it doesn't actually work properly. Opera doesn't support it. In IE for instance you can stream a YouTube video off a web page when it's embedded, but not on YouTube itself. (It has a YouTube program which you use separately, that's just an example of the naff browsing it has) - on the iPlayer the movie loads, but the circle in the middle just keeps spinning forever.

Sorry for the naiive questions I tend to buy these things and keep them for quite a few years, so I'm not up to date with it all.

So far however the Desire z seems the one to go for.