Be Excellent To Each Other

On o2, £25 monthly contract, 250 mins, 100 texts, no data, N95 (proper one, not the broken update or the broken, broken, broken sequel piece of trendy crap).

I'm tempted to just get a spare. I don't fancy an iphone as the first thing I'll have to do is install Itunes. Not sure why I have to install a shit media player on my pc because I've got a new phone but there we go. Nonetheless, I think for not much more per moith I can has a data package and it would be the best platform for surfing the internets in a normal and proper way when out and about. Also the N95's headphone jack hisses like a reality TV show audience at an honest judge.

SO WHAT ELSE CAN I DO?????

Everyone seems to have LG phones nowadays. I want something which trumps my N95 but it seems overall phone quality is heaidng downhill fast. I'm picky about the following:

If you want to pretend your phpne is a player, put a proper fucking 3.5 jack on it

If you are including a whizz-bang 10 megapixal camera, why have the carl ziess lens level with the rest of the shell and screatched to cuntery after ten seconds in my pocket, sat on a table or suspenced in mid air by some fruitless yet kindly phone-lens saving mystical force.

The keybaord on a nokia 3210 was fine, everything since is a downhill step. Let's make that step as small as possible shall we?

Touch-controls. It's a phone not a fucking clitoris. Nevertheless, I'm willing having used an Eee901 for a couple of months to believe that touch controls aren't as sucky as they were. My mind might be open here.

Advice the fuck out of this shit, homies.

Also, network operators: T-Mobile charged me for line rental three months after my phone got nicked, so I hate them. Vodaphone sponsor ferrari so theyt can fuck off, also my work phone is voda and never gets a signal while my o2 always does. Orange - well, I just don't like the colour.

ME TO!

Copied from Bits and Bobs:

"So lets get this straight, the Jesusphone 3G can't data tether to my Tom Tom to get my traffic info?

In which case Apple can get to fucking fuck, and can anybody recommend me a phone that offers a usable web browsing experience while actually allowing me TO DO THE BLOODY STUFF I WANT NOT WHAT FUCKING STEVE JOBS WANTS ME TO DO.

And I'd like to data tether to the Jesuslaptop as well for when I am on the move.

Ahem, thank you."

THOUGHTS PLEASE!

Not to mention - on my N95 I go to use opera mini and it asks me how I want to connect. Choices are:

O2 Mobile Web
O2 Postpay MMS
O2 Postpay WAP
O2 WAp GPRS
O2 Wap GPRS (again!)
O2 WAP GPRS Stream
O2 MMS

It confuses me

It took bloody ages to get my P1i to connect in the right order and to remove all the incorrect shit from the phone.

What about one of those Blackberry things? They much cop?

o2 Mobile Web is what you use for normal web browsing.

If you have HSBC's ace little Java app which lets you see statements and balances, use o2 Wap.

I have found no other use for the other profiles, ever.

get an iclone then:

https://www.specialphones.eu/en/store/10285

It actually looks pretty good, tbf.

Only if you do 95% email and 5% anything else. They're really not consumer devices.

I'd heard that bit although some people say you need to jailbreak the phone, others say you don't.

Irrelevant anyway as it won't pair with the Tom Tom.

Agreed. I ended up with a work one last week and while it's great for keeping tabs on your email, I can't see me using it for much else - I've not taken/made a call on it yet.

I might try a change of phone soon as while the one I got from Dealextreme works ok (something like £35 for a touch-screen phone so can't complain too much), it's pretty slow for texting which is what I do most. If anyone can recommend a phone for texting, that would be appreciated. It doesn't need much else - I wouldn't be taking pics with it, listening to music, surfing the net and all that.

I keep looking at the Google G1 on T-Mobile, anyone played with one?

But you WOULD be receiving pictures...

Bah markg! That was aimed at devilman.




Just to add to this thread, I too would like a new mobile, one I can access the web on. I'd like to get rid of my laptop all together if I go away for the weekend. So, calls, texts,camera and net access, but I think I'd quite like something with a qwerty keyboard. Nothing with little keys like the Blackberry, I had a play with devilmans last week, it's nice, but I wouldn't want one for daily use.

So anyway, I suspect I'm looking at an iPhone (but people on here complain about them a lot, so I'm not really sure that's what I'm after), or maybe the N95 that GY has (not his obv....)?

Ooh

EVERYONE has one here at work, and I'll be replacing my N95 with one in a couple of months when my contract runs out. Either that or one of the new models with the Google software on it that are coming out later this year.

edit: It's fucking brilliant, by the way. If you're looking for extremely fast FREE mobile internet access in your pocket with a full on keyboard. And I am looking for just that.

I briefly saw one at the weekend, it seemed quite tidy, but I didn't get to play with it (my own fault for not asking really).

thanks Ace, I'll have a look into this Google G1 then.




Oh, oh, now you're talking to me..

Free? You mean wifi or some kind of phone contract thing?

@Ace: I think there's an MMS app in the appstore now, so I assume you can do them without faffing now. Not tried it though, who uses MMS anyway?

It's 3G mobile web and you get unlimited access on T-Mobile with most contracts over about £30 (the only company offering the G1 phone). It also does Wi-Fi, although it's rendered slightly redundant.

a jailbroken iphone however does lovely mms with swirlymms,,

Doesn't seem too bad a deal really: http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/shop/mobile-p ... &WT.srch=1

Regarding the iPhone: I wouldn't swap mine for anything else on the market right now, trufax. This is what my mate Richie thought of it after three hours of ownership.

Regarding tethering the iPhone: you can do it on any jailbroken iPhone and if you snagged the NetShare app during the 36 hours it was in the App Store last year you can do it on non-jailbroken phones too. "Tethering" in this case refers to using WiFi to connect the iPhone to your laptop/whatever, and so won't work with the TomTom, as you say. The iPhone's weaksauce Bluetooth doesn't support the Dial Up Networking profile.

This is not because of Apple, this is because of the carriers. The problem is "backhaul", which is how the carrier shifts internet traffic from the cell tower and out to the internet. Even in a busy city they might only have a T1 to do that; in rural areas it might only be a business-class ADSL connection, so there isn't much bandwidth to go around between users. You can give people unlimited data on their phone, where all they can really do is email and web, and it works out OK; you can give people capped 2-5Gb/month data on a USB stick and it works out OK; but if you let people tether their iPhone's unlimited data to a laptop they start running p2p apps and the entire network goes to shit. This caused problems just recently for Sprint/Xohm in the US. This is a problem the wireless industry is still wrestling with.

Regarding the G1: I hear the software is rather undercooked (the reboot flaw was hilarious) but is seeing rapid development. I'd be slightly leery at the moment of recommending one to non-nerds, although Jon seems impressed so perhaps I'm over-cautious. I haven't used one myself.

As for more out-in-the-distance phones, the Palm Pre looks incredible, but it could be 12 months before we see it. The Nokia N97 also looks like it could be awesome, but I have my doubts about Symbian on a large touch screen. To me, both of these are very obviously answers to the iPhone.

I'd agree with this. The three people in my office who have one are the programmers, and I'm a bit of a nerd myself. Maybe that's why I'm so interested in it. But seriously, it's easy to use and genuinely excellent. I'm tempted to wait for more handsets before taking the plunge, though.

There is a third-party app called 'MMS' in the App Store, though. I'm just downloading it now, so will report back to say if it's any good or not.

I've not used that but I know about it. It's a bit fiddly, it does work, but it's pricey -- 35p per MMS to send. Receiving is free, but you have to receive an SMS with a code number in, then load the MMS app and type that code number to view the message (behind the scenes, the MMS app is loading the picture from O2's web site).

Personally, I just upload my pics out of the iPhone to Flickr, email or Facebook, I find that more convenient than MMS anyway. In fact it's so convenient I'm now annoyed my real camera can't upload directly to flickr.

What's the difference between an audio player and an MP3 player?

/stupid question

In what context? I'd guess that an mp3 player can play mp3s, whereas an audio player could probably play a number of file formats...

No difference, audio player is more technically correct but MP3 player has come to mean the same thing to a lot of people.

They're listed in the features of the G1.

Just to add a 2p to this, iPhone has a lot of flaws (really crap camera, a habit of randomly deciding it won't fucking talk to iPhoto to download the crappy photos taken with the crappy camera), but its UI and app store piss all over the competition from a great height. iPhone is a fairly average mobile phone, but a really great almost everything else—mobile email client (not as good as BB, but damn close), web browsing device, casual gaming unit, eBook reader (see Stanza and Classics, utilities unit, etc.) In fact, when I was away over NYE 2008, I used my laptop exactly no times at all—I just used my iPhone to browse the web, deal with emails and other things (like playing as many games of Wurlde as humanely possible in spare moments of time).

Having seen a good chunk of the competition, I can't really imagine using anything else now. Also, O2's plans in the UK, while not cheap, are good compared to every other iPhone plan worldwide, and the data stuff on the PAG version is surprisingly decent.

On other factors:

iTunes: just deal with it, or compromise the hardware you buy. iTunes really isn't that bad. Yeah, it needs QuickTime (oh noes!), but if you really hate iTunes, just use it for iPhone stuff and use some other app for everything else.

MMS: this one really staggers me in terms of complaints. But then that's down to me receiving precisely one MMS ever, and that was a link that I had to manually type into a browser to receive my crappy little image. I think Apple's got this bang on, like it did with the floppy disk, but it's a bit ahead of the curve. Don't expect Apple to cave on this on, though—if you have to have MMS and can't bear the thought of emailing your images instead, iPhone isn't the device for you.

iClones like https://www.specialphones.eu/en/store/10285 : uh, seriously? You'd be utterly insane to buy something like that. Those I've seen have appalling response times, broken software, and only superficially resemble iPhone anyway (like quite a few large competitors when they got all scared and started adding borked touchscreen components). The most important parts of iPhone are the app store and the way the device works. iClones take both things away, leaving you with less than a shadow of the original product.

Google Jesus phone: looks good. However, unlike Apple's draconian WE WILL CONTROL EVERYTHING attitude, Google's stance is more "hey, the open-source community will fill the holes". And there are some pretty damn huge holes right now. In a year or so, Google's device is going to be a major player (perhaps the major player), battling everyone else for marketshare. Right now, I don't think it's the best option.

New Palm iPhone killer: bwahahahaha!

I'd have an iPhone if they weren't so bloody expensive I do like slick interfaces but to be honest there's only so much of a difference the interface on my phone is ever going to make to my life and it isn't worth to me anything like what Apple/O2 are charging. I think I'll go with the the G1 this time around.

I'm still more than happy with my K800. I fancy for an iPod touch though for mobile innerneds, but that's just plain greed.

It sounds like an advert, but the iPhone actually has changed the way I use my phone. I always found browsing the web, checking emails and playing games on phones completely pointless and frustrating, but now I use it all the time. The fact that it's a phone is just a bonus.

The iPod touch looks great except for the price and the pathetic capacity.

Yeah. Like I said though, it's just greed.

So I'll probably get one at some point.

I just want something that:

a) actually has usable internet
b) Can tether to my Tom Tom. Tethering to the Mac isn't so important if the phone has decent internet, not some shitty small screen.

The tethering problem is simple, you restrict the tether to GPRS connection. It's painfully slow for internet use but does the trick for devices like the Tom Tom.

Just a thought.

Jesusphone knows where it is. Can it alert you to traffic on your route?

Yep, in the Maps application.

It's the other way round for me. The interface is what I interact with, and I absolutely hated those on my previous phones (the nadir probably being the awfulness that was the RAZR). A decent interface is what keeps me sane (hence why I gravitated towards the Mac during the 1990s rather than Windows, I guess, and hence why our video recorder didn't even get used once since we got a PVR).


I'm the same. The iPhone's always with me, and so if we're watching TV and one of those times comes up when you see an actor and wonder what the hell they were previously in, it's simple to nip on to Wikipedia (or whatever) and have a quick look, rather than nipping into the office and then getting sucked back into work things. I suppose iPhone, like some of the other smartphones, is more akin to a really tiny (and in some ways limited) Mac (or PC) than a phone.


What myp said, and there are also apps on the store for things like camera alerts. I've not tried them, although the positioning on iPhone has gone from being laughably bad (positioning you anything up to 30 miles away from your actual location, and usually about a mile away) to rather good (at the moment, it thinks I'm in the front garden, according to Google Maps, which isn't too awful from a location standpoint).


That said, my parents were both utter Luddites, but now my mum in particular is a digital photo fiend. Some people won't have any interest in embracing new technology, but show others Flickr and show how easy it is to upload from the likes of iPhoto (or an equivalent app on Windows/Linux) and they'll be hooked and never look back. And then if you've an iPhone or iPod touch, you can always upload using the likes of Mobile Fotos (< WARNING: direct App Store link).

So as a very happy N95 user, who's contract is up soon, why would I not get a N96?

Apparently, it's a pile of shit.

Yes, it's a valid point. They'd have to resort to email for that.

I did an O2 customer survey a few weeks back which had a lot of questions about MMS ("Do you miss it?" "Do you use flickr?" "Would you buy an MMS app from the App Store for £2.50?") so it's possible we'll have an O2 supplied program one day.

Not for the UK, I believe. It's the same data as the Google Maps traffic service, and I think it's only major US cities.

Totally impractical, the number of users who want to tether to a TomTom is tiny and it would require some solid software on the phone to handle it. Plus some hacker would defeat that seconds after it shipped. The way this is going to go is dedicated data connections for devices like TomToms, like the Amazon Kindle has. The high-end Go Live TomTom models already have this of course. In the future you may well have three or four active data devices (a satnav, a laptop, a phone, a camera), each with its own SIM and cellular network connection (likely WiMax or LTE). Like the Kindle, lifetime data connection would be built into the upfront cost of the device, or rolled into some other subscription service (like map and traffic updates for the satnav).

Well that's a shame. What about it is shit?

Citation needed, as I'm sure I've seen some roads show up as red, and the total journey time increasing due to volume of traffic.

No. Jesusphone knows where it's at.

No idea, I've never used a Nokia. It just seems to be the general consensus from other Nokia users I've spoken to.