Help: New cellphone

[Swe_Olsson]

Hey lads.

Well, I'll sum myself up really quick. I need a new phone, preferably a non touch screen or at least a phone with a num pad.
Unfortunately I have been un successful at finding one of those phones, so therefor I'm asking for your help.
The price don't really matter much, since I'll pay it off monthly.

Phones I've looked at so far.
Nokia N900
HTC Legend

My current phone is a
Nokia 6500, I believe I've had it for about 2 years now, still holding up very good. But as with every technological item, it gets old, so if you got any recommendations, personal experiences, Please share your knowledge with me :)

Warm regards
Michael

edit: no iPhone please :P

[MadTommy]

I use a Blackberry Bold 9700.. best blackberry there is.. (i had to have one for work. So it was a no brainer) I'm very happy with it. Does all i need and more... nice bit of kit. GPS, full qwerty keyboard, decent camera, 3g, wifi, good music player, of course very good email & MS exchance service, and plenty of useful apps. Best phone I've had, good quality all over.

Most peeps seem to have a preference for a HTC android phone.. you hear good things about them.

[Sadist_Cain]

I have the N900

As an out of the box phone it's terrible.

It's a developers toy, to give you an idea, with the first release of the OS you could go to your app manager make an application catalogue called matrix, delete it, the phone would then ask do you want to take the red pill or the blue pill? red pill meaning you get all the developing and testing apps that are still being built (and can therefore kill your phone) or the blue pill would keep you safe... See my point? that was a standard feature, gives you an idea what the phone developers were thinking

As an internet tablet it's lovely, you can browse proper web pages not the mobile stuff and do pretty much anything you do on the web normally (barr Divx webplayer)
Uses a firefox based browser so you can have addons as well.

App store is lacking, I swear it's managed by a monkey with OCD, keeps on saying how it's being updated and brand new amazing things are coming, nothing really changes.
the apps through app manager (from the testing and developers things) are quite often half broken or just "proof of concept" style apps, some hunting will produce good things but as soon as your having a phone war with anyone who has a blackberry, HTC or even the sighphone your E-penis will feel very small... It can run doom though, and command and conquer...

Battery life is evil, can kill it easily in under 2 hours if you try.

GPS is broken, simple as. Really there's no App (not even nokias others are £50 a pop) that makes it work worthwhile, the GPS navigation was better on my N95 8GB to be honest.

Camera is brilliant, good flash (with a torch app doubles as an awesome flashlight)

I can however remotely access my PC using my phone and also stream media from my Hard Drive to wherever I am, quite good

qwerty keyboard is excellent, even my stubby fingers can use it with ease, you'll still have to use the touchscreen to type out numbers (doing it on the qwerty pad is more trouble than its worth) but it's a resistive touch screen so prefers hard surfaces to contact, soft hands won't work well, nails will (or the stylus)

Some of the most powerful hardware in a phone and one of the most flexible operating systems, its no lie that the N900 could do almost anything you want its just been terribly let down by the floppy haired git at nokia and is seriously lacking a decent mainstream developers community (some of the most obscure and radnom applications exist on this thing that amaze you just someone spending the time to code them)

In short, if you work with computers, and have a reasonable understanding of Linux, networking and such, the N900 will sit beautifully on your desk working in tandem with your pc and be a great little companion in that regard.
if you're an internet fiend then the N900 can easily multitask many windows at a time and still run smooth, its not uncommon to sit and watch a film (video playback = awesome) then minimize the window browse the net and bring the film back up.

A very lovable little scamp it is though, the apps are largely crap but there's a few lil geeky gems in there that let you tinker with the phone the way no one else can with theirs.
My instincts would say go for the HTC, even though I do love this little bastard.

It's an awesome pocket PC. As a phone, compared to the blackberrys, HTCs and others, it's wank.

[Freddy Chickenbatter]

No touch screen and all button entry ..job done

http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/archives/images/set2/old_mobile_phones_002.jpg

[epoch]

I have a Blackberry Bold 9000, Blackberry Storm 9500, iPhone 3G and HTC Desire.



If you don't want touch screen, then I echo Tommy's comments - get a Blackberry.
If you decide to go for touch screen, get an HTC Android-based phone, such as the Desire or Hero
If you just want to hold a phone but don't want to be able to make telephone calls, get an iPhone 4G :p

[Swe_Olsson]

Thanks to everyone for their very creative responses! yes even yours Freddy! you're such a trip. hahaha

son of a gun, the blackberry is not sold with the phone company I'm using. I looked it up at another swedish based phone company and it indeed looks VERY nice, but I really don't feel like switching over to TRE as I'm very pleased with Tele2.

Sadist, I've heard the sound is pretty good, is the sound/music quality any good?

edit:

I do really like the HTC legend, I've red some reviews and it seems like a good choice, what do you think?. I also like the design of it. I cannot find the HTC hero on tele2's website

[Sadist_Cain]

HTCs definately going to be the better PHONE.

Sound quality on the N900 is great but there's no built in equaliser (apparently making an app for germany's bicycle hire scheme is more important than that)

has stereo speakers and is good enough to watch a film on your lonesome or with another

unfortunately dosn't support DRM tracks, so my entire napster library has become useless, ah well.

it does double rather well as my mp3 player and is lots more noisy than my old n95