It is. But smartphones are totally discretionary purchases, so I can't say I understand your "we are expected to spend £400" comment. Anyone can buy or not buy any damn phone they please. If you want to bitch about what we are expected to spend, complain about the petrol prices because we do have to buy that.
I got a HTC desire HD just before Christmas and I'm still really happy with it. The battery life is a bit of an issue - when I first got it the battery didn't last more the 14 hrs if you actually used the phone - but once you play with the settings a little its fine and now it lasts nearly 2 days depending on usage. Desire HD is particularly great if you want to be on the net a lot and works well as an E-reader/iPod replacement.
No we don't. EVERYTHING is choice. EVERYTHING is discretionary. It's just that those choices have consequences and everybody is supposed to make their own decision about how those consequences affect the choices they make. If I don't buy petrol, I can't use my car, but I can still choose not to by petrol if I want to. There are a million other examples, just think about it... When I say "expected", I mean that no R&D, marketing, or sales time is devoted to anything other than £400 phones now and that drives the expectation of the market. There's also the peer/societal element. But primarily, there are very few "good" cheaper phones because all of the "good" phones are £400+. That's my point.
"Also Nokia shafted us by not supporting the forthcoming MeeGo on it." but they promised! Finnish b*stards.... even the name is a lie (ie bet they started)
What exactly would you like to see happen to the dumphone market then? If these devices are for people who simply want to make calls and text then there's not an awful lot of room for improvement seeing as they've all been doing a great job of that for years; Nokia still make some great candybar phones but I'd much rather see R&D money go into making affordable smartphones like the Orange San Francisco which do everything a smartphone can do for the price of a dumphone.
The only thing left in the dumbphone market is spanking battery life back up to ludicrous levels. A few years ago when the Sony K750's were about battery lives were totally brilliant, then the dumbphones started getting smarter and flashier, battery lives died away again. OT: Anyone got a negatory opinion of the Motorola Defy? A mildly hardened Android runner sounds alright to me.
Orange San Francisco looks good, they changed the screen apparently, to a lower spec and res though. Thinking of selling my iphone 4 and getting one and using the spare cash to pay some bills off.
@Krikkit FWIW I'm about to order a Motorola Defy. That'll be my first smartphone, and I deliberately avoided paying attention to them for a while... done a bit of research now, though. I love my hardened / waterproof Panasonic FT1 camera (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FesuLFJrMb8 not that the Defy will do quite that). Shame that it's behind on Android updates, and CPU could be faster etc, but I reckon it looks pretty cool and it's also relatively cheap...
It might not be totally spanking fast like the latest and greatest android beasties, but I'll sacrifice a bit of speed for a modicum of extra toughness. Updates are pretty irrelevant - I'd be rooting my phone pretty much as soon as I got it. I used to be a big fan of toughened phones - they really did last a bit longer than everyone else's phones. My favourite was a Siemens M35.
They were previously using OLED screens now they use TFT but they are the same resolution (800x480). Both seem to be pretty decent quality especially at the price you can get it for (£80 inc a £10 topup). Obviously its a budget phone so it has some compromises the most obvious being the camera is shocking and the CPU is a little old and so doesn't support flash in Android 2.2. Build quality is pretty decent. It would struggle with some 3D games but its normal UI and browser is very smooth and frankly for £80 I could buy three and still have enough cash to upgrade my PC vs buying a "high end" Android/WP7/iPhone
I'll probably root mine pretty soon as well, will have to see. Updates are something to point out when evaluating that model though. Slower CPU may mean somewhat better battery life as well... they can be reasonably easily overclocked AFAIK but maybe the same is true of faster ones as well. Less RAM than some others as well. Anyway, I'm pretty settled on my choice and greatly looking forward to getting it. My thinking is that the faster ones are going to be obselete pretty soon in terms of being the fastest thing on the block anyway, and the difference isn't that great. Ruggedness on the other hand is a worthy distinction.
Good question, I'm not sure I have an answer to that. But I suppose my main beef is that the dumphones you can buy for £100 odd, seem inadequate when compared to things like the which had the most epic camera and Xenon flash ever seen (and still beats most now) and a decent media player, but also felt substantial and like you weren't buying some £10 Nokia POS. I dunno, I just don't like £400 for a phone. Can't really explain it better than that.
I've never paid that much, either, even back in the day when smartphones were ludicrously overpriced.
Info is in this thread from Modaco which is also where you can get custom ROMs for the OSF. Basically if you have or know anyone with an Orange PAYG SIM then Orange have an offer on where you get £30 off PAYG phones pretty much no questions asked. The SIM doesn't even have to be used much. Otherwise they're £100 from various Outlets. Frankly its a complete bargain with the only caveat being that I'm a rabid multitasker and I can see myself wanting to upgrade in 6-8 months to a more powerful handset now I have the Android bug.
THE PRICE OF PETROL IS CRAZY. THE SOONER WE GO ON STRIKE LIKE BEFOR THE BETTER. PETROL IN THE U.S.A IS HALF OUR PRICE. WE SHOULD ALL STRIKE. STRIKE STRIKE STRIKE STRIKE STRIKE
