Replacement Smartphone

Hi

We are looking for replacement smart phone for our Blackberry's and Palm TREO, does anyone know of any suitable replacement that has good battery life and doesnt break down all the time!

I'm in the market for a smart phone too, so I'm curious to know too. I'm moving this discussion to Wireless Connectivity forum, since I think it fits a little better there.

Best,

Megan

PS: Ninja2000, could you email me or send me a private message?

Any ideas?

Hi,

There is a thread running in conjunction (here) where several replacements are discussed - the iPhone is given a pretty good rap but if you are in the US it seems you need to be tied to a specific telecoms carrier in order to use it, and it doesn't support high-speed 3G... other models (3G compliant) such as the Motorolla Q9 might be worth considering but again it largely depends on what is supported by your local mobile phone carrier... are you in an area serviced by 3G or limited to areas serviced by Wifi for high-speed connectivity? - Also do you want a handset where the Internet is "always-on"? (so email and tasks etc, sync in real time, all the time?)

Just a few other considerations you might wish to look at in this decision...

Do you travel overseas? - If you do, you might want a handset that supports GSM as well as 3G or global roaming probably won't work...

Do you like a QWERTY keyboard?

Do you want to use the handset as a high-speed mobile modem for your Laptop/Notebook when out of Wifi range?

Do you need a hands-free car-kit for the handset? (not available with all phones)

For the moment we just need a handset that supports bluetooth, e-mail, has a battery life 8+ hours and is also a good phone, something like the Blackberry 8100 Pearl but that phone gives us hell with Breakdowns and file system crashes. QWERTY keyboard would be needed, no mobile modem, roaming not considered for the moment, any ideas users just need something that is sold for under 500 Euro

The Samsung Blackjack 2 is my favorite right now. It's got good battery life and runs Windows Mobile, which I like for it's play-nice-with-Exchange qualities.

My CEO, who is a freakshow for homw much she uses her phone, seems pleased with her Palm Treo 750.

I, and a couple others here, use a Samsung Blackjack (original), and haven't had any problems. I've dropped it, and it's held up well. The battery life wasn't good enough for my 5 hours of talk a day boss, but it's fine for me.

The only smartphone I've had bad experiences with was the HTC 3125. It was the flip phone. I LOVED the flip phone design, but had to replace it twice on warranty, once for a problem with the microSD card disappearing and again when it just magically stopped doing anything. The third one's exterior LCD broke in my pocket, and then the power jack came out after about 6 months of daily plugging in. VERY disappointed in HTC and would be very wary of them.

Hope that helps... good luck! I know the Blackjack 2 is available with a pretty good discount at AT&T right now.

I'm not up to speed on European model handsets so hopefully some one else will dive in and help... however on the Blackberry Pearl, we had similar issues prior to upgrading to 4.2.1.164 firmware - have you tried a firmware upgrade? It fixed the problems for us.

i'm going to pipe up as another super happy iphone user.

i've had it six months, it's super stabile, puts my old palm to shame. it's crashed maybe three times.

the slower networking speed of the EDGE network compared to 3G does not bother me. in fact, iphone users are on the internet about 2-3 times more often than other smartphone users. mobile safari on the iphone is now 10x more used than other mobile web browsers.

there's some really simple software now to hack them so you can be free of at&t. i have been on another network since day 1.

the calendar, phone books, web and email are so easy to use, it's the first phone that does not make me feel stupid when i use it.

Of course, the iPhone will only operate on vendors with GSM networks (the ones with SIMM cards), regardless of what "hack" is used. So unfortunately, iPhones can never be used on a Verizon or Sprint type network.

For anyone considering the iPhone, wait until the new version comes out in a few weeks as it will now be 3G capable.

Also recently out is the Palm Treo 755p which is slimmer than previous Treos and has a larger screen.

> iphone users are on the internet about 2-3 times more often than other smartphone users. mobile safari on the iphone is now 10x more used than other mobile web browsers.

Where are you getting these stats from trees? Do you have a reference link?

I wouldn't be surprised if iPhone users spend more time on the web due to the slower link speeds, however to suggest they are on more often, and that safari is used 10x more than any other web browser seems to go against available evidence (eg I have a permanent access plan so my PDA is on the net 24x7x365 - although I guess to some statisticians this might mean I only access the net once a year - :-)

sorry! i didn't mean to imply it was time spent on the internet; it was a comparison of market share, or usage measured in page hits. i should have been more clear. also i was mentally averaging some factoids; mobile safari has 4x the market share of windows mobile, and 50x the market share on google searches.

Study: Surprise! iPhone owners don't talk as much
"It turns out that iPhone owners are using the gadget more for non-phone purposes than people with similar devices. With Internet and media usage numbers comparatively through the roof, Apple seems to have a leg up in the race towards convergence." link

Google: iPhone searches spanking rest of the mobile world
"We already know that the iPhone has taken 28 percent of the US smartphone market, and shot up to the number two spot in just six months. Worldwide iPhone has the number three spot with 6.5 percent market share. Well, it seems the iPhone is also responsible for the majority of searches from mobile phones. Gundotra had Google engineers double check the logs when an analysis showed the amount searches coming from iPhones was 50 times higher that any other handset. 50 times. That's Kind of a Big Deal™." link

Mac OS X, Safari usage still flat in March 2008
"Finally, the iPhone saw another increase in usage of 0.01 percent, which puts it at 0.15 percent total. To put that in perspective, Linux has 0.62 percent. At least the iPhone is ahead of Windows CE/Mobile, which has 0.06 percent. How long have the various incantations of Windows Mobile been out again? Oh, yeah, forever compared to the iPhone." link

by march mobile safari had .23% of the US internet browsing market, making it the #1 handheld internet device there. globally it was second only to nokias which had .25% of the global browsing market. so the iphone, only available for about a year now, and in very few countries, has almost as many page hits as all nokia phones in the world, and about 4x the hits of windows mobile. link

what the iphone lacks is ms exchange support and support for ms office documents. that's coming in the new release this summer.

personally i don't find the internet access slow at all, but it's not like i am doing major net surfing from my pocket. with my internet use it's mostly using the maps to get around town, searches to find businesses, looking up some occasional wikipedia entry, checking the weather and movie times, and emailing photos to friends. it's fast enough for all those things.

Interesting... Yet the same market research company (isupply) also states the HTC (JasJam) is used more than the iPhone on a percentage basis for surfing the web... Statistics are wonderful things... What the original stats don't really promote is how the iPhone was measured against other phones including those without a large display screen (obviously not used much for web surfing) so on 'average' the iPhone and HTC came out well on top for 'web surfing' habits.

Need to be careful with this sort of stuff, it's all a bit of a con - :-)

Have just taken delivery of an i-mate Ultimate 9502... pretty impressed so far... Windows Mobile 6 and the screen is large and bright enough that with the inbuilt GPS, it doubles very nicely as a sat-nav when sitting in the car cradle - still playing but drop a note if anyone wants any info on this model.

We replaced this with Nokia E51, Not a windows Mobile device but excellent smart phone. Simple and effective.