whyPhone?

Critique · Fri 04 Jun, 2010 10.41

GMTV2009 wrote:I'm personally looking at a HTC Smart in Black on Pay & Go with 02. I can get a bolt-on for unlimited texts and data if I top up £10 every month, and it's in a more appropriate price range for me. £100 for handset, and no fixed payments.

I've been reading reviews (Naturally) for this phone and the stupidity of some of the user reviews. One complains many apps he tries to install won't install, as he's trying to install Android apps on something that isn't an Android phone. One let down for me on it though is the lack of Wifi, although I am still looking forward too getting it as I can aim to use iPhone optimized sites (Facebook etc) in the browser, which should hopefully work the same on the HTC.

Inspector Sands · Sat 05 Jun, 2010 20.30

marksi wrote:Agreed with Gav, the radio is good other then the problem I've found with 96.0FM. Sound quality is much better than on the Nokia I've replaced it with, though while searching for other mentions of the problem above I've found quite a few people complain about the radio app locking up. I haven't noticed this myself.

Google Listen is doing a good job so far in terms of podcasts and that's what I've replaced live R4 with... though there are a few podcast apps which I've heard are very good but not yet tried.

Interesting, thanks. The Desire looks pretty good, I'm getting quite tempted by it

On the podcast front, how does it work with bookmarking them? I use my mp3 player mainly for podcasts and things downloaded from iPlayer, but I can bookmark them at the point I stopped at for next time. Does the media player (or any of the podcast 'apps') allow you to do that?

Also does anyone know if my Chrome browser bookmarks which are currently synced using Google can be synced with a browser on the Desire?... I assume an android version of Chrome would do it if there is one

marksi · Sun 06 Jun, 2010 00.36

Will check the podcast question for you... the Google Chrome bookmarks don't currently sync, which annoyed me, but loads of people have asked about this obvious omission and I'm sure it'll be fixed...

Jovis · Wed 09 Jun, 2010 16.57

I hope there will be a new iPod Touch as well as a new iPhone - is this likely?

Critique · Wed 09 Jun, 2010 18.26

Jovis wrote:I hope there will be a new iPod Touch as well as a new iPhone - is this likely?

Yes, it' almost certain it will happen. It has before, and so it makes sense for the same to happen here.

marksi · Wed 09 Jun, 2010 19.39

Inspector Sands wrote:On the podcast front, how does it work with bookmarking them? I use my mp3 player mainly for podcasts and things downloaded from iPlayer, but I can bookmark them at the point I stopped at for next time. Does the media player (or any of the podcast 'apps') allow you to do that?

I've just checked this. Google Listen remembers the point you stopped a podcast. I've swapped between two podcasts and each time it picks up at the point you left it last.

I've also added a "BBC Browsecast" app which neatly arranges all the available BBC podcasts and plays them for you through Google Listen.

Inspector Sands · Thu 10 Jun, 2010 01.05

marksi wrote:I've just checked this. Google Listen remembers the point you stopped a podcast. I've swapped between two podcasts and each time it picks up at the point you left it last.

Ahhh, that's cool. It sounds like the way my PVR remembers. Thanks for checking that for me

I've also added a "BBC Browsecast" app which neatly arranges all the available BBC podcasts and plays them for you through Google Listen.

So does that mean that it streams the ones you want to listen to rather than downloading them?

Sput · Thu 10 Jun, 2010 09.52

A warning to morons: if you opt to change your @googlemail address to @gmail -as gmail is inviting you to do- it will break the Android Market on your phone. Everyone might be aware of this, sadly I was not when I did it. Happily it's easy enough to change back to @googlemail, but still: poor show.

Gavin Scott · Thu 10 Jun, 2010 10.20

Sput wrote:A warning to morons: if you opt to change your @googlemail address to @gmail -as gmail is inviting you to do- it will break the Android Market on your phone. Everyone might be aware of this, sadly I was not when I did it. Happily it's easy enough to change back to @googlemail, but still: poor show.

Luckily I had gmail to start with.

Had an interesting evening with 2 pals and their iPhones last night, and me with my HTC Desire.

Was having fun with Layar - looking at the tweets emanating from around us, whilst my pal had grindr grinding.

Umm - is grindr available for android phones? Couldn't see it in the Android Market.

Inspector Sands · Thu 10 Jun, 2010 10.32

Hasn't Apple effectively caught up with the Desire now with version 4 of the iPhone? It doesn't encourage me to go down the Apple route but most of the new features on iPhone 4 seem to be ones that were already on the Desire.

Sput · Thu 10 Jun, 2010 11.34

I'd say iPhone 4 is probably better than the Desire, although a lot of that is still because the software experience looks so much better. I'm still routinely enraged with DoubleTwist, trying to get my music and photos to sync in a vaguely automatic or quick way. I hate copy and pasting files about.

Things that look better about the iPhone 4 specifically are the noise-cancelling mic (the Nexus one has this but the desire doesn't), the screen (as you can actually use it outside) and the camera is probably higher quality too. Also it is prettier and I bet it even shuts down when you tell it to.