The Eternal Quest for the Best Smartphone

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The Eternal Quest for the Best Smartphone

Thu 10 May 2012 at 08:45 #

When writing an article on Mobile Phones, there is always the knowledge that once the publish button button is clicked, the article is out of date, as the industry moves so fast with new models being released every week, but here goes anyway...

I have been on a 20 year quest for the ultimate smartphone. This doesn't mean that I buy every new model as it comes out, far from it; I tend to hold back and only commit to a model once I'm sure that it fits my needs. Once I have that new shiny device in my hands, it's now mine until I'm convinced that another phone is better. Sometimes this upgrade cycle can take several years. I have a long standing contract of almost 2 decades with my preferred mobile phone network provider, and on that contract there are 5 registered SIM cards. Somewhere along the line I also became a VIP customer, which seems to get me special discounts and offers form time to time. So I'm not restricted in my upgrade choices.

Like many people of my generation I first started out with a Nokia. In my case it was a Nokia 2110. Good Phone. Anyone who had one will tell you that it still holds a special place in their heart. I then went through several models from both Nokia and Ericsson (before Sony swallowed them up), one notable model being the Ericsson T28, an absolutely tiny phone for the time. One phone I did love was my Nokia 7110 although after I had it for a few months, in a moment of pure crazyness I sprayed the outer case metallic blue. The slider mechanism never worked properly after that. Many people think (and mainly because Nokia billed it as such) that the 7110 was the Matrix phone. It wasn't. The phone in that movie is a Nokia 8110 custom modifed to have a spring lock slider (which Nokia then built in as standard into the bigger 7110).

Shortly after that I played with several offline PDAs such as the Palm Pilot and some low end Compaq/HP iPaqs. This detour really impressed on me how good it would be to have a phone that could also be a portable computer. After hunting around I discovered the Trium Mondo which was a Pocket PC based PDA with a built in GSM Phone. It had a monochrome screen, and very rarely worked properly. In fact, if I remember correctly, every time the phone started ringing the screen would switch off, making it difficult to answer the call!

After the Mondo, and despite the problems, I never went back to a non-smart phone for any length of time. The promise and lure of having all that power and utilities 'on the go' was too much. My next smart phone was the i-Mate Jam, which is more commonly known as the HTC Magician. Sporting a colour screen and a newer version of Pocket PC, this smart phone was great to use, even if sending SMSs and Emails required laborious hunt-and-pecking at the tiny on-screen keyboard with the stylus. In fact it was that issue that caused my still ongoing problem with smart phones today:

I just don't like on-screen soft keyboards.

To overcome my issue with soft keyboards, my next smart phone was a HTC TyTN II (or HTC Kaiser). This phone was similar to the i-Mate Jam but ran faster, had more memory, and more importantly had a wonderful new feature - a slide out hard keyboard. I lived with and loved the TyTN II for a long time, until 3G arrived, bringing with it viable web-surfing on phones. The TyTN II without 3G now had to go.

Which brings me to my current phone, the HTC Touch Pro2 (pictured above) which is ancient by modern phone standards but still retains one important feature that most modern Android and Windows Phone phones do not have: a slide out hard keyboard. It's also got an 800x480 screen, and is only let down these days by it's old OS (Windows Mobile 6.5) and the so-rubbish-it's-unusable built in Web browser. There are some Android models that DO have a hard keyboard but these models are under-specced for the generation of phones that they are. If I want a hard keyboard I have to forego a fast CPU or high resolution screen, which is somewhat unfair. I'm sure it's down to manufacturing costs but I'd be prepared to pay a little over the odds for the phone that I want and I'm sure a lot of business users would too.

HTC (and some of the other manufacturers) say that there is little appetite in the European market for a hard keyboard on Android phones which is a shame because the way things are going, soon not a single model will sport one.

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I am a self confessed technology geek with a passion for all things IT. I also have unhealthy interests in Home Cinema, Batman Graphic Novels, and anything to do with Sci-fi. This Blog is an irregular outlet of my current thoughts and rants and is also a home for writings that do not fit on Facebook.

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