My mobile phone contract is coming up for renewal within the next week and I'm a little unsure as to which phone to get. I refuse to buy anything without physical buttons, so that rules out the iphone and the majority of android phones. I have had a motorola milestone for the last 24 months or so (original droid if you're in america ) and to be honest I'm sick of it, slow piece of crap with a battery which barely lasts a day even with the backlight off and the CPU underclocked to 400mhz. So i'm guessing this pretty much just leaves me with blackberries looking at currently available phones. I quite like the torch 9810 and I can get it on a cheaper contract than my craporola. But is getting a blackberry a good idea? Like if i get it, will RIM still be around to honour the warranty if something craps up 6 months down the line? Also if there's anybody here who has this phone i'd be interested to hear your thoughts about it generally Oh and if you can think of any other mobiles which are available and would be sutiable to my very specific tastes, I'd love to hear about them
Trouble is I don't think there's anything else I could tolerate using on the market, I don't want to get tied to a 2 year contract for something I don't like. I'm a little bit tempted just to get a sim only contract and stick with my motorola, then hope that the "what we need is fewer buttons and more touchscreens which don't lock properly in my pocket, telephoning my mother every ten minutes" fad dies as soon as possible To be honest I hate apple and google for ruining phones like this, I don't want just some big screen in my pocket but I often need to use the internet on the move. I can't use these stupid touchscreens to type and they all look exactly the same. My mobile phone is about the only thing I ever get which is nice and shiny and brand new but now choosing one just feels like a depressing chore. "well you can be our bitch for 2 years and have this ugly black rectangle or you can have another identical ugly black rectangle with curved corners a picture of a half eaten fruit on it, but get this you pay a fucktonne more for that fruit."
Unless you care about being a "Me too" yuppie, Blackberries are just fine. The OS works well and it does what it's supposed to do - Keep you connected with others. Voice, Email, Scheduling, Appointments, it does them all brilliantly. I have a Blackberry Javelin 8900 which is a really old phone, but it's solid as a rock and still going strong. Battery lasts me days and it's perfect for keeping up to date with people I connect with, instant emails, etc. Sure, you can't connect to iTunes and download millions of the latest "farting" app, but who cares. If I want a computing device, I'll get a laptop. Maybe I'm old-school but my phone is strictly for communication. Not Angry Birds!
Yeah, but if that's all you use a phone for, might as well get a dumbphone instead of spending more money on a crappy phone by a dying company. It's fine for you since your Blackberry is old, but getting a new Blackberry in 2012 is like buying a Jaguar in 1996.
Now that sounds more like what I wanted to hear lol Aside from the obvious, currently I use my phone for emails, light web browsing and a bit of facebook when I can be bothered with the pisspoor internet speeds, some regular mp3s which I'm happy to copy over in windows explorer (I'm not an itunes user and I dont intend to start), solitaire and a tube map. I'm 20 years old but all these apps just frustrate and irritate me, even chu chu rocket pissed me off and I love that game on the dreamcast. So you reckon a blackberry would be fine and dandy for me? Honestly I find the email a bit sub-par on android, I can set it to push but the battery lasts about 3 hours on that setting so I just check manually.
I see your in the UK so I'm unsure if you have CDMA (a phone that doesn't take sim cards) technology over there. I recommend buying a second hand phone and unlocking it. Get on a prepaid service. They are just as good as your big name AT&T and T-tmobile. In fact they just run off of big name companies, you will not get the best customer service but it will be much cheaper. Blackberry's are great. They are rock solid and do everything you need to do. I'm not a fan of the torch but the blackberry 8900 is old but still a great phone. Get a black berry bold 9700 or a newer model of that phone. I was the same way with liking physical buttons. I have swype now and i like it. It does take some getting use too. I currently have an xperia play r800. Its like a psp phone. It is great for emulators and has a built in ps1 emulator. Whenever i get bored i play mega man x 6 or super mario world. edit: and pretty much all the blackberry batteries last for days.
Over here the small networks are much the same as the big ones and the pay as you go often works out to be much more expensive than a contract if you use the phone more than 3 times a week. Even my mother who sends a text message about 2 times a day and makes the occasional 2 minute call switched to a contract 6 months ago annd pays less than half what she did on her small network prepay tariff. Thank you for the suggestion but all my stuff is secondhand, my mobile phone is the only thing I get which is shiny and new all to myself.
Blackberries (at least the version I have) get instant emails with no battery life compromise. As you can imagine, these phones were designed for business use so something like that would be basic functionality. In terms of the things you mentioned, I believe it should be fine. Modern handsets from RIM all have Internet and multimedia capability as well as clients for the most popular web applications. I use things like Google Maps + GPS all the time. From what I understand handsets which use 3G are more of a drain on the phone, but mine only works on Edge so I can't really compare. I assume it all depends on what your doing. Using GPS, lots of BBM messages, email, and maybe the odd voice call, on a warn out battery (doesn't stay as charged as long as it used to) I think I could leave it on for about 2 maybe 3 days before it would die? It probably would be shorter if I was on 3G using Internet and playing games and stuff on it all day though. EDIT: Oh ya, not that I use it personally but I hear that "WhatsApp" messenger is free for RIM devices. So if you have lots of friends on that using incompatible non-RIM handsets, you can still connect with them and keep in touch. I assume the makers offered it for free on RIM devices since it would be suicide trying to compete with RIM's native messaging system.
You have to take into account that once RIM inevitably gets bought out or goes bust in the near future, BBM and their proprietary e-mail may not work anymore.
keep old phone (or buy used) and get on giffgaff. unlimited (yes, actually unlimited) internet, unlimited text and like 250 minutes a month for £10 with no contract. Also, giffgaff to giffgaff is free and you get £5 for each person you refer (so if you want a sim, let me know and ill refer you )
I have switched to a Nokia N9 recently but used a Blackberry Bold 9700 for the past year. I love the keyboard on that device and would go back in an instant but no WiFi tethering (available only since OS 7) and the lack of Skype (only available in the US and UK) are strong minus points for me. It's a great phone and also very usable if you don't want to pay the extra for BIS. The Motorola Pro+ might be an alternative for you. It has a physical keyboard which looks very close to the BB 9700 design and runs Android 2.3.
Hey thanks for the advice everyone, Orange phoned me today and gave me an offer I couldn't refuse lol £20 a month for a blackberry torch 9810, 500 minutes, unlimited texts, 500mb internet and all the blackberry services. He was wittering on about web surfing being free and not using my internet allowance or something but I wasn't really paying attention as i generally use wifi at home anyway but i guess if my uni halls are ethernet next year then the internet stuff will come in handy. So it was the phone I wanted, cheaper than my current contract, I don't have to pay the last two months off on this contract because I stayed with orange, more mintues and I don't even have to go anywhere to get it, it will arrive at my door tomorrow. The guy basically said the only phones they offer with a qwerty keyboard were some tiny ugly HTC thing which is running android 2.2 (that's what my milestone was eventually upgraded to when motorola pulled their fingers out so that would be a massive downgrade considering I flashed custom 2.3 firmware as soon as the warranty ran out like a year ago), some tiny sony thing which i saw in a shop the other week and hated and blackberries. I wanted a contract because I have like zero credit rating due to only being 20 and i know it doesn't make a massive difference but every little helps ya know, it's not like they give out student credit cards anymore. I'll report back with my thoughts when it arrives. I know a couple of you think a blackberry is a stupid idea but it was pretty much the only option for me as I can easily budget in the £20 a month (especially considering I was paying almost £30 before) whereas, I wouldn't be able to afford the upfront £200 to spend on a second hand phone which would likely be equivalent or worse than the phone i have now, recently my current one has been dying a spectacular death so yeah, unlikely that would last if i had decided to use that Oh yeah and Bad_Ad, I suggested giff gaff to my friend and she loved it, unfortunately she had already ordered a sim before I could message you, sorry about that. I'm thinking I might get one for my old phone if I can work out what's wrong with it though as a backup so I'll let you know about that
Congrats. I think the only thing you need to worry about is battery life. I hear Blackberries 3G phones suck it down way faster than 2G/Edge ones. But it all depends on your usage patterns.
LOL, they're probably desperate to dump Blackberries on anyone. I hope £20 a month means they're paying you that much. Second LOL: RIM made an Edge only phone in 2008. Everyone always talks about how annoying Apple fanboys are, but the Blackberry "Heh, I use my phone for business " people are at least as bad when it comes to defending a crappy product, although they're now a dying breed now that RIM is circling the drain and even corporations are abandoning Blackberry.
Yes because less competition in the market is a wonderful thing, how we all long for a world dominated by ugly touch-only slabs :/ I don't recall saying that I was going to use it for business? I'm an unemployed student, the only business I do comes out of my arse. I just want a nice sturdy new phone with a qwerty keyboard which does emails, there are screw all half decent phones like that on the market in the UK, it's basically blackberry, some no-name blackberry clones and some android phones which pre-date my current one. I'm not concerned with it being a dying platform and if/when RIM goes to hell, I'm not massively worried. Besides, I play retro games, I'm not exactly a stranger to dead/dying platforms lol
Sorry to hear about the poor battery life you're experiencing on your milestone. My Droid1 routinely had 40hr+ battery life with my normal usage. I'm using a Droid3 right now. It goes without saying that it is much more powerful than the Droid1. I think you should take a look at it or the Droid4.
I think it was partly because I live in an area with horrendous signal (the blackberry has fixed that because it uses my home wifi to connect to the mobile network and as soon as I leave my road my coverage becomes maximum) Droid 3 and 4 are not avilable in the UK and as I said, I accepted the contract renewal from orange, I love the 9810, it pisses all over my milestone in every way except for perhaps app availability but there's a solitaire app, an ebay app, a tube map and a decent music player so it's all good. Loving it to be honest, oh yeah and it arrived on thursday, I did the initial charge and have only just put it on to charge for the first time since, it had only just dropped below 25%
