So given that I spent at least 2 weeks or more over the Christmas period continuously scouring the net to bring myself from a level of totally oblivious to anything pertaining to smartphones and phone plans and vendors, to an "expert" on the topic, I figured I should at least share this bit of knowledge I have with you before it becomes obsolete as it rapidly will. And hey, even if one could dispute this but after all isn't it product design in itself albeit perhaps less novel?
Feel free at any point to chip in with your own views or correct me if I make any false statements but I am just going to recount what I have learned as regards to what for me was the best option to go for. Note please do not quote me on anything or take what I say for 100% fact ie double check for yourself if for example you're using this blog to assist you in buying a new phone yourself.
Considering that I started at a point of being totally ignorant as regards to smartphones, I in my wisdom decided, given that the phone would be a christmas present, that I would first figure out my ideal phone. I guess part of my logic was that I was due an upgrade from Vodafone and so looking at the Billpay phones they had on offer it didn't look like the phone could go over 200 euro. Unfortunately on hindsight I came to realise that it was not such a good thing that I got my heart settled on a 400-500 euro phone Samsung Galaxy S2 (with the Xperia Ray 2nd choice) since latest technology phones do not come cheap without some kind of catch! The catch being that regardless of which vendor you choose, you're likely to find yourself having to sign up to a lengthy contract in order to avail of this "cheap offer". As my brother pointed out to me: when you weigh up the cost of the phone upfront versus the cost of the monthly payments you have to commit to over an 18-24 month period, the phone is actually not so cheap and in fact is actually more expensive when you calculate the montly payment over that time period. Anyway, regardless of this, whilst I have no plans to move abroad, one can never be certain in the current climate. For this reason I was not happy to sign up to a contract that could potentially have me trying to cover the costs of a billpay phone in Ireland whilst also having to cover the costs of a new phone abroad, should I find myself needing to take a job elsewhere in the next 2 years. P.s. I checked with vodafone if I could transfer my contract to a contract of the respective country that I might hypothetically move to and the answer was a resounding no.
This left me in a major pickle: Oh how I wanted that Samsung Galaxy S2 but I either had to sign up to such an aforementioned contract or pay a hefty bill upfront. The Iphone was a decent contender with good prices and only a 12 month commitment required but I was put off by the fact that it doesn't have a radio which is important to me. "But you can just get the app" was the response of so many people especially of course the Iphone fans. Yes I could, but I discovered thanks to the Carphone Warehouse rep I spoke to, that with the apps you end up using up your data allowance and can thus end up paying a fair amount on data. Note that all these vendors who offer "free internet" pretty much ALL have a "fair usage policy" in their terms and conditions which usually states that you can use up to 1GB a month before they start charging you. This allowance seems reasonably decent but if you go over then you can end up paying fairly significant charges for the KB you go over your monthly allowance. It should be noted by the way that if you don't sign up for some kind of data allowance package, you will probably pay: 1- a connection fee followed by a fairly big price for per kb usage initially up to about 10 euro and then the costs drop dramatically. I went as far as doing the sums of comparing how much data would cost PAYG and Bill Pay on the various Vendors and calculated that you can easily find yourself paying around 30 euro just in data if you're not careful!!
It was for this reason that I was eventually attracted to Meteor's plan. I wanted to switch to O2 so I could text my boyfriend for free but when I looked at Meteor's PAYG offer of free internet and texts if you top up by 30 euro every month, I felt this was the most sensible option for me to keep my costs down to a minimum. Since then I have discovered that they have an online billpay option for around 25 euro a month which gives the free internet, free texts and 200 minutes of call-time. One concern of course was connectivity. I was down in Kerry in the arse of nowhere which some fellow kayakers and they were all surprised that I actually had a signal -I guess that's a testament to Vodafone's coverage. Meteor in the meantime, if I recall correctly, had some statement on the website that said translates in my head as "don't be fooled by those memories of the past", basically that they have 99% coverge. Looking now I can't see that written anywhere and wondered was I confusing it with 3 but I don't see it written their either...anyway regardless of the case, I've been using my meteor account since the 13th and as yet I've not had any problems with connectivity.
On the downside, I have discovered that making the switch from Vodafone Billpay to Meteor Billpay wasn't as straightforward as it should have been. I ordered a Sim online and then discovered I was going to have problems organising a bill-pay account in time since I was about to travel to Barcelona and a-there was something listed on their site about needing to pay a deposit in order to use the phone abroad.(I had deliberately waited til my month was nearly up with Vodafone to get the max usage out of my final bill) and b-despite having ordered the bill-pay sim from their site already, it looked like I would have to wait for a new sim if I took a bill-pay account! So in looking for someone who could help me solve this dilemma, I went to the Carphone warehouse who told me I needed to speak to Meteor. I rang them up, the rep on the phone seemed unable to help and told me to go to the local store ie back to Carphone warehouse in my case! Carphone Warehouse again told me I needed to talk to Meteor so I eventually had to resort to dropping into a meteor store immediately prior to my flight to get it all sorted out only to discover: a- I couldn't go with the billpay option I wanted as the order has to be placed online and b- I didn't need to pay a deposit on PAYG to use it abroad (I guess I had assumed it was a requirement for both though I thought I saw it written somewhere for PAYG as well).
I find the top up requirements a bit odd. You have to freetext a number with a codeword BEFORE you top up in order to avail of some really good value deals. Unfortunately, given that I wasn't used to my new phone, I came back from Barcelona a few days later only to discover that I wasn't getting the free text and internet deal from my 30 euro because the freetext with the code hadn't sent!
So, like I just said, in order to get onto Meteor Billypay, for some reason you have to order ANOTHER sim.Well you sign up for your billpay account and another sim gets sent out even if you're on Meteor PAYG strangely enough. Not knowing if they would activate the payment immediately, I waited until my 30 euro credit had run low and then of course wound up having to top up by another 5 because this is all taking longer than I thought and whilst I thought I'd get my new sim today, suddenly a text appeared on my phone and an email in my inbox to say I've finally been approved and I need to pay a 50 euro deposit and I'l have my sim sent by courier tomorrow. Sigh! If you've got a headache from all this, imagine what it was like going through this process? No wonder I never got around to switching away from my expensive monthly payments to Vodafone when I was busy doing my degree! On this note: I'm sure Vodafone would argue that there are plans you can choose to suit your needs. I did try changing plans but the problem is if you go too low then you get charged a considerable amount for whatever you use that's not covered by your plan (I'm sure this is true for any vendor) and if you go too high then of course you could be paying too much on a monthly basis which I was doing initially but even after dropping my plan to a lower one I could never get my monthly bills to drop satisfactorily. I'm hopeful now that Meteor will be responsible for me cutting my bills in half at least.
So with the vendor side out of the way let's focus on the phone and the features:
What phone did I go for? Well I decided that I had to go budget which left me trying to decipher all the features and pros and cons of the budget smart-phones currently on the market. Concerns that were raised in various forums and reviews were size of the phone, size of the screen, speed of the phone, how it reacts, features, how long the battery lasts, heat issues, and so on. I myself, after searching high and low had become intent on getting the Samsung Galaxy Mini since it seemed from all the reviews to be the most balanced phone going for 100 euro or less and the carphone warehouse had a good deal on them.
What I eventually opted for however was a HTC wildfire which seems to retail at around 150-180 euro but I managed to get for 100 euro on ebay second hand (but good as new!). From my research I knew that at the 150-200 mark that the HTC was the best contender of the countless phones I researched. It's confusing trying to differentiate between the wildfires and HTC desire etc but they all seem to score pretty high in their reviews. Samsung in the meantime seems to be making a good name for itself as well but I noticed that quite a few of their phones had some issues that people wrote about that were enough to turn me off them. This includes the Samsung galaxy y which I ended up dismissing on the basis of some reviews I read. I would however urge you to go and check it out for yourself as I can't remember what turned me off it so it couldn't have been a personal want at play here.
Some of the stuff I read in the reviews regarding the HTC wildfire has turned out to be true:
Sometimes it's slow to react to the touch or even non responsive and once in a while it seems to freeze up for a moment but all in all for the price I paid for it, I'm quite happy and don't find it too much of a nuisance.
I do get the impression though that it seems to have slowed down since I downloaded angry birds onto it!
I tried the GPS the other day, likewise it was a bit slow and lagged behind where I actually was and even sometimes seemed to think I was in an estate beside the road I was actually on, but given that I was moving at a fair pace, I was still reasonably impressed and felt it was helpful to have something that was nearly real-time.
On the whole topic of time lag -I've also noticed that the auto rotate feature is a bit slow so you'll find yourself having to hold it in the correct position for a good few seconds before the screen finally rotates accordingly.
There's lot's of things to love about it: I find it incredibly intuitive which as a product designer is a major plus in my mind. The only thing I'm confused about is: of the logos that appear at the top I've figured out the one for when I'm using the internet at home, and the one that tells me when I'm using the 3G network and thus paying for data but I haven't figured out what the H and E symbols are and it's not in the booklet that came with the phone! I love the layout, the news page, the weather app and being able to pinch the screen to make things bigger or smaller. On the downside it's a pain that when you choose to personalise your background screen that it removes all the apps you took the time to pull over to the main screens!
I had read many complaints about the battery life of the HTC. Personally I think that the1.5 -2 days that I am getting out of it is rather impressive when you consider that these things are practically mini computers! Are we not expecting a bit too much of our technology these days?
I find it comical to think that there was a trend in technology that phones were getting smaller and smaller and it was looking like there'd be competition to see just how small we could get them and now it's reversed for a large part -i.e. if you want to have a screen that displays the net and videos then you want a decent sized screen!
Another new trend seems to be the fact that most phones now seem to have radios whereas only a few years ago I was always hard pressed trying to find phones that had a radio. Which I guess in some respects made my searches easier back then (a mere 2 years ago).
So what else to consider? Well, I also learnt that you might want to consider the operating system: Go with Nokia and sadly it's no longer the lovely familiar OS that was standard to all Nokia phones but no you end up with MS and we all know what happens on our laptops don't we? Crash, crash....Having said that, I haven't tried one of these phones so I can't know for sure but I just loved the old Symbian operating system as it was very easy to use and it was nice that they kept it so similar on each phone.
Go with Iphone and you're absorbed into the legacy that the wonderful Steve Jobs left behind but you're also locked into it!
Go with Android and you can avail google apps like your gmail, synchronized contacts and calender which personally I find to be a major major plus! It's so handy having all my contacts automatically downloaded and all my calender events showing up on my phone! According to my brother who's a big geek, you should keep an eye to this site to know which android phones you should go for (I'd need to ask him again why if you want clarification on this). http://www.cyanogenmod.com/
Lastly, I discovered the Chinese are developing some really super cool phones that have loads of cool specs including a wristwatch phone that I saw on ebay but eventually I decided to go with the tried and tested faithfuls.....
On a final note I'll just add that as regards to using the Meteor website: I find their site is pretty easy to navigate -vodafone's was sometimes confusing and it could be hard at times to access your account. What I also really like about the Meteor site over the Vodafone one is the ability to easily access a full list of calls and data usage within 2 clicks. Ie I don't need to go into my bill slip to see it so it's easy to keep track of my activity and usage with meteor. Having said that, I do miss the vodafone webtexts including being able to select up to 5 people at a time and the "Text later" feature which was rather nifty! :)
Well folks...I'm hitting publish now as this has been sitting in my drafts for too long and I don't want to wait til it's old news. Hope it's of some assistance to you!
