It's hit that time again where the contract is up on my mobile phone and it's time for a new phone. This time I've decided to take TMobiles lower price contract and use the savings to buy a sim-free phone.
So a quick look around the pre-xmas market shows a few phones that look promising (main requirement is 800x480 screen size as a minimum). The phones that made my shortlist are below:
iPhone 3GS - I really can't bring myself to buy one for personal use, tethering costs 10 a month on O2 and the screen is now a little low-res and the lack of easy development (I'd need a mac) and apples attitude really puts me off.
Status - Not for me, but my wife wants one.
HTC HD2 - Well it looks lovely, has all the features that I want BUT it's got Windows Mobile 6.5 as the underlying OS and the play I've had with the emulator didn't inspire me (Although with HTC UI I'm not sure this is a huge problem).
Status - Probably if it was Windows Mobile 7
Acer Liquid A1 - I had this on back order for a while BUT acer don't seem to have delivered just yet and it's running the older Android Donut 1.6 OS (Most of the motorola comments apply here as well) BUT it does have a budget price. Its also somewhat unclear if it will ever get upgrading to eclair.
Status - Might be a dead end phone, if hackers don't crack root (last seen hackers got root).
Motorola Milestone - I cancelled the order for the Acer Liquid and moved over to this once it became available from expansys. It's running Android Eclair and has been billed in the US as an iPhone killer. Problem is the one feature that I absolutely require from a smart phone seems to be missing tethering the phone as a modem for my laptop (I work in police stations where getting internet access is rare). Now there are third party solutions for this but they either cost money OR require root access to the phone. Looking at the US based forums for it's sister phone the Droid this seems to be a trick that no-one has managed yet (there seems to be a part way solution). Finally there is no sync with Outlook unless your running exchange.
Status - Would be a contender but late delivery, no Outlook sync and potential lack of root kills it.
Nokia N900 - This phone is what I ended up getting. It hits several sweet spots for me. Tethering is there out of the box (you do need the nokia PC suite installed) so no messing around trying to get a new kernel with iptables loaded. There is a keyboard which means I'm not relying on a on-screen one it's small and yet again a three line qwerty I'd have preferred a seperate number row, but at least when you enter a phone number it sees the top row as numbers. The killer item for me was that it comes with xterm and vi gotta love any phone with those in box. The only downside is the software still feels a little unfinished in places, for example as I'm typing this my screen brightness keeps changing, I suspect this is flickering sunlight confusing a sensor but who knows.
Status - I like it but probably currently for geeks only. May well improve dramatically with next few firmware releases.
In summary all of these phones have promise and for me the nokia is great fit. For my wife the iPhone is probably a better phone. Both of the android contenders fail at the moment due to lack of true openess (they are very close but the need to hack them to get root isn't a good sign)
