Phone Search

Today, Debra and I went out in search of phones. Our contract with AT&T has recently expired, and we wanted to survey the current mobile phone scene and see what we could get. Basically, we decided that we wither want to get smartphones with internet access, or just get simple phones with a basic talk and text package. Being a grad student means that we don't have a whole lot of money to shell out, but if the smartphones are good enough, we can budget for a more expensive monthly bill. So basically, if we're going cheap, I don't much care about what phone I get. But if I'm going to pay a lot, then I want to make sure I get an awesome phone.

We looked primarily at three phones today: the Blackberry Bold 9700, the HTC Pure, and the Motorola Droid. The first two were at AT&T, and the Droid (of course) was at Verizon. The costs of all three phones would be the same: about $100 each after rebate. The service plans from AT&T and Verizon would cost about the same as well. I should mention that we inquired about the iPhone (not that I would ever buy one, but if Debra wanted it I would have winced and allowed her to have it), but rejected it because with the iPhone, we would not be able to use the 15% discount on the service plan that I get for being a University of Illinois employee. So forget that. The Nexus One seems awesome, but we didn't see anything about being able to buy a family plan with two of them and the cost was significantly higher.

Here are my impressions of each phone:

Blackberry Bold 9700

This phone seemed pretty solid. The keyboard is a little easier to use than the one on my current phone, the Samsung Blackjack II. Another big improvement over the Blackjack II is the trackpad: it felt very smooth and responsive. Scrolling was smooth and easy, although I imagine that it would still be annoying to scroll through a page that is very link-heavy. The model phone I used did not have a SIM card, so I couldn't test the browser or anything that required access to the network. I've heard that people who have Blackberries are pretty happy with them, but this phone didn't seem to have enough for me to really want to pay a lot for it.

HTC Pure

Ok, this phone was terrible. For starters, it runs on Windows Mobile 6.5. If you know me, you know that Windows isn't exactly my thing. My Blackjack II runs Windows Mobile 6.1, and it's nothing really to write home about. But this thing was miserable to use. I don't know if it was just that the phone takes 5 minutes to get going fully, but after it booted up the interface was so sluggish and unresponsive that I immediately disliked it. In the couple of minutes of using it, I had trouble trying to scroll the application bar from side to side to access the phone's functionality. The onscreen keyboard did not appear to rotate if the phone was held in landscape position, and I had a lot of trouble typing the letters I meant to hit. If there was text auto-completion, it didn't appear as I was trying to type in the "Notes" application. The touchscreen and UI responsiveness were so bad for me that I was already sour on the phone when I noticed the hideous flip-style clock on the homepage (clearly visible in the image above). Why would you waste processor cycles rendering that ugliness, when the UI is already sluggish as is? Ugh. No thank you.

Motorola Droid

Now this phone was nice. There's so much about this phone that I didn't get to play with, but in the couple minutes I had with it I was very impressed. The interface was intuitive and smooth. Touchscreen input was accurate, typing was easy (especially in landscape mode), and the auto-completion was a nice touch. In fact, the touchscreen keyboard was so nice, I forgot to try out the physical keyboard! The deep Google integration is excellent (probably second to the Nexus One) for someone like me who uses quite a few Google services. Since KDE 4.4's Akonadi personal information database plays nicely with Google services, I can keep my phone and laptop calendars synchronized via Google Calendar for instance. This is certainly a phone that I would be happy with.

From my limited testing of phones today, I've whittled my options down to 2: get Droid phones and pay the higher service plan rate, or give up on smartphones and go with a much cheaper service plan. Is the Droid worth it? Anyone have experience with this phone, or any advice in general on this?