Which (smart)phone(s) do you own?

Until last year I had an HTC Desire running some version of Android and now I have an iPhone 4S. I was getting tired of the HTC and its many UI issues, so I'm happy with the switch.

 

Well, there were several things that bothered me.

After having had the device for several months, it would no longer allow me to turn it off, reboot it or enable airplane mode. I think this happened a few weeks after I updated the OS. Normally I never want to enable the airplane mode unless I enter a hospital or an airplane so it took me a while to notice it. What I had to do was to go to the security settings, and enable "security credentials" (repeat after every reboot). Apparently, the official HTC shutdown "app" no longer worked out of the box and you had to enable a seemingly unrelated global setting to make it work again. A lot of people reported this bug to HTC, but I don't think they ever fixed it. I often forgot how to fix this for myself (since the setting is disabled again after a reboot/shutdown/empty battery) and then I just physically removed the battery if I needed to restart it.

Another thing that annoyed me often, happened when I finished calling another person and wanted to hang up. If the other person was faster than me and hung up before I did, the red hangup button would automatically morph into the green call button. Almost always, my thumb would hit the green call button instead of the red hangup button.

A final thing that I can now recall had to do with downloading and installing apps. On the iPhone I use an app that is called "App Store". On the Android I also use an app, but then it's called "Google Play" (or something like that?) I've wasted so much time looking for an app with a name that indicates that I can use it to manage and download my apps. "Play" is then one of the last words that comes to my mind! The search feature didn't help me either since it apparently only tries to match the query with the title of the app and not the description.

 

I can't speak about the HTC Dream, but the HTC One X+.

my UI issue is with calling people. It has a hands-free feature that I can use in the car, but when the call is over I can't hang up with a simple button press. If the call is longer than the screen time-out time, which is a default 30 seconds, the screen will go dark and you have to hit the power button, then unlock the screen.
You can set the power button to end a call, but then if you are ever trying to call some place that uses a menu maze it tends to go dark before you finish hearing all the options. If you try to wake up the screen so you can enter in a number to navigate the menu maze, it hands it up instead.

Having the phone stay unlocked when a call is in progress would help.

There are a couple other minor UI issues as well, such that it's not easy to get the voice dialing to work, requiring a lot of navigating through the interface and button pressing (unlock, touch the call button, find the voice button), which defeats the purpose of voice dialing. Having an app icon or widgit you can put on the home screen would help.

Those are the major UI issues for me. I've never encountered the bug Morgoth talked about. I did have a few other issues in the first month, but I took it back to the AT&T store and they swapped the phone which fixed most of them.

 

At the moment, the 2 best phones on the market are the Samsung Galaxy S4 (make sure it's the i9506 version) and the HTC One. Both are not particularly cheap. It would help to know if you're going for a contract or a pay as you go, and buying the phone outright.

I personally have a HTC One and love it.

 

I have a Galaxy S3. I like the fact that you can use it to make a phone call.

(And I hate hate hate typing on those damn smartphones. Seriously, if I need to reply to or send an email using more than a couple dozen words or so, I'll wait until I can get to a proper keyboard. )

 

I have a Nokia 2310, apparently. I had to open the phone up and remove the battery to check the actual type of phone it was, actually. It was the cheapest I could find on short notice a couple of years ago. You can make phone calls and send text messages with it. Though texting only really works if I have the time and patience to actually type something with the numpad.

My girlfriend has a Samsung Galaxy S2, which is pretty decent but Android (or whatever Samsung did with it) has a tendency to decide for you what is best, which aggravates her something fierce. It's good it's her phone, though, those things happening to me would have found a phone having short-term flying lessons.

We also have an old iPod touch (which is like an iPhone 1 or 2, but without the phone part), which is probably even worse than the Galaxy S2 in this respect, though. Itunes always knows best

 

Galaxy S4 - its a bit bigger than my old S2 but no problems with it.

 

iPhone 4S over here. I've been more than pleased with it. So much that I haven't felt the need to upgrade to the 5. Maybe I'll upgrade to the next generation.

Teen Snook as a S3 and swears it is the best phone he has ever seen/used/had.

S4 seems to large to me.

 

I have a piece of junker, 8 year-old flip-phone for calls and texts only. The wifey has a Galaxy S3. She loves it for its features and ease of use. BUT, we have been getting blank/black screens periodically. When it happens, calls are dropped. It's not a year old as of yet. Looking to take it in this weekend to see what is causing the issue. I know several others with the S3 and they all love it.

 

It's fun if you're used to the Samsung S2/3/4 and then switch to an iPhone. I keep wanting to press the back 'button', but it's not there on an iPhone, you have to do it on-screen instead. And I don't even have either myself

 

You can not go wrong ith an S3. The hardware is decent, it's very customisable, and there's still a fairly active ROM cooking scene for the phone (considering it's a generation old). You'll be fine with that. Even more fine if you decide to put an after market ROM on it, which is when these top end devices really come to life. Even fresh out of the box, the S3 is a very good device

I would definitely caution against any kind of Apple device (although I suspect you already have ruled them out) due to their incredibly restrictive operating systems.

 

Xperia P. My first smartphone! I only use it for a little internet and email on the road. And the phone function is nice.

Not a bad phone, but I am to ignorant to recommend anything.

 

I got an HTC One SV free on my contract and it's great. Not had a single problem with it at all. My last phone was a HTC Desire HD and that was great too. My phone gets a lot of abuse; Adam is growing so fast that I can put it somewhere I think he can't reach and, next thing you know, it's getting eaten or thrown around!

 

IPhone 4S here. I have no problems at all with this unless you count the relative inaccuracy of the GPS when I am running a problem. I do wish the battery life was a bit longer though.

 

My mother bought me an iPhone 5 for my birthday with a year's paid subscription for 1gb/month of internet access.

Unfortunately, the option to increase text size only worked in a few places on the iPhone, and I was getting eye strain trying to use the thing with my new glasses on. Heck, I was getting eye strain trying to use the iTunes store with my glasses because it insisted on using tiny text and seemed to ignore my DPI settings under both Windows 7 and Windows Vista (tried it just to be sure). I only have 512mb on my working XP desktop and didn't try it on my laptop.

I traded it for the HTC One X+ and she got a partial refund because it cost less than the iPhone.