The Cell Phone / Mobile Phone Thread

Actually, knowing who I am, I'll probably get something made by GeeksPhone.

edited 4th May '11 7:26:07 PM by FuschlatzOReilly

Used to have a Sony Ericsson W580i. It wasn't bad for texting (though the keys cracked if you texted too much), and it was functional.

Now I have a Samsung Sunburst. Touch screen texting, which I'm godawful at even after months, and it's generally frustrating. Don't get it. I hate my phone to the point where I honestly consider switching my SIM card over to my old one, but I don't know if ATT lets you do that.

edited 4th May '11 7:28:39 PM by KrisMahai

I've done it, and I've never had a problem.

Touchscreens vary in quality. As I mentioned, the LG Rumor Touch feels pretty poorly made as far as touchscreens go. My old HTC Mogul was okay, but you needed a stylus due to the small screen size. iPhones? They're supposed to be pretty top-grade as far as touchscreens go. My LG Optimus S is okay, helps when I rotate the phone so I get a wider keyboard. With it held vertically, I tend to accidentally the wrong button and that's bad.

But even on landscape mode, if I'm trying to rush it, I'll end up hitting the emoticon key instead of the period key.

I have a hard enough time on a normal keyboard.

The Atrix's touchscreen is prone to randomly just spazzing out. It also feels calibrated differently from my iPod Touch's.

Also, for those who use Androids, what keyboard are you using if you don't use or have a tactile keyboard? I was using the stock multi-touch keyboard but it has this unremovable feature that auto-corrects symbols after spaces to be on the word before (i.e. "stage #1" becomes "stage# 1"). I'm using SwiftKey which is the next best option.

edited 5th May '11 1:35:56 PM by TsundeRay

I'll have to look into that. Even Better Keyboard 8 uses autocorrect and autocomplete, which is a mixed bag. I like that I can autocomplete a word nine times out of ten, but if I use some texting shorthand like "kk see you in a bit", it turns it into "Klein see you in a bit" - I can get around it by merely typing "kk" and immediately hitting send.

I use Swift Key too. I'm using a T-Mobile My Touch 3G Slide, which is a godawful product name. It's actually a HTC something-or-other with a slide-out keyboard.

As of last week, it's on Android 2.2. Way later than T-Mobile promised, but the upgrade is so worth it. The web browser is much faster, and the ability to have apps on the SD partially mitigates the insanely limited amount of internal storage the thing has.

(For those who don't know, Android prior to 2.2 allowed you to add extra storage BUT applications had to live on internal storage. This became a problem when applications became more popular, but many phones were and are under-equipped with internal storage (to save money, one figures).

It's not the fastest Android phone out there, and I don't find I use the physical keyboard that often.

My wife has the Samsung Vibrant, which is the T-Mobile version of the Galaxy S line. It has 8GB of internal storage, a kick-ass screen, and is in general pretty awesome.

My girlfriend hated using my last non-QWERTY phone because I had it set to predictive text (which recognizes "heroin" but not "spinach" for some reason). And my mother tried to send her a text from it once (long story) and didn't understand T9 and my girlfriend thought I was sending gibberish and freaked.

I hate T9 and any form of autocomplete with a passion. I tend to use foreign words, acronyms, neologisms and, most importantly, I LIKE TO HAVE CONTROL OVER WHAT I'M TYPING.

I rarely need to override predictive text (unless I'm talking about primaci spinach), but it's really not a big deal. Though I don't use it on my current phone, and hope never to use it again.

T9 is teh suck, yes. I've turned it on once on accident and did a bit of eyebrow-raising until I figure out how to revert.

I've found it to be the second-best solution for text entry.

I've had a Motorola RAZR for... a long time. I really want a new cell phone, preferably one with a touchscreen or a sliding qwerty keyboard.

Ordered the Motorola FlipOut. I'm having remorse already and it hasn't arrived yet; I keep thinking it has a smaller screen than it actually does — I played with it a bit in the store before making my decision.

I have an Android with a modified OS. Got it as a christmas present so I couldn't tell you where it's from.

I know that when you turn it on, it says "Cyanogen" and otherwise, it's pretty much exactly like a regular Android. And that's about it.

I don't use it much, but it's reliable.

Been grabbing some more Android apps lately.

• LauncherPro is an alternate home screen app with faster scrolling and more possible screens, if you have a shitload of apps or like having well-organized widgets and app icons.
• Twicca is a Twitter client. Functionality-wise, it's quite similar to the official Android Twitter app, but with a dark color scheme, plugins, and a color label feature (similar to Twitter lists, but with the effect of making designated users' tweets more eye-catching rather than having a list). From what my friend told me, it's also lighter on resources than the official app. However, the menus have some Engrish (although I usually ignore that), and auto-update is kinda funky (have to enable it manually, and less notification functionality than the official app), and the autocomplete has a tendency to conflict with SwiftKey and spaz out. Other than that, I find it strangely more addicting to use than the official app.

edited 16th May '11 5:09:02 AM by TsundeRay

I have an iPhone 3GS which I got for my birthday last year. It's my first mobile phone, so I can't really say it's good or bad compared with other phones. I'd like to try an Android one day though.

Google Sky Maps: With GPS on, I can pint it towards a star and it'll (usually) tell me what it is. It's nifty. Doesn't work too well indoors due to GPS signal degradation, but my apartment is not full of stars, so no loss there.

I typically only use GPS if I'm using my phone as a navigation device (either driving, or walking in a metropolitan area like San Francisco); otherwise I just use wireless points for my location needs. My phone doesn't get very good battery life, plus I think using GPS costs extra.

At least on Android, and I believe iPhone too, the GPS is not turned on until an application starts requesting fine location. Thus, it costs no battery unless you try to use it.

That's exactly what my phone does. And it's a Sony Ericsson Walkman series.

I have toggle switches for GPS, wifi, and Bluetooth on my Android's home screen. I also have a toggle switch for airplane mode (which completely shuts off wireless communication), not that I'll be needing it for a long while.

Yep, I can toggle GPS manually, or let the app do it. A few apps won't, but most that require it on will do so.

I have an Android HTC Incredible, and I don't like it. I can't wait until Apple introduces a universal iPhone.