A new toy

I bought a new phone the other day, for no good reason.

Nope, I did not buy an iPhone, nor and iPad, continuing my small protest of all things Apple. (I’m thinking of going into business making signs with a bar sinister slashed through a rotten apple proclaiming “Fruit Free Zone” but my wife thinks I’m trying to justify a meat-only diet!)

Nope, I did not buy a replacement Nokia, despite being incredibly satisfied with my N95 8Gig. When I bought this phone almost two years ago I researched available phones for months and became convinced that the N95 was very close to perfect. At the time there was even a thread on Nokia.com’s forum entitled “Is the N95 the greatest phone ever made?” I have always been happy with this phone but I fell in love with it when we were closed for our stocktake/tagging period and I took advantage of it’s amazing music player and Bluetoothed some wireless headphones. It was a fantastic experience, not far away from the first time I heard LP’s through decent headphones. This has been a great phone but it’s spiritual successor, the Nokia N8, uses an odd OS called Symbian and Nokia have already announced they will not be supporting the OS for much longer, which doesn’t inspire much faith in the long-term viability of the phone. It is a staggering phone in terms of hardware with a 12Meg camera, HD video capabilities and another fine media player but these days phones are all about apps.

I hate this word ‘apps’, what was wrong with ‘applications’? Too many syllables? But, since it has become an accepted term, and I am an advocate of using English as it adapts and alters, I’ll just have to cope.

I wouldn’t be the first person to note that mobile phones are now much more about computer-like abilities than telephonic proficiency but in very recent days I have become a convert to the concept. Apple pioneered (or, at the very least, popularised) the idea of downloading additional applications to add personalised functionality to your ‘device’ (as opposed to ‘phone’). Arguably because it was Apple, developers swarmed to the concept and both validated and  expanded the market for those applications. Most of us would remember Apple’s  “…there’s an app for that” marketing campaign and I have often wondered if it was the first phone campaign that never actually mentioned the device’s ability to make a phone call.

I will happily admit that I liked Apple’s concept and the iPhone introduced a slew of interface improvements that were incredibly smooth and intuitive, making the iPhone so easy to learn and use that it set new benchmarks for the whole industry. Just because I have issues with Apple-the-company doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate Apple’s achievements and products.

So I guess, essentially, I was looking for a non-Apple iPhone (or a Clayton’s iPhone, if you are mature enough to recall that reference). I wanted a phone with a great screen, auto-rotating aspects, pinch-to-zoom and, most importantly, the ability to download and install additional functionality (no, Saire, not games!).

A wish-list like that meant I was going to end up with an Android phone.

Android as an operating system has been around for few years now but it is only recently that it has become big news. It’s now up to the sixth release, called FroYo, and the next version, Gingerbread, is being hotly anticipated. FroYo has added a few features that closely emulate iPhone apps and there are some that are probably superior. Certainly there is a greater range of free apps than is available at the App Store although Apple has almost double the range of apps in total.

I love tinkering with technology, especially hardware, and Android phones have that appealing tinker factor, although they are generally pretty decent phones without modifying or upgrading.

Yes, I did consider one of the range of phones using the new Windows Phone 7 OS, which seems to be pretty well regarded, with a lot of pundits alleging it is the finest iteration of the Windows Phone OS ever made. Lots of reviewers seem happy with it but, to be honest, the whole ‘tile interface’ looks cheap to me. It’s only my opinion but isn’t your own opinion the most important factor when you buy a phone?

In then end I bought a Samsung Galaxy which does not currently have FroYo but, like most Android phones, can be upgraded to the newer version. Indeed Optus have already sent me a message encouraging me to enjoy a free OS upgrade.

I did not need a new phone but I knew I was approaching the end of my current contract so I started looking around and got very excited about these Android phones. Optus bent over backward to allow me to finish my existing contract early and sign a new contract and it turns out that I will be saving just over $13 a month on the new plan.

In the end, being a tech head, do I need any better reason than a $13 a month saving? J