My new smartphone

My mobile phone contract recently came to an end. I’d been paying £8.50 per month to Virgin Mobile for 100 minutes and 100 texts. I sometimes used up all my minutes, but almost never that many texts.

I really fancied getting some kind of smart phone, and since my mp3 player was literally being held together by an elastic band, if it could double as a new mp3 player, so much the better. The key features I wanted were:

Easy synchronisation with my email, calendar, tasks and so on.Ability to download and play podcasts directly on my phoneCheap or unmetered Internet access

Since I use Google’s Gmail, Calendar, Tasks and so on, a phone with Google’s Android operating system was an obvious choice, and I knew that Android has a great podcast app in the form of Google Listen. There was no way I could justify an expensive gadget like the iPhone, or the top of the range Android models only available on the £30 per month contracts, to myself (or more importantly, to my wife), but there are by now plenty of cheaper options on the market.

I quickly settled on T-Mobile as the most promising choice of network for my needs. If you choose a smartphone, “unlimited” Internet access is included, even on the cheapest tariffs. T-Mobile also offer a choice of a “Flexible Booster”, such as unlimited texts, landline calls, or T-Mobile calls, which you can swap around monthly. Since most of my minutes are spent on the phone to my wife Bev, and she had just switched to T-Mobile, the “Unlimited T-Mobile Calls” booster would make a big difference to me, even if my basic allowance of minutes and texts remained unchanged.

Of course, I’d only been paying £8.50 a month – T-Mobile’s cheapest tariff is £10 a month, and they don’t offer any Android phones for free at that point. One option was to go up to £15 per month, get 300 minutes and texts, and a smartphone “free”. Alternatively, I could pay money upfront to get a smartphone on a £10 tariff.

So in the end I opted for an Android phone on the £10 a month tariff – 100 minutes and 100 texts, plus unlimited Internet access, and unlimited calls to other T-Mobile phones, on a two-year contract.

I strongly considered getting the LG Intouch Max phone. My friend Phillip has this phone, and one of its most attractive features is its slide-out QWERTY keyboard. I’m not a big fan of touchscreens and have always found texting on a numeric keypad cumbersome, so that was quite a selling point.

But having played around with my wife’s new touchscreen phone, I found that the newer capacitive screens are quite usable, and the T-Mobile Pulse at £40 less (£35 instead of £76) had very decent reviews and a better screen. While it came with the same fairly old version 1.5 of Android, I discovered it could be upgraded to Android 2.1 through an update released on T-Mobile Hungrary’s website (slightly bizarrely, it’s not on the UK site, though it works fine here). So I decided that while a physical keyboard would be nice, a cheaper phone with a bigger, better screen and more recent version of Android was a bigger draw.

My T-Mobile Pulse arrived on Friday. The first thing I did was to update the operating system following the useful instructions given on the Modaco Android forums, plus some other tweaks – I might discuss my customisations in more detail in another blog post.

Once that was done and I’d set up my email address and so on, I went a bit crazy with Android Market, quickly filling up the internal memory with various weird and wonderful free Apps! I’ve calmed down a bit now and cut back to those I think I’ll actually use. Once I’ve had more time using them, I might write about which I find to actually be worthwhile.

I’ve had it a couple of weeks now and I’m very happy with it. The number and variety of apps is bewildering but there are some that are genuinely handy. Easy access on the go to the web is very handy, especially combined with GPS for maps and the like. I’ve even begun to get the hang of touchscreen.

Oh, and it also happens to make phone calls!

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