What to look for:
Some people want the latest and greatest
OS. Of course, it helps if you find a Telco and manufacturer who provide recent
upgrades. Samsung’s newer phones tend to get the earliest upgrades to new
Android versions, and Apple makes its upgrades available immediately as long as
your phone spec is high enough. Windows Phone gets updates intermittently, and
again, as long as your RAM is sufficient, they’re available to all.
Many of you may prefer to jailbreak, tinker
and upgrade your phone for full control, or to get features you might not
otherwise be able to take advantage of. It’s even possible to install an
alternate OS. How do you find the best phone for that?
How
do you find the best phone?
The obvious answer, when it comes to
Android phones at least, is to pick a Google reference phone. The advantage
here is that you get a plain version of Android with no manufacturer
proprietary content, so when an upgrade comes out, you can download it and go
without having to wait for your Telco and manufacturer to catch up and add
their customized elements. Another thing to keep in mind is that Android lets
you download apps that aren’t in the Google Play store, even Without
Jailbreaking, so you can get unapproved apps. However, we advise caution here,
because research shows that the vast majority of malware-infested apps are also
in non-Play locations.
If you’re very tech-savvy, you can go down
the path of Jailbreaking your phone, that is, setting up a custom ROM and OS.
This can be done for Apple phones and Android at minimum. The advantages are
being able to run apps that require root access to your phone’s OS, and the
disadvantages are missing out on the proprietary materials. Here in New
Zealand, we rarely get telcos placing limits on what features of a phone we’re
able to use, but rooting your phone lets you bypass any that might be in place.
It also ensures that you can upgrade your phone to the latest OS regardless of
what your Telco and manufacturer decide is appropriate.
Google Nexus phones can be easily boot-unlocked,
allowing alternate ROMs and OS’s to be installed. Otherwise, you need to ‘root’
android phones, which means finding a way to replace the existing firmware
(ROM) and then installing an OS.
Some custom ROM’s are designed for
performance or allow you to overclock the phone. This can massively improve
either battery life, performance, or rarely both. It’s not for the
faint-hearted, though. If you get it wrong in Jailbreaking, you may end up with
a ‘bricked’ phone that no longer functions, but there are a number of sites
with instructions and guides, and as long as you follow the steps for your
phone model, and have a good understanding of commend-line interfaces and the
like, you should be able to manage it. Sounds complex? There are actually
‘one-click root’ software apps for some phone models. If your phone is popular,
it’s possible that someone has made the process simple. A quick Google can help
you out here.
PC World recommends:
We can’t go past the Google Nexus 4 for the
user wanting to turn a phone into a fully-fledged PC, complete with
customizable everything. Google makes it as easy as possible for you, and it’s
a great phone, besides.
Google
Nexus phones can be easily boot-unlocked, allowing alternate ROMs and OS’s to
be installed
Best by carrier
STUCK WITH A SPECIFIC provider, whether because of an awesome contract locked in four
years ago that you don’t want to lose, or having all your family and friends on
the same network? Never fear, we have recommendations for every budget on every
network.
You may be surprised to see the same phone
repeated below, but the plain fact is that good phones are often recognized
overseas before they find their way to New Zealand, and all carriers try to get
deals whereby they get to sell them to their customers. While there are some
exclusives, they are fewer, given the dominance of Samsung and Apple.
We’ve recommended the HTC One X for all
three carriers in the top price bracket, but the Samsung Galaxy S III is very
close to it in terms of usability, great screen and features. We prefer the One
X, but you may prefer the Galaxy S III or even the iPhone 5. Each is an
excellent phone that represents solid value for money in its price range.
In the mid-range, we’ve selected older
models, predominantly – they often still represent better value than some of
the newer phones designed for the mid-range price. After all, including shiny
new features such as LTE in a mid-range phone is useful in the United States,
but not so much here.
For the lowest prices, we’ve picked carrier
exclusive models not deliberately which may be because those phones are
subsidized to be affordable.
The little extras…
On screen keyboards
So you’re looked at a few phones and they
all seem pretty quick and easy to use. Want to know what the next most
important feature is?
The keyboard. Yes, we’re serious.
Smartphones have a lot of functions, but
the single most commonly used one is still texting. Sure, you could probably
control the Curiosity Rover with a smartphone, but good ol’ SMS is still king.
It’s not something most people think about when choosing a phone, but the
keyboard is of crucial importance and it’s the reason why we can’t in good
faith recommend any smartphone with less than a 3.5-inch screen.
If you must buy a phone with a small
screen, however, look for one that features Swype. Swype is a technology that
allows you to grad your finger from one button to the next. When you stop
moving your finger or change direction, the phone will pick the latter your
finger is sitting on. You don’t have to be particularly accurate, either – your
phone has a dictionary of words and will pick the one it thinks you’re after
with a reasonable level of accuracy, regardless of how sloppy you are with your
input. As such, you can get pretty fast at texting with Swype.
Swype
is a technology that allows you to grad your finger from one button to the next
But Swype won’t do you any good if you
don’t have a decent dictionary for auto-correct and word suggestions.
Auto-correct is when your phone guesses what you actually meant when you typed
in a word the phone didn’t know, or when you spelled something incorrectly. It’s
notorious for causing social faux pas, regardless of which platform you’re
using.
It’s also important to make sure you have
all the buttons you want on the default keyboard, too. When you’re in the web
browser, for example, you might want to have a dedicated .com button, which
some devices have. (Wouldn’t .co.nz be nice?)
Then there’s punctuation ideally you want
the full stop, comma, question mark and exclamation mark to be available to you
from the main keyboard, at a bare minimum. Some phones will require you to hold
down a letter button to get even the most basic of punctuation, which can be an
annoyance.
Most smartphone keyboards make you switch
between the QWERTY keyboard and number pad, which is a massive pain in the
butt, especially when you’re typing in passwords. Some phones improve on this
marginally by letting you hold down a letter key to get a number instead. If
you can find a phone that has a row of numbers above the letters,
congratulations! You’ve found the Holy Grail of smartphone keyboards. For
better or for worse, you’ll normally need a massive screen to accommodate those
extra number keys. Which is why…
PC World recommends:
The Samsung Galaxy Note/Note II. Both of
these devices have massive screens, which may not be your style, but we’re
damned if they don’t have great keyboards. It helps that the devices have
stylus, too, for greater accuracy when you’re tapping away, telling your mum
you’re going to be late to dinner.
Proprietary skins
We won’t recommend anything for this,
because every phone has its own special features and lots of them are great.
Nokia has its own mapping system and ‘City Lens’, allowing you to point your
phone in any direction and see what businesses are available to you. HTC has
its Sense software, which lets you do things like turn your phone over to
silence it when it rings. Motorola’s MotoBlur lets you make your phone silent
by swiping from one side to another on the screen. You’ll have to try for
yourself to see what you like and what you hate but these little features can
make a phone the perfect fit for you.
