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CNET UK Podcast 141: Living with smart phones

Topic started by DavidRGilson on 26 June 2009

4 Posts

26 June 2009, 05:42 pm

CNET UK Podcast 141: Living with smart phones

This week on the CNET UK Podcast has a reduced, but very dedicated, team. Flora and Ian discussed the week's news, as well has having quite a healthy debate about the pros and cons of living with a smart phone. Ian is currently rocking the HTC Magic with Android, and Flora is living it large with the iPhone 3GS (and a backup iPhone 3G). But who has the best product, and who spends the fewest minutes yelling at their handset in frustration?

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27 June 2009, 11:55 am

I listened this morning. Really liked the smartphone feature as smarphones are one of my favourite tech things.

As everyone know, I'm currently a very happy E51 user. I use it for reading E-Books, for watching video podcasts and films (via 3rd party software that plays all the codecs), and it's my music player (nice loudspeaker). Not to mention that I do e-mail, web, and all the usual calendar/contacts stuff you'd need to do. Because I stumped up the cash for QuickOffice upgrade, I've even one time had a .doc file e-mailed to me for proof reading, which I was able to edit & annotate, on the phone, and e-mail it back to sender, all without touching a PC. It lacks GPS, but I've used it as navigation tool with Google Maps too (Google Maps is a heck of a lot snappier to use than Nokia's own mapping application).

It's funny, because as I was listening to all the downsides that Flora & Ian were saying about the phones they'd been using, I realised I didn't have any of those problems with my phone. With one kind of exception - extended periods of video playing and/or WiFi usage does mean I have to recharge my smartphone several times a day. Although if I'm out and about and just using it as a phone with 3G data, I can stretch to 36 hours, if I'm careful.

So all this is making me ask myself - do I just have a high pain threshold for getting such things done on a phone, or is this a testament to that Series60/Symbian is still the daddy when it comes to smartphones?

Edited by DavidRGilson (Moderator) on 27 June 2009 at 10:59 am

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29 June 2009, 11:31 pm

You have a high pain threshold as Symbian is one of the most outdated smartphone OS's

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30 June 2009, 08:16 am

jasonquinn351 says:
You have a high pain threshold as Symbian is one of the most outdated smartphone OS's


Hmm, how is it outdated? I think it's certainly mature, which is its strength - i.e. it doesn't crash.

I guess it depends what you want out of a smartphone. I want a smartphone to be useful, functional, rather than a handheld novelty experience. iPhone is certainly the latter, it's multimedia ability is constrained within the iTunes ecosystem, it's PIM sync ability is constrained to MobileMe, and it has no Office Software. Android is less constrained than the iPhone, but similarly limited, I think.

(Although everyone tell me, are there Android apps are out there to let you watch any video codec, and to edit Office docs offline (i.e. native/local editing rather than using GDocs), and to perform a PIM sync with the standard SyncML protocol? Because I haven't looked, so I don't know.).

So in that sense, the only real alternative to S60 is Windows Mobile, which I can't say much about. It's got a good catalogue of 3rd party apps, and it could do all the useful stuff I mentioned. Although, when it came to the crunch of me choosing a phone, I felt safer with S60 than I did Windows Mobile. S60 is being constantly updated and pushed forward, while Windows Mobile seems relatively stagnant.

Edited by DavidRGilson (Moderator) on 30 June 2009 at 07:25 am

Edited by DavidRGilson (Moderator) on 30 June 2009 at 07:27 am

Edited by DavidRGilson (Moderator) on 30 June 2009 at 07:29 am

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