switching from iPhone to HTC

[silvertwister09]

Hey guys noob to the boards here. People prolly have posted this a million times before but here I go again.

So, I have had an iPhone literally for 3 years, iPhone then the 3G and then the 3GS. Kinda bored of it now a little bit - great apps but kind of restricted as to what you can do with it. Love the operating system as the handset runs smoothly & the touch screen I love too and I do use iPod quiet alot too, mostly in the car as a mp3 player.

I've had a htc tytn a few years ago & I liked it although it was windows based and I can't really sat d windows. Read up on Android system & a had abit of a play on the desire on a colleagues phone, quiet liked the feel of it and was wow'ed by a few of the functions.

I want to be able to do all the things I do on my iPhone, on the new handset. This includes:-

- keep contacts, emails & calendars in sync between my new phone & my MacBook Pro - I currently use MobileMe on my iPhone but was wondering if there's anything similar for free? Does google's wireless sync work well? Or any others you would recommend?

- wireless printing - I'm going to upgrade my printer at some point - can I do wireless printing via the handset without too much messing around?

-I use quiet alot of apps on my iPhone currently. Mostly social networking & things like Shazam for music recognition & just everyday apps like eBay flixter etc

- I use the iPod quiet alot on my iPhone, is the interface pretty neat on the Desire? And does it work well? When I use to have a Sony a few years ago the mp3 player wasn't great on it had to reset it alot to get it working etc - also I know you can't transfer purchases made on iTunes but I can fix that however do android have their own online music store or anything or am I best off using things like play and amazon as iTunes stillworks with those purchases plus I guess they'll transfer to the desire?

- it would be great to have navigation software on it , it's bit pricey on the iPhone so I just used googlemaps which works well as it routes the directions plus the built in gps tells you if your on route - is googlemaps available for desire aswell? I know it sounds stupid as it's googles OS but best to check these things right?

- also my colleague showed me a speech to text for SMS is that a built in function? It worked amazingly well!

- are there plenty of apps to play with on marketplace and what are the prices like? Eg; iPhone apps start from free / 59p

- what web browser is used on desire?

It would be great if you guys can help & for anyone that's switched from an iPhone it would be fab if you can highlight any big differences good/bad.

As I.said earlier, I want something that won't give me issues as I haven't with my iPhone but runs just as well as the iPhone.

- oh and one last thing are software updates free too?

- and I keep hearing bad things about battery life ?

Thanks everyone

-

 

[Ceefax]

I can help out with a couple things (hopefully)

-Yes googlemaps is on the desire including turn by turn navigation for free.

-The desire comes with htc's standard web browser, which to be honest, i prefer to most of the other's available on the market

-Amazon offer a music 'app' where you can listen to a sample and buy/download songs/albums. Google is bringing out their own music store at some point, but this probably wont' be until next year at the earliest.

-software updates are free, but aren't that frequent. Especially if it's a branded phone as you have to wait for HTC to customise the google rom, then you carrier to customise the HTC rom.....

-Battery life is fine, just depends on how much you use it! Quite easy to get 1-2 days out of it, but at the same time it's quite easy to kill it in a few hours! But hey, you can always carry a spare battery around as you don't have to send the phone to apple to get it changed! Also you can do the standard usb cable to a computer to charge it at work etc like you no doubt do with the iphone.

-Pretty sure the speech to txt is an additional programme from the market

-I find the music player is basic in features, but that's just how i like it tbh. I want it to play music, it does. Never got on with ipods really so someone else will probably be better to answer that and the mac sync questions as mac's are the devil's work!

 

[jred7469]

You can use Itunes sync to sync your Itunes library, an app called printershare for wireless printing and the google calendar and contact sync is seamless and fantastic

 

[silvertwister09]

thanks appreciate the info guys waiting for my iPhone to sell on eBay so I can buy the desire

 

[bobo.]

thanks appreciate the info guys waiting for my iPhone to sell on eBay so I can buy the desire

Desire uses HTC sync to sync all your contacts, calander etc over the web. Wether its Gmail, Exchange or any other.

So you can sign onto any other HTC phone and get all your contacts synced within seconds. All this is free

Aslo you can sync all your contacts with Facebook too, so all your contact list is linked with their Facebook page, with their picture and latest updates.

Personally I think the HTC Desire is the best phone on the market at present including iPhone 4!

 

[CarsnGadgets]

I came from the iPhone 3G, had it 2 years.
The desire is far more flexible and customisable, you wont regret the move.
Apps range from free, and cheap at 50p-ish to tens of pounds, but there seem to be far more decent free apps than on the app store. There are far fewer games available though for android.

googlemaps comes with free turn by turn navigation, but there are plenty of free and paid for alternatives like copilot or navigon.

wifi printing can be done via 3rd party apps

speach search and text to voice come from apps on the market and from the apps available on the nexus one that also work on the desire. its fantastic and works well.

software updates are free and over the air (ota) normally, but have to be reworked by HTC after google release them before they are sent to the Desire handsets to include the sense UI.

the stock music app is very basic. I use mixzing, which inclused playlist creation, tag edditing and a feature similar to genius on the iPhone.

you can get a lot of the big iPhone apps on the Desire as well like shazam, dropbox, adobe reader, photobucket etc.

your best bet for syncing is to get your contacts in the cloud via googlemail, it will sync automatically with the phone then. I had issues coming from iPhone, trying to get my contacts off the iPhone as you cant easill export them or save to sim.
I eventually saved my contacts as a csv file and imported it into googlemail on my pc. You can use the supplied htcsync program thats on the sd card in the phone, but I'm not sure it works on the mac.

goodluck selling your iPhone.

 

[JamesFoster]

You will already know about cutting edge things like removable lithium ion batteries and micro sd cards.
In terms of media the ipod app is a little prettier than the HTC music app. But we get wma, wmv, ogg, flac, divx and other format support. Plus when we use our browser we already have flash lite (based on flash 9.0) and we will have flash 10.1 by the end of September (if we want it). You can turn Flash and any other plug-in you want by going to settings within the browser.
Still you can already watch loads of videos on Google Video, MySpace Video, and desktop YouTube.
Also our phone supports a variant of Java.
Honestly the thing that made me sell my iPhone 3G was not be able to copy and paste mp3 files onto it or drag and drop files from Windows Explorer. I really do not like iTunes on Windows.

I would also try and sell your iPhone on Amazon. I got