Which phone is really the best??

[gstamm]

Hi,
I need to get a new phone and everyone tells you something different. Which phone is the best?? I am looking at HTC Inspire but hear the battery is short-lived in this phone.
I have ATT but really could get a new carrier because my contract is up. But other than ATT which phone is the best??? Can anyone help??

 

[Steven58]

Hi,
I need to get a new phone and everyone tells you something different. Which phone is the best?? I am looking at HTC Inspire but hear the battery is short-lived in this phone.
I have ATT but really could get a new carrier because my contract is up. But other than ATT which phone is the best??? Can anyone help??

Welcome, probably the Atrix.

 

[Pochi_X]

The best phone is the one that actually can make "calls" without signal dropping every now and then.

The best phone is the one that suits your needs the most.

Tell me what do you need in a phone and I'll gladly answer you with the best option available, and I am biased toward HTC!

 

[HustlinDaily]

I think that bias really makes this question difficult to answer. There really isn't such a thing as a perfect phone. All have their flaws.

Atrix- not a fan of the plastic body, not a fan of the locked bootloader and the display, despite qHD didn't look too great to me (due to PenTile).

Inspire- love everything about it but do wish that it had a higher resolution display (tho even despite that, it looks good to me) and do wish that it had a dual-core processor.

I am waiting for the LG Thrill and hoping/praying that it is LTE-compatible (rumors of LTE launching in NY/LA soon) but who knows when it is gonna come out? And whether or not it will be?

 

[chrlswltrs]

The best is the Nexus line. Good hardware and always the most up to date software, without another manufacturer or carrier adding crap that does nothing but slow your phone down and add icons for unused and unwanted apps

 

[KENNECTED]

Hi,
I need to get a new phone and everyone tells you something different. Which phone is the best?? I am looking at HTC Inspire but hear the battery is short-lived in this phone.
I have ATT but really could get a new carrier because my contract is up. But other than ATT which phone is the best??? Can anyone help??

Welcome.

The question really isn't, "which phone is really best?" but, "which phone is best for my needs?"

What do you want a phone for? How will you be using the device. How much would you like to spend? Those along with any other pertinent information will help us, help you.

 

[substring]

I agree with the other posters that you should ask yourself what works best for you, and not to the other folks. Different strokes for different folks.

For example, most people here in this forum focus primarily on tech specs. Those are most important to them and that is fine. To me, as long as the specs are not too far off, I am more interested in the look of the phone....how elegant it is.

In my humble opinion, chasing the latest greatest tech specs is like chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You will never get there because the phone with better specs will ALWAYS be around the corner. The best phone (specs-wise) this month might not be the best phone next month. Therefore, I rather to focus on the elegance of a phone instead.

I like the Galaxy S line of phone because they are beautiful and not something out of a sci-fi movie. And the Super AMOLED screen is simply gorgeous.

Again, these are my preferences. And what other posters posted are THEIR preferences. You should come up with yours when you are shopping for phone.

Hope this helps.

 

[AndroidSPCS]

The best is the Nexus line. Good hardware and always the most up to date software, without another manufacturer or carrier adding crap that does nothing but slow your phone down and add icons for unused and unwanted apps

I'd agree with you but the latest Nexus S doesn't have external SD, which sucks big big time.

There is no best phone. There are BAD phones to avoid, and better phones to get, but no best phone.

 

[A.Nonymous]

I don't care for the Atrix as ATT has a history of locking down their phones to block side loading. Don't care for the Nexus S since it has no SD card slot. I'm not a fan of any Samsung phone because they skin them with the horrible Touchwiz UI and there is also no chance of them ever getting updated no matter what happens. But these are all my personal preferences.

 

[cds0699]

I am looking at HTC Inspire but hear the battery is short-lived in this phone.

All smartphones have battery life shortcomings. I haven't heard of anyone buying a stock smartphone and saying "Oh wow, the battery life is great!".

 

[chrlswltrs]

I'd agree with you but the latest Nexus S doesn't have external SD, which sucks big big time.

There is no best phone. There are BAD phones to avoid, and better phones to get, but no best phone.

That is a negative for some, but how often do most people switch out memory cards? I personally do not know anyone including myself that uses more than 1 memory card. But, if you are one of the few that does need removable memory, then I agree the Nexus S is not going to be good for you.

 

[nateap87]

All smartphones have battery life shortcomings. I haven't heard of anyone buying a stock smartphone and saying "Oh wow, the battery life is great!".

haven't there been a few as of late? incredible s/2, droid charge, sgs II,

 

[AndroidSPCS]

That is a negative for some, but how often do most people switch out memory cards? I personally do not know anyone including myself that uses more than 1 memory card. But, if you are one of the few that does need removable memory, then I agree the Nexus S is not going to be good for you.

It's not just switching out memory cards. There are several other important benefits:

1. if the phone is unreadable by the usb cable / computer, it's easy to take out the microSD card and plug it directly to the PC. This is useful to transfer files, or place important updates to be flashed, such as kernels, recoveries, new ROMs.

2. If the phone gets bricked or dies, the data on your external SD card is still likely to be safe. The data on the internal SD card is most likely inaccessible if the phone is bricked. Loss of data in this scenario is a huge negative.

3. When flashing certain ROMs, you have to wipe all, including the internal SD card. I had to do this with my Captivate, by doing a Master Clear. This means it's very time consuming to manually copy all the internal SD card contents over to a PC. God forbid if you missed a file..

Contrasting that with my Evo / Epic, when I flash the ROMs, I simply took out my microSD card with my data, put in a fresh microSD, and felt comfortable to flash as my data was safe. On my Epic I actually had to flash 3 times to get the right ROM I wanted, including changing the system file from RFS to EXT4 a few times. On my Captivate this was a huge pain because of the copying of gigabytes of data back and forth. So flashing ROMs becomes a chore.

So there are a lot of important benefits to having an external SD card. I will never own an Android phone without one. If I wanted a phone without an external SD card, I'd go WP7 or iPhone.

There is NO excuse for any Android phone not to have one. No excuse whatsoever.

This is my rant from another thread:

I'm the paranoid type who don't trust leaving data on the phone when I'm flashing ROMs or recoveries.

On my captivate for instance, all the critical data was stored on the internal SD card. It took quite a while to copy the files over to my computer before I felt comfortable flashing.

I also don't like to use the microUSB cables to move files over as the cables can get flaky, so I used SwiFTP to move files via wifi, which is slower but I don't have the cable locking down my Captivate.

Given how I had to flash from rfs to EXT4 on my Epic, realized I needed something back in my old rfs ROM, and then flashing it back to my old DI18 ROM, taking screenshots, data, then flashing back to the new ROM again, it was so much easier just swapping out different microSD cards to get it done, than relying on slow data transfers with the non-removable internal SD card. (I actully had to convert EXT4 back to RFS / CWM 2.5.5, but still couldn't recover, so had to use ODIN to restore my stock DI18 ROM just to restore my NAND back up, so the process was so much easier and comfortable knowing my data was safe on the removable SD card that I had set aside, as opposed to stressing out about it if it was internal to the phone and wondering if it would get accidentally wiped or damaged.)

Just a lot of things that I personally value - security of my data, backing up of my data, all of the important things that I believe a user should do before recklessly flasihng recoveries / ROMs, are made so much easier with swappable external SD cards. My data is more valuable to me than the physical phone itself. I can buy another phone, I can't always buy the data I've spent months collection / creating.

Finally, should I brick a phone, the data on the external SD card is still available to me, not so sure about the internal SD card - if it can be accessed at all if you brick the phone.

Major disadvantages to not having a swappable SD card, from my perspective. And I come from having flashed ROMs on more than half a dozen Android phones and tablets (8 Android devices to date).

 

[thedosbox]

Hi,
I need to get a new phone and everyone tells you something different

That's because everyone has different requirements out of a phone. What's most important to you?

Some things to think about:

Quality of the screen - the Samsung Super AMOLED screens are more vibrant and can draw slightly less power. However, their Pentile layout makes text look fuzzy.

Software - a Nexus phone has a stock Android software build. This makes it easier to get updates as you're not dependent on the manufacturer and carrier. However, the stock-Android experience is fairly basic, so you'll need to tweak and use apps to get a lot of functionality.

Exchange support - the stock mail client isn't the greatest. The HTC mail client can support multiple Exchange accounts and sub-folders.

Keyboard - if you do a lot of text entry, consider whether you can live with a virtual keyboard. Most people get used to it, but some prefer a physical one. Virtual keyboards also vary in quality, so make sure to try one out before buying.

Size - having a large screen is very nice when browsing the web or using a virtual keyboard. It's not so nice for battery life, or if you have to fit it into a suit pocket.

 

[Shocky]

If you measure what is best by performance and hardware the best available right now is the Galaxy S II, followed closely by the Tegra 2 phones.

Not a difficult question to answer, theres no point being coy about this.

 

[A.Nonymous]

That is a negative for some, but how often do most people switch out memory cards? I personally do not know anyone including myself that uses more than 1 memory card. But, if you are one of the few that does need removable memory, then I agree the Nexus S is not going to be good for you.

It's not that so much as it is the upgradeability. Right now I may be ok with only 8 GB on my SD card. Tomorrow, I may decide that I need more space. With the Nexus S, I don't have the option to add more space.