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Re: [LUG] minimalist android phone

 

 On 22/08/2012 11:27, Julian Hall wrote:
 On 22/08/2012 08:28, tom wrote:
On 21/08/12 12:05, tom wrote:
Managed to smash my current mobile screen and am toying with getting an android phone. But a cheap one without a package.
Any ideas?
Tom

Thanks for all you replies and also this came out today: http://www.reghardware.com/2012/08/22/ten_low_end_android_phones/ so now I have too much choice....
Tom te tom te tom

I'll be able to give a hands on review of the Huawei Ascend G300 later - the one I got on Ebay for a friend arrived and he'll be up later to pick it up. Scores the highest on that website, and frankly the spec is not far off my HTC HD7 which costs a lot more and runs Winblows Phone 7 - which by the way is a pile of Castlemaine XXXX and I recommend you never touch it. Bad mistake, I should have waited and got the Desire HD when it became available on O2. WP7 is a half-hearted attempt by M$ to cash in on the boom in smartphones and they couldn't be bothered to fix hardly any of the faults reported at launch, in fact the only one they did fix is you can now have custom ringtones - in a roundabout way at least. If you're interested http://www.kaotic.co.uk/wp7-wishlist.html for what I consider to be the major flaws - by no means all of them.

Roll on February when I get my free upgrade!

Julian
I've now handed over the Huawei Ascend G300 to my friend and he's very happy with it. It took a few minutes for it to decide it liked his O2 SIM and find the network but once it did that there were no further problems sending and receiving calls and texts. Basically simliar spec and performance to the original Samsung Galaxy S, uses Android 2.3, genuine Android Marketplace - albeit wanted an update to the new Google Play store. Nice and responsive - e.g. he installed Angry Birds and says it plays brilliantly on it. Wireless setup was painless - or would have been if my password wasn't miles long and I have MAC filtering on the network! :) Once on the network it ran seamlessly. Battery would probably need charging daily - potentially more depending how hard you thrash it. My friend was here about 4 hours and it went down from 69% to around 30, but then we were actively using it with Wifi most of the time, GPS was turned on briefly, and 3G was turned off - he's on PAYG and doesn't plan on paying through the nose for mobile Internet access. He also took a call of five minutes or so while he was here plus the usual bits with swapping contact lists etc. to drain the battery even further. All told I would expect the battery in average use to last the day. The screen is nice and clear and at 4" is only .3" smaller than my HTC HD7.. frankly if I was buying a new phone now I'd get the Huawei not the HD7 given the choice. Having said that the HD7 is two years old and technology marches on!

In a nutshell the Huawei is a very nice bit of kit and if you're on a budget of around £100-£130 I'd recommend it.

Julian

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