Ten... alternatives to Samsung's Galaxy S III With the Galaxy S III unveiled at last night's Samsung event, the next generation of smartphones now has consumer eyebrows permanently raised as if the wind just changed direction. Feel like defying the herd? Here are ten current or upcoming smartphones that may be worth considering, should you wish to avoid the Galaxy S III …
Meh. Stable and fully functional are for gurls.
The current Alpha release of CM9 on the S2 is very good, though, about the only serious criticism I can come up with is a somewhat reduced battery life compared to the standard Samsung build. I've no idea how much work it will take to port that to the S3, mind you.
GJC
I would gladly take the Nokia as an alternative. Samsung Galaxy owners (of all 136 variants) seem to give off the same type of Smug that Prius owners do (or iPhone owners used to before they came too mainstream for it to be meaningful). Very unattractive. For that reason if it was ever a cold day in hell and I got an Android phone it would be HTC etc.
Yours truly,
A Luddite who in disgust of all these big dick (and/or boring) phones, recently hunted down a NOS Nokia 6500 Classic as my main phone. Glorious!
Prius owners have a reputation for breaking wind in a most unpleasant fashion thereby rendering ineffectual their carbon reduction smugness. One day I'll get around to lighting one of their farts in a car park; it WILL make local radio news even if I only singe their clothing with the lance that I carry in my Hummer.
My company moved everyone over to Marmite. It bought 144 cases of it, and gave every employee a jar. I tried it and it's GREAT!!! Much better than the other stuff. Everybody I breathe on likes it too. I thank our Head of Procurement every time he drives by in both his Lamborghinis.
The main reason (well until MS shafts all the users when 8 comes out) is updates being out of the hands of phone companies trying to get to force a new phone on you. Sadly only the Jesus phone, BB and WinMo do that now. Even the Nexus seems to keep getting the previous version forgotten about by Google for a few months.
While not a huge issue currently, sooner or late the massive fragmentation, and lack of security updates is going to hit the phone market like it has the full blown PC market. And when that occurs, it'll be nice to have something getting updates.
Am I a bit paranoid on this? probably yes. But hey, WinMo is Marmite. Love it, hate it, makes a good door wedge :P
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As a fan of slipping my phone into the front pocket of my jeans, which is the best smartphone for me?
The big screens are all very pretty, but it's almost a different class of device to the trouser-able phones I'm used to.
Difficulty - no SOny, MS or Apple.
The One S is vaguely reasonably sized. You can still buy quite a lot of 3"-era top-of-the-line models, like the HTC Sensation or its keyboard-y cousin the MyTouch 4G Slide (which is what I have, it's a great phone). And there's always the iPhone, I guess. That's small.
A lot of current midrange phones are smaller than the high-end ones, but of course you don't just lose screen size, you lose some genuinely nice features like good cameras and stuff.
Have you actually used a Nokia belle phone?
And I don't mean an upgraded N8 from 2008. I'm refering to e.g. the 1.3Ghz 701 with Belle FP1
As for "Later PureView devices"; you probably refer to proposed Windows Phone devices. They will have the same shortcomings as the current ones. Besides by the time a non-Symbian Nokia device will have PureView-technology, Windows Phone 7 will be defunct. So stop living in that pipedream.
Though I agree that the new 701 with Belle FP1 is good, I'm very happy with Belle on my N8.
Still one of the best camera's around.
Just the right size and avoids being a slab
still the first and best multi-tasking OS
and a battery-life that makes most other smart-phone users weep - even with a screen-saver. that's on all the time, live widgets etc etc.
Not to mention all the things it does that Android, IOS and Windoze just can't do even now.
Most annoying thing that I can't get - British Airways App for e-tickets. Saying that most other smart-phone users should take a paper one just in case they can't find a charge point!
You forgot that this is El Reg. They typically neglect Symbian/Nokia, deliberatly downtalk it and favor Android devices. They definitely won't look at it with an open-mind.
Some of these Symbian-haters probably have stupid remarks that Belle nicked features from Android while in reality Android (and Symbian too) nicked features from Nokia's Harmattan.
What you forget is that Nokia's CEO publicly stated that Symbian was rubbish and dead.
This is a terrible shame, because neither of those were actually true when he said it - though the former had been fairly accurate about a year prior.
Now the latter is true, because nobody in their right minds buys an operating system that the manufacturer has publicly declared dead.
Face it, Elop personally killed Symbian. It's all over bar the lawsuits, and unfortunately lawsuits take so long that they can only find blame and never correct stupidity. It's also fairly unlikely that he'll ever be held properly responsible for the destruction of shareholder value he has caused. All we can hope is that he won't be given the opportunity to kill any other companies.
As someone who owns and uses on a daily basis both a Symbian S60 handset and and Android handset, both released at not too dissimilar times 2-3 years ago, I would agree with the comment that Android is a more pleasant experience than Symbian is.
Symbian (and the phone I have that runs it) has many good feature - that's why I have it - but unless you're after certain specific things that Symbian does well, it's Android all the way for me.
No Galaxy Nexus. Its only probably the most directly comparable handset, with the same resolution, ICS 4.0, similar size etc. Also not too big, like I suspect the SGSIII will be (can you hold it in one hand and touch all four corners of the screen?). It will also get Android updates much quicker. I suspect battery life is on par too.
Got one, and it does rock. Like the look, like the lack of carrier kruft, like the direct line to the Android devs for getting updates. Even before the SIII came out I didn't want one, but all the new features that it supposedly sports make me think that either Samsung is going to fork Android, or it's just another case of "6 months to never for the next OS update".
The whole point of the Galaxy releases is that at the date of release there IS no alternative. The review shows only 1 or 2 available devices. And waiting for the next iPhone is moot as usual, since by then there will be at least 10 devices that have progressed beyond. There is always a next iPhone and it is always hardly better than before and iOS is so tiring and dusty already.
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Has world has been flipped on it's head? Now purchasing an iPhone is considered as 'defying the herd?'.
And 'should you wish to avoid' a 'juggernaut.' Going for an iPhone not going to do that as they are the archetype of 'juggernaut' launches. The fact that Samsung are being able to compete is a good thing....
...I have to say that the current and near future selection of phones out there is looking pretty fantastic, and, if I hadn't been mentally programmed to 'stroke the fruit', it's be very hard to choose what to get next. Very cool.
Now all I need to reach techo-nirvana is for the Lytro to be released over here next week.
AC 'cos there's only so much direct derision a person can take.
Being a bit of an old fogy I always made the assumption that phones were for phoning with... OK I can go with the apps and wizzy stuff but many of the comments here are mainly around how good or bad the camera is.
The camera appears to be the deciding feature so in effect people are buying a convenient "quality" camera with lots of goodies attached including a phone. Interesting as perhaps the manufactures have missed a trick here? So what we need is a good quality compact camera that is pocketable, digital zoom lens, lots of memory for all those piccys. with a built in phone/browser/wifi/3G?
Nice to know there is more than just HTC. After the mess they have made of my HTC sensation (lasted 24 hours of crashing, burning my hands) and it's replacement HTC Desire HD (no 3g, no network and no sd card support) and the utterly appalling support team in Ireland that basically said "buy another phone". I have been looking for a replacement that isn't MS or Apple.
Tegra 3 in a phone. Jeez the thing will heat my house. :)
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