I've used a 5800... Yes, its touchscreen is very sensitive, but the iPhone one is lightyears away. Really.
Plus, you don't have to use any pen, stylus or pointy thing to operate it. Just your fingers. And it's as accurate as it can be.
Then, accelerometer. Your phone has one too. It's useful when you are surfing the internet or showing your photos. I tried, iPhone's faster, and it just feel more natural.
Finally, speed. Even the slowest and oldest iPhone, the 2G, feels fast and nimble, whereas (almost) every Symbian-based phone doesn't. I like a phone to be ready to do what I want, WHEN I want. The camera is fast and takes gorgeous pictures, the games run smoothly, internet is almost as fast as my ADSL line at home... And then, it doesn't squeak when you hold it tight. I've come across many, many iPhones, from the first to the latest generation (actually, I didn't try the iPhone 4, but I'm sure it will be the same), but NONE, even the broken ones, squeaked. My aunt's BRAND NEW 5800 squeaked when I held it in my hand for the first time.
Little things, you may say, for a big price. Well, it depends on how you look at it. I usually DESTROY my phones, I broke my Siemens C35, my C55 had a ruined cover, my Samsung SGH-E700 has always its screen white, my Nokia N70 hasn't got a drop of paint on its back anymore... But my old iPhone 2G is still tiptop, as is my 3Gs. They're my first phones that are still (almost) like new. So, my mother didn't buy a new phone and took mine, and I bought a new one. My family spent LESS overall: we only bought a new phone instead of two. And next year or when it will be, I will buy a new (i)Phone, my mother will give my old 2G to my dad (he finds always himself to take the "latest" technologies, ha ), my mother will take my 3Gs and I will buy a new 4s or 5G or what it will be called. Again, even less expense.
Things that I really do use my phone for, in everyday usage:
PHONE
- Texting, sending multimidia messages (mostly pics), calling people, making call conferences (3 or more people talking to each other on the same call, all from their own phone).
- Automatically recording all my phone conversations and automatically sending them to my e-mail as soon as I hung up.
CAMERA
- Recording videos, taking photos (quite a lot, I have about 1700 photos on my phone memory right now)
- Playing Augmented Reality games
- Using barcode reader to get texts, links and products
INTERNET
- Browsing the web (all websites I browse on the PC I also browse on the phone)
- Checking Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Foursquare (actually I get automatic notifications on my phone's desktop as people send tweets and update their Facebook/LinkedIn/foursquare)
- Checking out product prices by taking a picture of the bar code on the product, which the phone automatically reads and send me options to find this product online on google or several stores (amazon, ebay, etc).
- Reading e-mails (I get push-email notifications on the phone so I can read them as soon as I receive them on any of my 9 e-mail inboxes)
- Sending the best photos I take to Flickr, Nokia Image Exchange, Facebook, etc
- Backing up my contacts to the Nokia "cloud" thing (Ovi Contacts) (I find this useless as the phone can backup the contacts in itself and it's much better that way)
- Sharing my internet connection by creating a Wifi LAN, so that I can connect any wifi device to the lan and use the internet in it (I even did this yesterday on my PC because GVT was offline for some unknown reason, and my sister did the same when she noticed GVT was offline on her netbook and I had a wifi hotspot open)
- Watching youtube videos
- Automatically getting my contact's updates from Facebook to my phone contacts (such as contact photo).
- etc
GPS
- Using the GPS to go somewhere (I'm new in this city and I basically don't know anything here so I use the GPS turn-to-turn voice-guided navigation a lot).
Other uses:
- Sending Tweets with GPS location
- Using the GPS location on Opera Mobile with Geotagging
- Locating my phone (the phone sends my current position every 4 hours to a server so that I can be easily located and also if I someone steals my phone, I can track it down to the police. If the robber changes the SIM card the phone sends me a SMS with the number of every new SIM inserted on it and keep updating its position via wifi, 3G, edge, SMS and whatever ways it can find to send the current GPS position (it tries to access all the wifi connections, all carrier connections, etc automatically. I can also trigger a position update by sending a sms with "Update" to the phone. If it doesn't manage to send the position at the time it wants, it saves all of the positions until it manages to send it to the server)).
- Planning long trips (and also using turn-to-turn voice-guided navigation on them)
OTHER - MULTITASKING and smart phone management - I consider this one of the most important points in using the phone, if not the most important. If you could spend a day watching me use my phone, you wouldn't be surprised be seeing me downloading some torrents while reading e-mail on the e-mail app, having Opera Mobile with about 9 tabs open on the background (sometimes more), windows live messenger, orkut and facebook chats connected, GPS open voice-guiding me to the place I'm going at the moment, listening to music, sending two different devices some files via bluetooth (maybe some songs to one of these and a few pictures to the other one), while still connected to my bluetooth headset which I'm using to listen to music and hear the GPS navigation. The phone periodically sends my position to a closed server. A game I was playing before is paused on the background so that I can continue playing it later, and while I do all of that a message pops in saying someone is calling me, showing his/her photo and recent facebook updates, birth date (if it's close to that date) and phone number, call which I seamlessly answer by pressing the green key and the phone sends me back to my e-mail app, pausing my current song and hiding the voice-guided navigation so that it doesn't interfere with my call (all services continue running, just the apps' sounds that are hidden. GPS is still connected, as well as internet, bluetooth and all other active connections, and I can go to the GPS and see the map where I'm going while in a call). The phone records the call, and after I hung up, the song gradually gets back from the lower volume to the volume I was listening before, the voice-guided navigation does the same and the phone sends the recording to my e-mail, which I also receive instantly on the phone via push-email notifications.
By the end of the day, when the battery level/power gets low (you must have noticed by now that my phone battery only lasts 1 full day, from 6am until about 10pm), the phone automatically closes the GPS and all unnecessary apps (the ones I'm not using. It's customizable though), ends all connections (bluetooth, wifi, internet etc, unless I'm using them, in which case they remain on until I stop using), turns down screen brightness and decreases the time it takes the screen to turn off and start power saving sooner. When there is about only 15% battery left, the phone starts power saving after 5 seconds without any key presses. This makes it last a lot longer on stand by if I'm not close to the charger.
Before going to sleep I turn off the phone so no one wakes me up calling me and the phone turns itself on at 5:48am to wake me up and get back to work, and repeat everything again. It can turn itself off automatically if I want though, but I prefer turning it off by myself.
In the above pic, Hugo Luis (he's from LFS Forum and LFSBR) sent me 1 message while I was using the GPS. At the right photo, downloading a PC game (Quake III) on a torrent for playing it later on the phone (the phone's integrated graphics accelerator runs flawlessly all Quake games and all games based on the same engine, which uses OpenGL)
- Smart phone management, part 2: the phone knows where I am and adapts itself to best fit my needs. If I'm at the beach, it changes my theme to something clearer (a white theme) and adapts the screen brightness (unless I'm low on battery, in which case brightness is always on lowest), changes my profile to a louder one (such as "external", but I have one specific to the beach, called, uh, "beach"), and opens up apps that might be useful for me (customizable), such as media player and windows live messenger, and turns on bluetooth so I can listen to music on the bluetooth headset. When I go somewhere I can't use the phone, it automatically changes the theme to something dark and discrete, changes the profile so that it won't make any sounds when someone calls me and closes unnecessary apps (depending on the location and the open apps. also customizable), also turning off bluetooth. Etc. The phone is aware of my location and adapts itself automatically, so that I never have to touch it to make any changes.
- Backing up my phone on itself (the phone saves all apps, messages, contacts, calendar, etc in itself and also allows to restore. I don't need a computer to do that, the phone does this by itself, allowing me to format it and then restore the backup without plugging it anywhere. I don't format it often though (last time was 8 months ago), but when I needed it, I could use this feature and it was amazingly fast and easy)
- Using the calendar (a lot. I wouldn't live without it)
- Using it as my clock and alarm to wake up
- Printing documents by connecting it to a printer
- Share photos, videos and music (multimidia) from the phone to my wifi LAN at home
- Watching full-lenght widescreen nHD movies on the TV (I did this twice since I purchased my phone)
- Showing pictures, videos etc to my friends on the TV
- Playing all kind of 3D games that use OpenGL and the built-in graphics accelerator and accelerometer, and also connect it to the TV to play it on a larger screen
- Listen to music on the Stereo Speakers that received "excelent" rating on GSM Arena
- Transfer files (all and any files) via bluetooth with netbooks and notebooks, PCs and mostly other devices (basically other phones with bluetooth too. I do this a lot).
- Transfer files via Wifi with wifi-enabled devices (mostly PC)
- Recording audio (anything) and taking audio notes for later use
- Taking notes and creating to-do notes on the calendar
There are more things I do with the phone but I don't remember right now.
EDIT: Pictures attached.
EDIT2: By the way, my phone is a Nokia N95-3 NAM (american model, 128MB RAM, ARM 11 dual core processor clocked at 332 MHz, 160MB internal memory, 8GB microSD memory expandable up-to 32GB*).
*The phone has been tested to work with up to 16GB. 32GB is the theoretical maximum allowed by this phone.
nice list but everything in there that i'd want to do, my current phone does ok, so i guess there's no reason for me to get one
pity, i'd have loved to have one but if i can't justify it, especially the bit about paying for the contract and extra for the handset, with a plan thats matches my usage i'm looking at £269 for the phone, that'll go a long way towards a decent graphics card
How's that a smarter buy? Giving that much money on a graphics card, crazy.. it will be obsolete in a year when they invent some new DirectX 12 or "PhysX 3.0" or something lol..
I pay about $40/month (something like that) for my carrier (TIM) plan:
Unlimited data at 300kbps (you can see it in action on the torrent screenshot), 60 minutes of talk-time and 30 sms.
I wouldn't recommend you get a Nokia N95 right now, though. It's an amazing phone even 3 years after its release, but the Nokia N8 is also very promising and if all goes well, it will be able to deliver everything the N95 already does and perform it even better (HDMI tv-out, 12mp camera with xenon flash and HD recording, graphics accelerator with OpenGL 2.0 (N95 has OpenGL 1.x), faster processor, etc). Nokia has said it is not supposed to be a fully featured phone, though, which gets thinking if they will make it really as good as they did with the N95, but I can only hope so.
I consider the N8 to be an improved N95, running basically the same system.
Look at the phone menus to give you a better example of what I mean by "basically the same system":
I have installed the same theme I use on my N95 on the Symbian^3 (N8's operating system), and you can see the layout, system and everything is pretty much the same, but optimized for touch and with some improved features.
Just so you have an idea about the performance of the N95's graphics processor: you know the iPhone game Real Racing? At first it was supposed to be released for the N95 too; I don't know why (and I believe Apple has got their dirty hands in it), but it was later cancelled on the N95 (even after the company having showed gameplay videos of the game running very well on the N95)
The N8 is supposed to cost about EUR $370 if I'm not mistaken (in Europe). Estimated release date is October.
don't worry im not thinking about an N95, if im not getting an iphone or htc it'll be because im quite happy with what i've got already not because i think an N95 is better
Not really, I didn't intend on doing any of that. It's just a phone, it's from 2007 (we're in 2010) and I got it veeery cheap used from one of my best friends. When I purchased it, the price of a new one in Brazil was R$1400, I got it for R$600 from this friend... I wouldn't really have spent any more than that on this phone anyway and I would say exactly the same things about it if I didn't own this phone (although I wouldn't have any pictures for posting apart from google ), just as I already say about other phones too (specially the N8, which I'm very interested in getting my hands on, but also others such as the Dell phone with Windows Phone 7 (not oficially announced) and iPhone 4, although the latter doesn't really make me as excited as the others).
The N95 is not the only phone who does these things too (basically any other smartphone from Nokia with Symbian (and maybe hacked too) does most if not all of these things, (although some apps may not be available for all of them due to different OS, and they may do it in different ways). It's just that it has been an almost legendary phone from Nokia, has been their flagship for years blah blah and after which the company started to go downhill, only releasing bad (some really bad, actually) phones without the features they had implemented on previous phones already and very bugged (such as the N97).
If there's something else I'd like to say, though, is that when the iPhone was released, and even when the iPhone 3G (and 3GS) were released, they still didn't have most of the features other phones had. Not only the N95... MMS, anyone? Bluetooth file transfer/keyboard/mouse (still doesn't have unless you install some apps, apart from the keyboard, implemented on the iPhone 4), GPS(2G), 3G(implemented a year later with iPhone 3G), video calling(not even the 3GS has), 5MP camera with VGA @ 30FPS recording (3GS has only implemented video recording with a 3.2MP camera and in 2009, and just now, in 2010, they release an iPhone 4 with a 5MP camera), LED Flash (only implemented on iPhone 4 in 2010), multitasking (only implemented in 2010 on the iPhone 4 and an update to the iPhone 3GS only), automatic backup its contents by itself without the need of a computer (none of the iPhones do that, and the "cloud" thing for the contacts and settings isn't that special (other companies have that too)), etc. The list is quite big.
If there's any iPhone I would like to have, it would be an iPhone 4 (even with the antenna problems), because it implements most of the stuff I would like to have on a phone (and already exist for many years now), but even so I'm not very excited about it because the N8 seems like a better option (not only in features but also price, and having the features I like plus being cheaper really is the way to go), and the Windows Phone 7 also seems like a good option, although it doesn't have all the features just yet... and I don't really need to get any new phone for a good time now. It's just about wanting to have something new.
The whole part about the iPhone is that it does work so well as a touch interface... The KB support is.. well, it lets you type.. that's it. No navigation, nothing. Sure mouse support would be great, but then you think.. you have this (Using my Apple BT KB) 1~ ft. long kb.. and a mouse the size of.. well.. a mouse. to use a 4 inch display? At that point, why are you still on your iPhone. It is a phone after all, not a PDA.
Also, it's funny that you say that you use all these things on your phone.. not that I didn't do similar with my WinMo phone (I torrented a bunch of albums in the middle of the ****ing prairies... ). Then you'd take a Win Phone 7.. which does less than all that.
The point about the bluetooth keyboard and mouse is that you could connect the iPhone (preferably iPhone 4 because of screen resolution and better hardware) to a HD/full HD screen and use the phone from the sofa. The Nokia N8 supports this via component video and HDMI cables (which theoretically allows you to connect the phone to two TVs at the same time), and this feature has been showcased already (in only 1 TV, though). But the N8 video output resolution is 1280x720, and I believe the iPhone 4 could have full HD video output (well, even the iPhone 3GS can run so ... screen without jailbreak). It would be very fun playing games or using the phone on the TV from the sofa, it could even replace a gaming console.
When I look at a phone I don't really see just a phone (by that I mean a smartphone)... I see all the features I could get from the device without purchasing anything else (so, if I can put everything in the same device I can use only that device and won't need anything else! I love these "all-in-one" devices/products, but they need to have at least good quality, it's not just about having most features, it's also about how well they perform). For instance, people don't need to have a camera, an mp3 player, a TV, being close to a computer to make usual computer tasks and a gaming console (etc) if they can put all of these in the same portable device, and that's where the smartphone comes (in my opinion)... it's small enough so it can fit the pocket, makes calls, it's powerful enough so that it does everything possible without draining all its battery very quickly, highly customizable and "cheap" enough so that it gives its user the best price vs benefit and ease of use when compared to purchasing and trying to use everything else separately.
A simplistic example of things a smartphone can replace at any time: My old PC webcam doesn't work with Windows 7 64bits (which I'm currently using. There are just no drivers for it), so when my friend (who is traveling in another state right now) asked me on MSN to turn on our webcams, I quickly grabbed my phone that was sitting on the desk and started a bluetooth connection to the PC so that I would use the phone camera wirelessly as my webcam on windows live messenger. (It's also possible to do that via wifi and USB) And I talked to this friend of mine for many hours with the phone as webcam, even received a call on the phone while it was being used as webcam, and I answered the call with the bluetooth earpice (that also comes with the device) so I could talk while still using it as webcam and my friend could see me talking on it...
The other example I've already given so I won't get into details, but two days ago GVT was suddenly offline... I was having a really nice conversation with someone so I hadn't seen for a long time so didn't even wait to check my connection, I just created a wifi hotspot with the phone, and less than 2 minutes after GVT got offline I was talking to that person on MSN again, connected on the phone's wifi.
Now, again about the TV feature... I've played plenty of games on my TV using the N95, and although the video output resolution doesn't really make it fair for the full HD TV I was using to play (640x480 output, or nHD for videos/movies), the output quality was higher than I expected and I could play through full games without any problems, it was some great fun.
I didn't really say I wanted a WinPhone7, I mentioned it because it seems like a good option (for a phone). And that's why I'm much more interested on the Nokia N8 the WinPhone 7 got my attention because of the new interface and integration with social networks, but that's just because I found the interface very cool (I have played with it for a good time some months ago when Microsoft released the developer tools and I could emulate it on my PC. I loved it, but it still lacks a lot of features... could be implemented later, though, and we still don't know much about the future of applications on this platform).
Anyway... right now, the only probable option for me to get another phone would be the Nokia N8. HTC seems to be the first who wants to implement more features on WP7, they'll release a Win Phone 7 with their own visual style (basically the same as their other phones) although MS still holds quite some control over the interface), but it's still a phone I would like to play with for some moments.
I'm not sure about the iPod touch, but the iPhone 3GS with latest iOS4 installed can be jailbreaked if it's using one of the first boot roms (something like that). Newer iPhone models, however, cannot.
How so? A bumper is basically the equivalent to the case I already have on my iPhone 3GS.. a thin, Sillicon one so it doesn't get scratched to high hell.
That's why the bumper thing ain't a big deal.. it's a case that's the same as the one I have... and I'll have a nicer phone for it.
), my mother will take my 3Gs and I will buy a new 4s or 5G or what it will be called. Again, even less expense.
It's just a phone, it's from 2007 (we're in 2010) and I got it veeery cheap used from one of my best friends. When I purchased it, the price of a new one in Brazil was R$1400, I got it for R$600 from this friend... I wouldn't really have spent any more than that on this phone anyway 
and I would say exactly the same things about it if I didn't own this phone (although I wouldn't have any pictures for posting apart from google 
). Then you'd take a Win Phone 7.. which does less than all that.