T-Mobile Hero G2 touch

For most of my life I have always made do with buying a “Pay as you go” mobile phone and top it up as required and for most part this meant that mobile phones were older models and never did much more then calls, listening to music and taking the odd picture. Recently I thought it would be a good idea to step into the modern world and get myself on a contract and get an updated all singing and dancing mobile phone – but what to choose? Read on to find out how I came to the choice I did.

What started me thinking?

Well it was a new article that I read that Google were giving away free Maps on the Android phones and this would replace a standalone GPS based item such as TomTom and the like and the article went on to say that TomTom stock fell by 40%. Now the idea of having a device that does everything and saves me from buying a GPS, MP3 player and so forth is a good thing indeed and on top of this all the talk of the HPC Hero giving the iPhone a run for it’s money.

What about the iPhone?

Many things are important to me and I need to be paying the lowest monthly cost possible while getting the most free minutes, text and internet along with the most functional and easy to carry phone. Whiel some may disagree, I still say the iphone is too big and heavy compared to a lot of phone apart from let us say the Microsoft offerings. What about the price? Well let us say I wanted to only be locked into the phone for 18 months and that I wanted let us say the 16GIG model? I would have to lay down £184.98 for the phone and then pay a further £34.26 a month for a duration of 18 Months and for this I get 600 Minutes and 500 text with unlimited internet. I need to say now that this is a BIG Chunk of money, do I have £184 lying around? Of course I don’t and no matter how good the phone people say it is and how many apps it has (they are not all free) – this is just a step too far, if it had been free plus the fee per month then yes – Apple need to take this into account.

Android G2

After playing with the mobile in the store, reading various reviews and watching countless video’s – I finally was happy to get this phone – the T-Mobile Hero (G2 Touch), how much? Well for £29 a month for 18 months I get 800 Minutes, unlimited Text & Internet, not too bad at all and no Buying the phone either.

I need to add this for you all iphone lovers – I am a strong Google user in that I use the mail, calendar, contacts, documents and just about everything else on there, so all my information was already in place and on top of this I use Twitter and Facebook.

My Initial verdict

One of the first things that I did was to go through my google contacts and fully update them with all the information possible such as address, all numbers, picture and so on. The phone automatically got all the changes into the address book and I could go through and link people on facebook also for birthdays and the like. I could now keep up with all my facebook, twitter and emails no matter were I was and there is a lot of application to choose from, most are free but there is paid apps also.

I found the wireless kept dropping, the indicator was shown me as connected but the phone kept saying no connection and through the night as emails and such came in, there was a lot of beeping and lights flashing (scroll ball) – now worked out how to silent the entire thing via an app which does this automatically at 11:30pm and goes back to normal at 6am. It has multitouch, can take various size Micro SD Cards – so not limited to 16gigs as per the iphone and multitask (again the iphone does not do this).

I am more then happy with this phone and do not feel like I just bought a lemon, I do not feel the urge to rush out and get the iPhone and this phone is quite small and very light.