Be Excellent To Each Other

Hi.

The wife has an iPhone 4. She's about due a new phone, and needs one as the current one is full and the home button is a bit knackered.

However, we're trying to cut down on spending, and since she uses precious few of the whistles and bells of the iPhone, we want to get something else.

Priorities:
Camera - the camera on my 4S is way better than her 4. She takes loads of pictures of the child with it, so a good camera is top priority.
Memory - 32GB plz, as her 16GB one is full all the time
Price - cheaper than an iPhone and with a less expensive contract

Must also do Facebook and web browsing, obv. No need for massive amounts of minutes or texts or anything.

If anyone has any suggestions, that'd be bloody marvellous.

One of the flagship Android handsets on Three?

I sold my iPhone 4 and bought a Samsung Galaxy S3 on Three's 'The One Plan'. The phone cost nothing upfront, whilst the contract is £36 per month and is a 2-year minimum term. It comes with something like 2,000 cross network minutes, 5,000 Three-to-Three minutes, 5,000 texts and unlimited data.

The unlimited data is the real clincher. I've gone from a 32GB iPhone 4 that was full all the time to a 16GB S3 that's about half full with apps and photos. No music on it whatsoever, since I stream it all now from Google Play Music. It's ruddy marvelous and 3's data is excellent. It was a bit patchy when I was on holiday in South Wales last week, but at home in Hemel it's incredible and is actually faster than my home broadband - I regularly get speeds up to 13Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream.

All that said, I'd have probably gone for a different phone now, like maybe that HTC One, or the Nexus 4 and a SIM-only contract if I'd been a bit more flush at the time, as the built-in software on the S3 (TouchWiz) gives me the arse. I've put a custom ROM on there (the latest Cyanogenmod) which improves things for the most part, but the camera sometimes crashes. I took a nice 5 minute 1080p video on it whilst on hols, only for it to crash when I tried to exit the app and the resulting film footage is nigh-on unwatchable - it'll play but the majority of it is badly corrupted.

Nobody else? I thought this forum prided itself on not all having iPhones?

Don't get an S2, they smash up when you drop them.

Mine doesn't. The simple addition of a £3 hydrogel case has made it clumsy-proof

There's very soon due to be a 'Google Play Edition' of the Galaxy S4 with none of the samsung gubbins attached. I'd go for that.

I should have done that. I will look out for one. In the meantime, I havem't repaired the screen yet as I am anticipating crashing the bike and smashing it again.

Only £40 extra!

Really? Cheeky fuckers.

No idea. That's just how I imagine it, what with it being a privilege to get a stripped-down version and all.

Have you thought about an iPhone?

Zio's recommendation for one of the flagship Android phones is all I'd have said and it didn't seem worth repeating him. Plus I only know the hardware and don't follow what contracts are available and suchlike so have nothing to add on that front!

I'd have suggested the Nexus 4, but there's no 32gb version.

I'll be upgrading from a dumbphone to a smartphone soon, but I think it'll have to be an iPhone, because you can't get Dariusburst: Second Prologue on anything else...

Does she really need more than 16GB? What the Hell is on it?

About 5000 photos.

This.

Stick them on dropbox or something and have a clearout.

Presumably though even if she doesn't transfer the existing pictures to the new phone and is starting from scratch she'll fill the new phone up with nonsense the same way she did the old phone so the storage requirements are the same.

My wife is the same, on a smaller scale. She's fills her 8gb sd card about 4 times a year with pictures of the kids.

True, but I'll look at the price difference and there's probably a cost/hassle trade-off somewhere along the way.

Might just get an iPhone 4S, as they're the same price as the Nexus 4 or Galaxy 3, and at least she'd be familiar with the operating system.

My sister is similar in that my parent's PC is groaning under the weight of a billion pictures of my niece from throughout her life; 99% of them which no one will ever look at again because she used to take shitloads of pictures at the same time then never clear out any duplicates.

Thinking of the storage space thing; a potential selling point for a non-Nexus Android phone is the ability to shove massive SD cards in them for cheap and tell the camera to send pictures to the SD rather than internal memory.

I have a nexus four, it's set to automatically upload all photos I take to drop box when I'm at a WiFi point. Having the drop box app on my phone, I can just access them the same as if they were stored on my phone. Phone.

Is it better than an iPhone 4S?

Phone

You're welcome.

Better is a meaningless construct when it comes to buying technology for one's partner.

For me, yes.

It depends. She'll be able to keep using any apps she has b bought on an iphone, which is a big plus.

I got a HTC one. I love it but I imagine at nearly 500quid for the handset is a bit much for her.

All in the Camera Roll? Delete them off the phone then sync them back again through iTunes. This process will reduce the resolution massively; they'll still look great on the phone but take up about 20% of the space.

I have no idea how you achieve anything similar on Android.

Also, consider signing her up for the Everpix free trial and see if she likes it. It seems to be a much nicer way of browsing huge photo collections on the iPhone. (I've dumped 13,500 photos into it.) The auto-pick-good-photos voodoo seems to be some good shit.

There are apps that do it all "in the phone" I used to use one in my memory poor Desire. Most rely on you saving the originals yourself (if you want to), but you can just use Dropbox for that.
They make a Hell of a difference to videos, as you can imagine.

Should just get Grim...'s old Nokia, obv.

Cor, just took a look at Everpix and it sounds great. We've got a lot of photos (and duplicates) with little quality control, so this interests me a lot.

I'm just a little worried how long it'll take to go through my library on our crummy Internet connection. Maybe it's something to leave a computer at work to churn through.

Mine uploaded 13k photos in under 36 hours on a 1 meg upload.

Everpix does look good, but £3 a month!

Apparently the wife wants to have all the pics on her phone, so lookin like a 32GB 4S.

Or any Android with an SD slot. Unfortunately the nexus 4 is by far the best value, and it doesn't have an SD slot.

How silly.

Not quite as bad as thinking the best place to keep 30+ Gb of photos is on your telephone

It's coz it's the only place she ever looks at them.

Yeah, but she can look at them on a site on her phone, they are still there the same size and everything, you just have to click on a different icon.

Company in 'charging for service' shocker. If this is what I lay to stop Google buying and shutting it down in a textbook acquihire, I'm fine with that.

Tell me this phone is thoroughly backed up.

Also, the sync-through-iTunes thing I described earlier would still have all the photos on the phone while requiring about a fifth as much space.

Except that only works if you've got a data connection of some kind; if she happened to want to view some pictures in a location with no Wi-Fi/3g she's pretty much screwed.

I take it it just drops the resolution of the images as part of pushing them onto the phone?

Yes. Even the iPhone 4's relatively lowly 5 MP camera captures images more than seven times larger than you can see on its 0.6 MP display, so when you sync photos via iTunes it downsamples to a more appropriate res. Pleasingly, it doesn't go all the way down to the screen resolution -- it targets something a bit above so you can still zoom in and pan around if you want.


Everpix devotes up to 2 GB to a cache, which goes a long way on downsampled images. So far it's seemed OK to me, although I've only been trying it for a week.