Scargill

Against my better judgement (but then it’s usually that way) my wife, desperate for a new phone and frustrated by continued delays with the forthcoming Samsung S3, decided today was going to be the day she got her new phone and so off we went to the Metro Centre in Gateshead.

She headed to the Orange store where she got her original HTC Desire from – and I managed to persuade her to pop firstly into the 3 store – where I got my iPhone 4. Having been an Orange customer for many years, some time ago I’d simply had it with their utterly useless technical support and wavering definition of “unlimited data”.. I went to get my iPhone 4 and they informed me that I could have unlimited data – but that I would have to pay an extra £10 a month to share that data with my iPad. Well, you can imagine how I felt about that and to cut a long story short, I simply got out of the contract and went elsewhere.

3 offered truly unlimited, unrestricted data- and sure enough having bought my iPhone 4 with 3, I could share it with my iPad – and have done ever since, not to mention playing endless Internet radio when in the car. Marvellous. I have no complaints – batter life could be better but then that applies to virtually all top-end phones.

For the above reasons alone I did my best to convince my wife to change suppliers. She was not convinced until today, we went first to the 3 store and they were offering the new HTC One X for £29 a month with unlimited data. Back we went to the Orange store wherein we asked the assistant if they had the new Samsung – no. Ok, did they have the HTC X1 – yes – at £41 for unlimited data. This apparently is the best they can do – when asked if they still matched other people’s rates the assistant INSISTED EMPHATICALLY that they’d never done that. Sadly for him we both have long memories of having had Orange do just that on several occasions… by this point we were so disgusted with Orange I didn’t have to do any convincing – straight across the road to the 3 store and shortly thereafter out came my wife with a brand, spanking new HTC One X.

I’m not that keen on HTC having had many years of dealing with their phones supplied to staff.. and having watched buttons drop off etc.… but I have to say, they do seem to be improving. Whether this model will compare to Samsung S3 or the forthcoming iPhone 5 is another matter but the setup (Ice-Cream Sandwich) was devastatingly easy, the large screen is stunning and the phone is very light and thin. With a 1.5Ghz quad-core processor the screen is lightning fast and transferring information from the old to the new phone, I did in the store while she was filling in forms.. a trained monkey could have done the job. 

Key things to note, the HTC desire, though capable of handling a large external memory was screwed by having only 256 meg internally – and no matter what you do – you have to use a small but of that memory for every application you install – even if that application itself is stored in external memory.

The ONE X is very different – out of the box it has 1 GB of internal memory but ALSO has 32GB of permanently built-in “external” memory.  Installing the Sat-Nav software we use along with Spanish and UK maps hardly made a dent in the available storage and I’m confident the phone will handle more Apps than are likely to get installed by a long way. The S3 incidentally will have a higher monthly cost so that needs to be taken into consideration when comparing the two.

As time and experience progress I’ll update this blog. Up to now the white model is looking very nice. Would I swap for my iPhone? No, they still have a long way to go – but Ice Cream Sandwich is a very welcome improvement on the previous operating system version…  First thing to get tested once the battery is fully charged will be the 1080p HD video recording capability…  I mean – in a PHONE for heaven’s sake!!