Once you've had a good play around with it and got familiar, you'll have to give us a review.

If planning to use a mobile on telstra, be aware, that overseas sellers don't generally sell the 850mhz phone versions needed to work on Telstra Next G. The 900/2100 versions sold overseas will only get 3G access in metropolitan areas and even then it's generally inferior to service on 850mhz.

I couldn't get rid of my HTC Touch Diamond 2 (bought form the UK) quick enough when the HTC HD2 came out.

Cheers

Steve

Irrespective of how good the Next G network is, there's no amount of money that would convince me to go anywhere near Tel$tra. I would much rather be on the standard 3G than deal with and be completely ripped off by them. I have never experienced worse customer service than what I have experienced with Tel$tra. Not to mention over charging on bills and that doesn't even take into account their prices.

Don't forget also the issue of Flash support. Like it or loathe it, there is an awful lot of Flash content on the web.

It's hitting Android soon, Flash for Android, yet Apple [read Steve Jobs] are resolute in their decision not to support it, and are hence still more than happy to restrict the browsing experience of its customers.

I'm afraid there's just something I don't like about the way that Apple goes about it's business - it seems very much a 'we know best' attitude, it seems so focused on limiting the choice of the consumer.


S

Principals don't help much if its the only decent service you can get. I'm with Telstra and the network is outstanding. The customer service is about as dire as you can possibly get. Only yesterday I had to call them for 40 mins because I received a debt collectors letter concerning my MiL account with them.

Wouldn't have minded except she's been dead a year. After speaking to several idiots, the best of which said they wanted to speak to her because I didn't have authority on the account and got a sharp rebuke asking if they could put me through to someone with a greater IQ than they - maybe the stapler on the desk, eventually I got put through to someone whose turn it was with the collective brain.

Fortunately I do not have to actually deal with them very often. But the network is sadly hands down the best in the country and they know it and the only realistic 3G service in our area.

However, for the non tech minded without a built in nerd sense (which I am blessed with my wife tells me), the Apple experience with the entire range of products seamlessly integrating with each other is great.

No company is going to be everything to all people, but I reckon Apple do a pretty good job. My iphone, macbook pro, apple tv and a couple of airport expresses littering the house all work amazingly well with other in ways that I could not with a PC and other phone manufacturer. I would achieve poorer results, much less polished experience and a wife who would constantly need me to tell her what to do when something didn't pan out and require "tinkering".

Apple are not the be all and end all, but the experience is a good one overall.

Luckily i'm in Melb metro area and the service with the other telco providers is fine.

And that is the number one reason why I wouldn't purchase an Apple product.

Which is why I went for the Desire over the iphone. I also don't like the way that a lot pf people slavishly and unquestioningly buy - and rave about - their products.

Aplle make nice stuff yet really treat their customers with contempt.

Loving this thread!

What's the term for an Android fan boy and more importantly - do they all, despite being in their 30s, still live at home with their parents?

You see, the only people that give a shit about 'proprietary crap' are the propellor heads. I'm a huge geek myself and so I should sit in that 'trash Apple cos it's Apple' camp. But I don't. And I don't sit in that camp because the bottom line is that Apple produce good products, that just work.

Out of curiosity I nipped into my nearby Telstra superstore (whatever the hell they're branding them as these days) and had a play with an HTC to see what all the fuss was about. The screen was indeed very pleasant, though no more pleasant than an iPhone and as far as I could see most of the advancements in Android appear to have been simple copies of everything that's in iPhone OS3. So remind what the revolutionary bit is? Vaguely better screen? Slightly better battery life? A cloud based app store? Slightly faster CPU? Hardly comes as a surprise that Apple's suing them.

What specs? Since the lost-and-found iPhone 4G wasn't functioning and therefore couldn't be fully analysed, nobody has a clue what its specs are. Unless you've got some physic hotline into Steve Jobs brain of course.

As for multi-tasking - it's coming in iPhone OS4 but I don't think many iPhone users will care much because it's an irrelevance. My music carries on playing while I check my email at the moment - what further multitasking enhancements will I need that will make my life complete as it has the lives of Android users? I had multitasking on my N95 and it was a pain in the arse - I was forever running out of memory and constantly dropping back into the interface to close the myriad apps I'd opened and inadvertently left running.

It's exactly the same here. It goes wrong, you walk into the Apple store and they replace it. The battery fails and they replace the phone. Never heard of anyone having to wait three weeks - three minutes more like.

Yea, there's an awful lot of absolutely shite Flash content out there. I mean seriously - send me in the direction of some useful Flash code - I dare you. In my wanderings around the web all it seems to be used for is as a container for lazy programmers to sit their shite movie players in or as a GUI for websites used by ermmm lazy web designers who can't be arsed to use proper web code like HTML5 or for porn adverts. And let's not even get into the subject of how full of holes Flash is and how it's utilised by hackers who love the fact that it can bring otherwise secure browsers (like Chrome) to their knees.

I browse the web all the time on my iPhone - both with Safari and more recently with Opera and my options have in no way been restricted by the restriction on Flash content.

Lucky you - enjoy all those, ermm, Flash games. And, ermmm, intrusive adverts.

Yea, my choices as an iPhone user are so very limited. Only 180,000 apps to choose from - my god it's like a barren wilderness in that app store.

No idea. Android fanboys? Droids? Droids sounds like it might stick. either that or get confused with the Motorola.

Yes Apple do produce very good stuff. However it would be good to not have to be tied into iTunes and be able to play music in FLAC format. I prefer Linux and if Apple had more of a Linux ethos I would probably buy one. Apple stuff does tick the eye candy box.

The Snapdragon processor is pretty good. I think the real revolutionary thing will prove to be the openness of Android as it could become the standard OS that all mobiles in the future will run, a bit like how the micro computer market changed with the emergence of the PC and Windows. Only time will tell.

I think what is more relevant right now is that there is now a real competitor to the iPhone in the market. By filing that many lawsuits it appears that the Desire does put a rocket up Apples arse.

I was referring to the specs of iPhone OS 4.0, details of which were released by Jobs last week.

Agree. I couldn't see myself using it but it's a bit like having an amp as featured in Spinal Tap that goes up to eleven.

Whether it's awful or not is irrelevant. What matters is that if you want to use Flash then you can. You have the choice. Not so with the iPhone.

But could you develop your own app and run it on the iPhone without the approval of Apple?

Talking about adverts. What are the thoughts of Apples iAds?

*shrugs* You can encode in AAC or MP3 at very high bit rates. I love my music as much as the next person but I can't tell any difference between a 'lossless' FLAC recording and a well encoded MP3 or AAC song. Also, I like iTunes - I even use it on my non-Apple hardware. What's the alternative? Media Player? Winamp? Amarok? They're all much of a muchness.

The new iPhone's rumoured to be getting the iPad's A4 chipset - a move that makes a lot of sense. So there'll be a considerable degree of parity performance-wise. Plus since Apple produce the hardware and the software they can get far more out of both.

It puts a rocket up their arse in the sense that someone's ripped off a great swathe of their IP. The fact is that the Apple caught the competition napping when they released the original iPhone. Prior to that we'd been served a diet of shitty handsets by the likes of Nokia and the whole market was controlled by the telcos (not known for their acts of charity) and a couple of major handset manufacturers.

Apple broke that monopoly up - without an iPhone there would never have been an HTC Desire. Competition's fine by me and Apple could be just as guilty as the next company of sitting on their hands once they'd sewn up a market. But Apple are the only innovators in this market - Android brings absolutely nothing new to the party at all. I mean seriously - beyond some eye candy (active wallpaper on the home screen etc) - what is truly innovative in either the Android OS or the HTC handsets?

Apple often takes a while to get things right. For instance, leaving out something as fundamental as copy/paste was a huge error of judgement. But the iPhone and the iPhone OS are seriously sweet bits of kit now.

Yea - and I could install Ubuntu or OpenSuse or Fedora on my PCs too. But those OS's are only good if your only metric is the cost price of the product. Simply because something is free (or 'open' for that matter) means nothing.

I'm yet to hear am argument as to why that's a good thing. Instead of getting 180,000 apps that have been developed under strict guidelines and go through an approval process, I'd instead get 45,000 different kinds of Flash-based porno apps? Ermmm, thanks.

Sounds like a good way for developers to make money. They'll stick 'em in the 'light' or 'free' versions of their software and the full products will be ad-free. It's a model that works well online and will I'm sure enable the coders to earn a bit more cash out of their hard work.

Last night whilst syncing my iPhone, it reported an error. So I went to restore it.

It backed the phone up, and then "preparing iPhone for restore" message for about 15 minutes. Then, I get an error message. Phone now stuck in usb + iTunes mode.

Managed to get it into DFU mode, and iTunes found it, went to restore, but at "verifying restore with Apple" it got another error.

It's dead as a dodo.

Just trying it on my XP machine now. It's found the phone in recovery mode, just downloading 3.1.3, and hoping it'll restore the bastard.


I think I tempted fate yesterday!!

Take the battery out, wait a minute, and put it back in, you'll be fine...

Oh thats right, you can't.

Yes you did tempt fate, ha ha ha

JTL