Hi all,

Could i trouble you for some advice. I am thinking of upgrading my phone, and i am tempted to get a smart phone. However, the market is overloaded with them at the moment and so i am swamped with what i should get.

Here's what i need from it;

Good battery life (3 days would be great, hence the fact that i am not getting a desire despite really liking it!).

Full keyboard (touch or standard)

Full access to my hotmail accounts NOT via the internet (i have several for business purposes)

The ability to get a decent sat-nav would be nice as well (although not required!)

any suggestions/recommendations?

thanks

From those specs possibly a nokia 5800. Its the only one i know of that will get near your 3 day battery and has the sat nav. It does depend really though on your definition of a smart phone. Did you want apps like the desire you like? Or is it literally something for email and the sat nav?

That sounds a bit unlikely, as smart phones do use a lot of battery. At least with the Desire you can swap a spare battery in.

Assume you mean wireless enabled then. In which case, where do you intend to find the access points? And if it's for business, wouldn't that just be a business expense?
Edit: you pick up an email and it has a word doc or excel spreadsheet attached, how do you intend to read it? If you do want to read it, then you are looking at an apps phone.

Thanks for the response, and you ask a good question. If i am honest the idea of andriod does appeal, but in truth I doubt that I would really use it that much. As long as I can have full hotmail control and can do some surfing occasionally i'll probably be happy. As for the battery life, just don't want to be charging every day!

hi tealady, sorry for not making myself more clear. With the hotmail, i meant via a client on the phone rather than via the hotmail.com website

What you need is probably going to depend on how much business use you require and what your business is. That will then dictate the extent you need to access the internet and browse files such as pdf, doc and xls. The more likely you are to do this, the 'smarter' the phone needs to be.

An iPhone 4 would do all that and will last 3 days depending how often you use it but you will generally only get 2 days out of it. TBH I don't understand why a phone has to last longer than 1 day, just throw it on the charger when you go to bed at night, that's what i do.

Thanks for these responses,

The reason i am after a resonable battery life is basically as the phone will be mainly used as just that, a phone. I use it a lot for standard calls everyday, and so need one that can last a bit. The e-mail and internet would just be really helpful, as it would reduce the need for me to carry a laptop and use various wifi spots etc.

I must admit i was giving some though to the 3GS, given that it seems to do well battery wise and i really don't want to pay top dollar or be locked into a long term contract. The only thing that i was aprehensive about was the iphones ability to access hotmail accounts etc.

I would think that the majority of phones, even non-smartphone/feature phones have built in mail clients that allow you to access mail without going through gmail.com or hotmail.com.

Its almost ridiculous that you can't have a device that has satnav, mail, web, etc. that can also have a decent battery life.

With minimal use the 5230 can last 3 days, but if you start to use the GPS and net a bit, the battery life drops. Battery technology (or at least capacity) is the one area that hasn't improved much over time. It obviously fails on the full keyboard though. And as good as some on-screen keyboards can be, they really aren't a replacement for a full/tactile keyboard.

The problem with smartphones is they're computers running on phone batteries. You could always buy a second battery and switch them if need be.

What is the difference between a "feature phone" and a smartphone? The operating system functionality, thats it. And the lines are being increasingly blurred, and theres never really been a true definition of what constitutes a smartphone.

Most phones, be they feature, dumb or smartphones use similar processor technology - all variants of the arm cpu. iirc even the SE K800 had a 200mHz ARM cpu. Similar spec to that on smartphones of its era.

And try changing a battery in the middle of a call ..... sorry, gotta go, gotta change me battery. Take off back, replace battery, wait for phone to boot up ....then get back on the call.

200Mhz? they are around the 1Ghz mark now, that's where the batteries go. HTCs new Windows phone will be 1.5Ghz. Battery technology has not kept up so we trade battery life for speed and functionality.

Is that a windows phone 7? I quite fancy trying one of those when they come out.

It is, there's a thread on it somewhere around here. It'll be interesting to see if they've managed to improve their mobile platform as much as they have their desktop one.

Edit: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s....php?t=1290961

http://www.digitalreviews.net/news/i...os-leaked.html

I'm probably a bit biased but I'd definitely recommend an Android phone, especially given that they come with Google Navigation - awesome AND free.

To be frank, good battery life and sat-nav don't go together at all. Even a phone that yields 3 days battery life normally won't last more than a day with reasonable sat-nav use and a bunch of calls aswell. And as most people charge their phones up overnight anyway, it doesn't make a great deal of difference (in my head, at least) whether you do this every evening or just one in three.

If your using it as a sat nav then surely you can charge it in the car?