Next Gen Developer

The question is, do you really need a smartphone? Browse the web, collect e-mails - you can do that on almost any regular phone now. Most phones also have reasonable calendar and contact applications for basic organising too. It's becoming increasingly difficult to come up with a strong reason for paying out the extra for a smartphone - to which you are probably hinting with your comment about it costing no more than your current contract!

Sarah - I guess you do need a new phone now that your existing one is wet :) And you can get a Windows Mobile phone in pink too...to match your network cable. Just jokin ;)

Seriously, it can be difficult to justify a smartphone (of any brand) if you have little need for features such as email and calendar. Maybe it's other apps that will drive yours and other people's interest though? Most people don't buy a desktop OS just for the OS - they buy it to run applications and with apps like SportsDo for runners and bikers maybe that will pique your interest?

From a cost point of view, that's more down to the operators and with some Tottenham Ct Rd style haggling you can get pretty good deals on devices.

What interested you about the PPC though if you don't need the added functionality? The cool factor or the hardware features like GPS?

And finally...you know you will always want want you can't have...it's the nature of IT that the coolest thing is the next one around the corner!

What would I use a Smartphone for... well for one I have been playing with a really cool application and hardware combination today called frwd... it's a gps, heartrate monitor etc device which connects up to the Nokia Series 60 and provides info on performance etc. Very cool... especially with London to Brighton coming up. That would be one use for it if there was something like that on WM... which apparently there is but I haven't been able to get my hands on that just yet... I have a demo frwd kit at the moment (courtesy of paul).

The additional cost of a smartphone is questionable when you can get pretty much the same stuff in a Nokia these days.

As a developer on the other hand I prefer to develop for the MS OS as it allows me to write in C# rather than Java with it's many different virtual machines and OS versions.

The hardware features found in PPC are far better than in Smartphone which always pushes me towards them... If I am going to get a phone and pay a small fortune for it, of course i want all the hardware features. So often these days people have their phones in the car, why not put the gps into it so that they can use one device to find their way around. And whilst your at it let's get the wifi in the same device as the phone and gps... and on quad band too... so that it works in the US just as well as in Europe.

Granted the operators don't like the idea of wifi in a phone coz it could just let a killer app out, but to be honest, why not get the devices out there and sell direct to the customer... who says everyone has to buy their phone through an operator. More and more often these days people already have contracts and all they want is a newer better phone coz the one they have is either broken (:S) or doesn't do something that they want it to do.

Personally I would love to be able to write notes on my phone and be able to access my home pc from the kitchen via wifi to get that recipe that I found and saved on my pc. Or since I use messaging clients at home be able to wander round the house and not have to carry an entire laptop about. (it just makes sense...)

In terms of gps and wifi... (or as I would prefer wimax) there could be some interesting games that could be created on that sort of location, proximity software... :)

Hi this is lisa even i too not satisfied with the mobile phones until i went to keepbuy.net then i felt that i don't know so many models which are collected by keepbuy.net, so many modeles are there in the market.I am really satisfied with the collections and services done by keepbuy.net
cheers: lisa

<a href="http://www.keepbuy.net" title="quality mobile phones" target="_blank">Quality mobile phones</a>

Just poping in to say beware when dealing with keepbuy as not all are happy customers there,be very aware,service not so good.

interesting, thanks