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November 2008

There are only a few weeks until Christmas and as mobile phones are a popular gift choice, Reevoo.com gives you the low-down on mobiles; examining what’s hot, what’s not, what people are actually buying and which phones are the best value for money.

WHAT’S HOT? The iPhone 3G of course! But it’s not highly rated…

Despite being one of the most talked about phones of the year, the iPhone 3G has failed to beat its 2007 predecessor. The original iPhone is rated 8.3/10, just pipping this year’s 3G offering to the post, (the iPhone 3G scores 8.2/10). According to owners, the major issues with the 3G model are its battery life and application crashes, meaning that other phones have been able to storm ahead of the iPhone.

So what really is the hottest mobile phone this season? Reevoo reviewers pick the BlackBerry Bold 9000 as the best phone released in 2008. Some genuine reviews on Reevoo for the BlackBerry Bold 9000 include:

+ Great keyboard for e-mailing and texting. Cracking screen which is nice and bright and videos look lovely on it. The sound from the internal speaker is really good. Just a great phone overall.
– Out of the box battery life is bad but gets better with regular charges.

+ The Bold is undoubtedly the most impressive Blackberry yet. One of its greatest advantages is that in spite of many new features, it feels very familiar. Web browsing is almost broadband speed.

REEVOO RECOMMENDATIONS: TOP FIVE CHRISTMAS MOBILE PHONES
The hyped-up phones usually get all the attention but it’s interesting to see how the most popular phones differ from the most highly rated:

TOP FIVE MOST POPULAR IN LAST 30 DAYS:
Nokia N96
Samsung F480 Tocco
Blackberry Storm
Sony Ericsson C902
Samsung Omnia

TOP FIVE HIGHEST RATED PHONES OF 2008:
BlackBerry Bold 9000
Sony Ericsson W980i
Apple iPhone 3G 8/16GB
Samsung F480 Tocco
Sony Ericsson K660i

For the full lists, see Reevoo’s blog, Decide What to Buy.
The Nokia N96, whilst being the most popular phone on the market, gets marked down by reviewers for poor battery life and software problems. At around £500 for Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) customers, it’s no surprise that it also gets rated below average for value for money. However, it does impress with its design and features. One reviewer writes “great picture and video quality, very easy to find your way around, fantastic features...looks good”.

REEVOO RECOMMENDATIONS
When it comes to value for money, the stylish Samsung F480 Tocco is a great buy. It scores highly for design and features and gets much higher scores for battery life than the Nokia N96, both iPhones and the BlackBerry Bold 9000. It’s around £150 PAYG or free on some contracts.

Here are some of the reviews from owners of the Samsung F480 Tocco:

+ Easy to use, good haptic technology feedback from the touch screen, excellent camera, fair battery life, smart, compact, stylish.
No Wi-Fi capability.

+ It's easy to use and has a very good memory and has good features that I would have expected.
- Should come with a ball point touch screen pen, can be hard to press the right keys sometimes.

Check out for thousands of genuine reviews and scores for mobile phones.

[miffed]

.........Right .... , so

The iPhone loses top spot for stability , - and then there is a Nokia S60 device right at the top of the table ?

:rolleyes:

[Ben]

I know. I even have an issue of Fone on my desk at work with a headline about dealers getting angry over N96 software bugs.

Anyone shopping for Christmas handsets would do better to consult us rather than Reevoo, IMHO.

[DWTB]

Hi Ben,

I'm from Reevoo. We're just reporting on the most popular phone here with the Nokia N96. It's the phone that most people are looking at on sites like Dixons, The Carphone Warehouse, Vodafone etc. It's definitely got a few problems and these are reflected in the reviews that people leave for it. There are lots of complaints about software and battery life etc.

The highest rated phone, however, was the BlackBerry Bold 9000 - and that rating is from consumers only.

Just wanted to clear that up :). Keep up the great work on these forums, always a good read.

[Ben]

Hi - Welcome to Talk3G!

I've not used the Blackberry Bold, but while I'm sure it's a great Blackberry (likely the best to date, judging by some of the Storm criticisms floating around) I don't think it has too broader consumer appeal.

However, as always Apple are restrictive around all aspects of the iPhone. Limited tariffs, a tie-in to O2 and a basic feature set are turn-offs for many, despite the cold hard fact (meaning my opinion, naturally!) that the iPhone 3G is the best mobile phone out there.

My recommendation for Christmas would be the iPhone 3G on O2 PAYG. The Apple iPhone is currently selling a steady 20,000 units a week in the UK (Mobile Today), down from 50,000 when it launched. New Christmas advertising should push this up even higher. I don't doubt that with cross-network availability and tariff competition the iPhone 3G would be the biggest selling handset in the UK of all time - however, this just isn't the Apple way. They've made it clear that they're focussing on the quality of execution and delivery rather than going for maximum volume sales. It skews figures out of their favour, but makes for a great customer experience for those prepared to submit to the 'Apple way'.

If only they'd chosen Vodafone. Ah well.

[DWTB]

Thanks Ben!

The iPhone 3G is a funny one. People can see that it's a great phone but it's the niggley things that the average user gets annoyed about. A load of the reviews moan about things like forwarding texts, the camera, the battery life etc.

This reviewer sums up what most others have said:

"Cant send meeting requests, cant send picture messages, cant view picture messages, can't bluetooth to or from other devices, cant forward text messages, not a very good camera & cant take video."

I think that more tech savvy people love the iPhone 3G as it's clearly a great phone but those who have bought it because it looks great or because of the hype around it seem to be finding that the simple things they did on their old phones aren't possible on it.

[Ben]

It's funny - I'd say that reviewer would be very much in the minority, I don't think the vast majority of mobile phone users consider sending meeting requests or any of the other features listed to be 'simple' things.

But yes, the inflexibility of the device does rub people up the wrong way. It's a bit like the iTunes issue - a lot of folk hate iTunes because they like to manage their music themselves in folders sorted by artist name etc. However, give them a few weeks with iTunes doing all of the behind the scenes stuff itself, and in my experience people realise the Apple way is quicker, easier, better.

[Hands0n]

Hmm, the funny thing is that I tend to agree with the moaning reviewer :D but then I carry around a Nokia N95 (the original) that does all of those things for me nicely. But the iPhone itself is the dogs nuts when it comes to doing real world stuff like calendaring, emailing and even Facebook with the apps available. The Apple push mail works as well as I've ever seen it work on a Blackberry, and better than on Windows Mobile.

But horses for courses - the iPhone was never going to go toe to toe with the likes of the Nokia N9x - I don't believe that Apple ever intended that.

[3GScottishUser]

Reading todays Sunday Times it looks like Microsoft are the company to watch in terms of mobiles in 2009. MS could not get the phone interface right themselves but others seem to be making more of their OS including Samsung, SonyEricsson and HTC. The latter is getting good reviews for their latest implimentation of Windows Mobile and there now appears to be eyes opening in other places about the potential as MS seems happy to allow others to develop what was up until now pretty clunky PC OS technology.

Looks promising.....

[Ben]

I think (hope?) open-sourcing Symbian should result in that OS being as attractive to front-end as Windows Mobile. 2009 will certainly be exciting in terms of phone operating systems, but if MS overcome OS X, Android, Symbian and RIM to win the smartphone race then I think we should all shoot ourselves.

[Hands0n]

The stark irony of it all is that it took a completely new entrant to teach these old hacks what a UI was all about. Having done just that it has been left to the handset designers to put their own take on a UI on top of the foundation OS itself.

What is particularly interesting is that the latest new entrant to mobile telephone OS has taken not only a big leaf out of the same book, but has done a pretty good job of their V1 implementation of such a UI.

Why any of this makes Microsoft the one to watch eludes me completely!