Do you own a smartphone?

[Kobold]

Inspired by the discussion of the LBA1 remake/port to smartphones, how about a little poll?

Personally, I don't have a smartphone.

[marcosmapf]

I do have an Android one but I hardly use it because I can use skype to talk with all my friends and grooveshark for music...

[Styx]

I stay away from smartphones. I find them an unecessary risk regarding theft and damage. They also are such a distractiom and battery lasts for hours.

I'd choose my crappy, beaten, indestructible nokia over anything.


My battery lasts a week

[Streg]

I have a Galaxy W. It's basically one of the cheapest android smartphone out there that isn't totally a piece of crap. Thanks to costum mods it can be upgraded to Android 4.1, and it goes way faster now. If it was for samsung it would still be on 2.6... and it would be totally useless. I was about to sell it, before trying a costum mod.
I'd never buy anything more expansive, like an SIII or a SIV, unless some years pass and the price goes down.

It's true those mobile phones battery hardly make a day at normal use, but with some tweaking and little use I even got mine to last for 36 hours.

I find mobile phones quite useful actually. Sometimes when I was away from home I needed the internet to get some info online, or indications to get to a place, or even a phone number. Strangely enough, I don't use it to play that much. Even if I'm a gamer, I don't like the kind of games those mobiles have... just a few exceptions.

[SpaceGuitarist]

Originally Posted by styx

i stay away from smartphones. I find them an unecessary risk regarding theft and damage. They also are such a distractiom and battery lasts for hours.

I'd choose my crappy, beaten, indestructible nokia over anything.


My battery lasts a week

^ THIIIIIIIIIIIIiiisSSSSSSSSSS.

[Twinsan]

I find them a nessarily risk for my day to day functions, laptops come and go and the worst thing that happened to my iPhone was a scratch from a £2 coin

[marcosmapf]

Wait, you guys have a £2 coin on europe? lol

[Necdilzor]

In Argentina there's also a $2 coin.

I don't have a smartphone, I find them useful for activities on the go and to access internet on the outside.

[marcosmapf]

Ah I see...We have coins for only $1 and lower values here in Brazil

Wait, so you don't have a smartphone but you think they are usefull? Why don't you buy one then?

[SpaceGuitarist]

Originally Posted by marcosmapf

I do have an Android one but I hardly use it because I can use skype to talk with all my friends and grooveshark for music...

You do realize cellphones are meant for when you go OUTSIDE and you're far from the computer, right?

[Dino-Fly]

I have an old Nokia with Symbian(and it's too old to even get the latest version of Symbian), so technically a smartphone...but not really.

Either way, it does what I need it to do, and it's practically indestructible.

[Lupin]

Originally Posted by Styx

I stay away from smartphones. I find them an unecessary risk regarding theft and damage. They also are such a distractiom and battery lasts for hours.

I'd choose my crappy, beaten, indestructible nokia over anything.


My battery lasts a week

I used to feel this way about smartphones, not to mention other reasons that made me disregard them (ecological and the likes).

Then I decided to give them a try with the cheapest android I could find. This was not a very convincing experience. I liked toying around programming for it though.

Then, while still being rather hostile to smartphones in general, I bought an iPhone. The reason for this was one single app that I use all the time to study/practice Chinese handwriting, and which exists only on iOS. The app is just fantastic, and if it were only for it, it'd consider it was a worthy investment.

Then I must say I came to really appreciate my iPhone. It does its job as a phone pretty well (with convenient features like visual voice mail, good contacts organization, fast input for text messages...), the format is right, doesn't feel more cumbersome than regular phones.

But the most important is that it's actually useful in a variety of ways. The most important for me being to have reference material for everything always at my hand:
* several monolingual and bilingual dictionary apps (not the crappy cheap ones, professional ones with rich definitions).
* the Internet (Google + Wikipedia on the go = often very useful).
* other educational apps (mainly language-related in my case, but also things like a world atlas)
* orientations (map with GPS = often makes your life much easier, and it's actually fun, paris metro app = very convenient to move around, bike map with counts of available bikes in the stations near me)
* quality camera to take pictures and videos anytime, without the need to always carry around an actual camera. It allows me to take real life pictures, which I would never do if not for it.
* Communication apps, Facebook, QQ, mail, tapatalk (for the MBN) which I can use on the go, during the idle/boring moments of my days, thus saving much time to do other stuff when I'm home. Actually I'm posting this from my iPhone, and I think I'd never have done so if I only had a PC to browse the forum.
* many other stuff that I do use regularly like books, comics, weather, banking, some games, calendar, reminders, mood tracking, goal tracking, sportive activity tracking, karaoke.......

In short, it really does a lot for me. If I'm to live a urban life instead of being a secluded hermit, it's a very useful tool that I wouldn't like to be taken from me.

[Lupin]

As for thieves: I'm prepared for that risk, it doesn't scare me, nor bothers me, I think I'm careful enough with it, to not give much of a chance for someone to rip it off me, and then I'm prepared to defend myself in case that happens. I cannot allow myself to let fear drive my decisions.
As for the battery: I have a workaround to prevent this issue from bothering me: a second charger in my office. I never ran out of battery so far. I hope they fix this issue someday soon though.

[xesf]

Have also an iPhone for awhile and don't know if I will switch to others smartphones. Use all of them for development and iPhone has my favorite interface. iOS7 will be a great step forward on the interface for future buyers.

As related to LBA I do also think iPhone/iPad will be the best smartphone to sell such remake. As I've been notice around me, everyone who has an android phone don't buy anything, they just couldn't pay a single penny for a damn app, so I think LBA will fail on it on sails. Its really important to have a game demo so everyone could try the game before they buy it. There are more sells from trials than directly pay the app.

Strangely and really don't know why, they are not targeting the game for Metro. That's a big mistake. Windows devices are starting to sell a lot, windows OS have the majority of selling computers around the world. That's probably a good question to ask Fred, why only iOS and Android and not WinRT.

[Polaris]

We have a tablet that is mainly used by my father, but no smartphone...

[marcosmapf]

Originally Posted by SpaceGuitarist

You do realize cellphones are meant for when you go OUTSIDE and you're far from the computer, right?

I do , but I don't like to use it on the street because criminality is realy high in my city, and I am realy small, so the chances I'm robbed are realy high

The only times I use my cellphone are when I'm at a friend's house or somewhere closed and I need to talk to someone

[Necdilzor]

Originally Posted by marcosmapf

Ah I see...We have coins for only $1 and lower values here in Brazil

Wait, so you don't have a smartphone but you think they are usefull? Why don't you buy one then?

Did you consider the variable money?

[marcosmapf]

Originally Posted by Necdilzor

Did you consider the variable money?

Buy a crappy one... it doesn't have to be good ¬¬". Its at least better than having none, as even the worse smartphone can access the internet and stuff like.

[Darkflame]

Smartphones are good as small PCs and pseudo-Tricorders. You can then have a nokia (or whatever) as well for the longlife.

As I've been notice around me, everyone who has an android phone don't buy anything, they just couldn't pay a single penny for a damn app, so I think LBA will fail on it on sails.

Theres some contradictory evidence from the Android humble bundles - the % money from Android users is decent, second only to Linux from what I remember.

Given a choice though, add-supported stuff outsales in most cases, however.

Not that I play games on the phone at all. 9/10 times its just a crappy interface and shape for it. Very few genres work well, and those that do typically are uncatered too in the market places.

Also Netbooks are hugely underrated, if traveling on a train or plane they are the best Internet/Watching stuff device imho.

[marcosmapf]

I rather have a tablet for watching movies and videos than a netbook...

[Darkflame]

Originally Posted by A_LIPSTICK

how? i mean i loved my eee pc (RIP alae) but how is it any better than a tablet for that? if anything they're cumbersome with a large battery and have a superfluous keyboard that isn't required for either of those tasks.

My Samsung is thicker, but not really wider or broader then a iPAD...thus is fits in basically the same bags.

The advantage of the keyboard is you can sit it upright without a stand.
The advantage of it being a x86 chip is it runs Windows 7 and Linux just fine...giving a lot more options for video download/playback and other software.

Battery wise it gave about 7 hours when new and using Ubuntu (Windows about 5 hours). These days I get about 4 hours from it, but its a few years old now so thats really pretty good.

[SpaceGuitarist]

Next poll thread: netbooks vs tablets...


(PS: "I don't own a smartphone" IS WINNING. WOOHOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooo! )

[Twinsan]

Originally Posted by SpaceGuitarist

Next poll thread: netbooks vs tablets...


(PS: "I don't own a smartphone" IS WINNING. WOOHOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooo! )

err no it's not

[Zee]

I'm quite suprised how many of you don't own a smartphone. The first time I got my hands on one I refused to go back to the old phones.

[Twinsan]

Originally Posted by Zee

I'm quite suprised how many of you don't own a smartphone. The first time I got my hands on one I refused to go back to the old phones.

I know really? I call my iphone the god phone as it does everything i need it for.