With the holiday season approaching fast, lots of people are looking for their next phone upgrade, either for themselves or for their family or friends. We’ve had some announcements of phones coming out, or ones that have been released recently. There’s a variety of operating systems to choose from, along with carriers. Let’s start a discussion about each aspect of a phone upgrade.
First off, the carrier. Who are you with now? Have you been happy with them? Have you considered switching, and if so, to who? There’s been lots of changes going on with carriers too, ranging from data rates, to caps, to 4G technologies. We have At&t trying to merge/buy T-Mobile USA. We’ve had Sprint announce their plans to roll out LTE instead of their WiMax network for 4G (rumor is that it won’t start until 2013 though). We have some carriers that set a hard cap on data usage, while others throttle your speed once you reach a limit. For voice and 3G, we have CDMA/EVDO vs GSM/HSPA.
For the operating systems, the big ones are obvious…Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7. There’s also Blackberry and still some WebOS devices out there (although its being discontinued). So with all of those choices, which is your preference? Would you consider using one of the other ones? What features do you like most about them? Which do you like least?
Now for the phones. We have Nokia announcing their new Windows Phone 7 devices, but there’s talk that they won’t come to the US until 2012. We have the new Samsung Galaxy S II line coming to most carriers. Verizon has the Motorola Droid RAZR coming out. Then there’s the next developer phone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which is coming to Verizon. The GSM version has penta-band 3G/HSPA though, so it’ll work across all carriers, you might just have to buy it from overseas right now. There’s also the new iPhone 4S. Blackberry has their Bold line and Torch lines.
So with all those choices out there, talk about what your plans are. We’re interested to see what everyone is doing.