What mobile phone to choose?
There are so many mobile phone models out there, with so many features with fancy names, putting us in a big difficulty when we come to a shop and try to take a decision on what to buy. And the difficulty is often even bigger when we find out that the phone we’ve chosen isn’t linked with a package from our operator. Eventually we realise that we’ve wasted 2 hours of our time shopping around without coming to any decision.
I’ll tell you what I usually do and then you could decide if it suits you as well.
First of all, I start with Amazon.com. I go there to look for bestsellers, to check the design and the features which are important for me. The good thing is that on Amazon.com you can find SIM-free mobile phones, so you could stay with your operator without buying from it a new phone that you don’t quite like.
One may think that it’s easy to check which the bestsellers are and what is the coolest design, but what about the features? How do I know what features are the most important, the newest and the most useful? Well, that’s a tricky one. There are lots of features that are called with “upper-case letters” that you don’t know what they stand for and what they really mean.
You probably have an idea about what design you would prefer and the purpose of use of your future phone, don’t you? So features like touch-screen, full keyboard and slide / clam / tablet shape are easy to keep in mind for you to take a preliminary decision.
After that, you need to decide on features like screen width, camera performance, network. So the touch-screen devices have a screen superior to 3 inches. A good new non-touch phone has a screen of 2.4 inches or more. A 3.2 mega-pixel camera is currently considered basic. Anything below that can’t take good pictures unless your’re outdoor and it’s sunny. The best cameras are now the ones of over 8 mega pixels. There are even phones with 12 mega pixel cameras. If you use your phone for downloads, you better buy a 3G handset against an EDGE one. You may also see acronyms like HSDPA or HSUPA. These tell you that the speed of data on your phone is even higher than simply 3G. HSUPA has a better speed than HSDPA. The WiFi and Bluetouth features are also quite important nowadays.
Finally, you could check what games and applications are embedded on the phone. The motion games are of course something new and interesting. Business applications like Office Mobile are very useful as well. Navigation is not as used as it pretends to be, but it’s good to have this feature just in case. They call navigation also GPS or a-GPS. Many other apps are just marketing tricks, because you will never use them apart from showing off in front of your friends.
So, after I’m with all this info in mind, I go and check on Amazon.com and make a short list of phones and brands that I would like to have. Then I check if my operator has them in its shop so I could go over for a “touch and feel session”. Then I come back to Amazon.com, place the order and get it in less than a week with 12-month guarantee.
This way I never waste time: I do the pre-selection in the evening, while my wife is watching the X-factor, I do the touch & feel while my wife is shopping and I do the order on Amazon.com during an TV ad break.
