Best value cell phone - its a Samsung

My partner and I are always using our electronic appliances. Recently, we bought an Android-based Samsung I5503T cell phone in New Zealand for $NZ150 inclusive of a SIM card and pre-paid SMS & call credits from Telecom NZ for 6 months. This places the phone cost at just over $NZ100 we thought. The nice qualities about this phone was its Android software, its great sound playing music off YouTube, great Wifi connectivity, good design. Skype Mobile worked well. Just I prefer a QWERTY keyboard (as a writer).

Now, there are three problems with this phone:

1. The small sized battery - the result of which is short battery life - you could be charging it up every day for higher volume use. This is unacceptable to me. I am a writer; I write a lot of notes, so I want good battery life.

2. The lack of QWERTY keyboard - if you do a lot of typing you will want the QWERTY keyboard because screen-based keyboards do not offer the same 'tippled' board for better selectivity and control over your choice. If you have big fingers you could push '5' five times when you really wanted '6'. Not good. If you have small fingers however, or you want the phone only to read books,to telephone or play music, then you might be ok. The swivel screen gives you bigger keys in landscape mode, but still its a problem.

3. The phone size - The Telephone manufacturers are obsessed with size and power. Designed by macho-men you might think. This is a problem with only Nokia seems to understand because Nokia seems to be the only company under-powering their phones for longer battery life, whilst offering larger batteries than the likes of others. The other problem is screen size. I personally resent the need to have a cellphone, a tablet and a laptop. The tablet is really an 'unnecessary hybrid' of the other two. For this reason, I want a bigger screen, or a Nokia E61i/E5 size phone (with my much preferred QWERTY keyboard). Nokia could move towards a slightly even bigger phone than the E61i and I would still be able to fit it into my pocket....preferably with a slightly larger battery given the extra size.

I fully expect a phone of this design in future. The Nokia E61i is a little small on screen size to read books. I tried and I had to reduce the page to 61% in order to read it...it was barely legible. A slightly better resolution and a slightly larger screen will make all the difference.

If you want the QWERTY keyboard, you might like our choice of the Sony Ericsson Mini-Pro (??) reviewed before. This similarly had a small battery, but it did have the slid-out QWERTY keyboard. I personally don't like slide-out keyboards because they are often lose, and tend to have poor balance in the hand. This is because you are not always standing up when you write. I often right lying down.

Only update if you need to. I'm staying with my Nokia E5 until I get my next well-designed Android-based, QWERTY phone. I've lost confidence in Nokia's software, though it meets my immediate needs. They are moving to Windows; but I'd prefer Android....but I might adopt Windows if version 8 is ok. I can live with Windows; I use it for my computing.

Tablets are a flash in the pan...not functional enough. All you can do is read on them. The shallow lives of some people.

Here is another cell phone to consider - the LG-GW620 - it has the slide-out keyboard, but check to see if its well balanced when you are lying down, standing, sitting, etc. Battery life has been questioned...because I'd say its a small battery. But you have to like its 5-row QWERTY keyboard with independent numeric and navigation keys. That's one over Nokia E5.

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Andrew Sheldon www.sheldonthinks.com