Looking to upgrade my phone and was looking at the Nexus S.

My previous experiences of Vodafone is that they tend to lock down the phones and gear them towards using the Vodafone Live Network – free sample games that you can’t delete, Vodafone SatNav that you need to subscribe to, Vodafone Specific Menus etc
Not had a smart phone from them, so it’s not been an issue in the past. Anyone use Vodafone with an Android phone? any good? I want the freedom to use it as it was intended rather than it being restricted.

Cheers

My Desire is “open” and is not locked to Vodafone branding like my old Nokia.

Thanks, that’s reassuring. How do you find the Desire? Looks like they have a Desire S coming out soon.

my Legend is open too.

No Voda bloatware dragging it down.

Even got official 2.2 froyo on it too.

It’s pretty very easy to unlock your phone.
Just type in “[your phone model] debrand instructions” into Google. Should throw up something. You generally have to download something to either your PC or your phone to do it, but it’s really simple.

The Desire S (and Incredible S) are very nice looking devices.

The classic Desire has it’s faults (specifically, it has one fault, the internal storage space is too small) but nothing that isn’t bypassable with a bit of fiddling.

Been looking at exactly the same thing just now.

Might go for the Desire S at £25 per month on Vodafone, though I’m still looking at Tesco where I can get a Desire HD for £22.50 per month with more data (1GB vs 500MB) though it’s a higher up-front payment (£160 vs £99). Need to see both phones in the flesh – HD version might just be too big.

Most android phones on Vodafone are free of anything added, unless you get one of the cheap VF branded ones.

Nexus S is sold as “pure” android, as it doesn’t have an additional user interface skin like HTC Sense. Colleague has one to do some testing but prefers his Desire, mainly due to size.

I think the Desire S runs 2.3 (Gingerbread), like the Nexus S. You’ll probably get OS updates faster on the Nexus as they’ll come from Google, rather than having to go through HTC first to allow for all the customisations.

Vodafone stuck a load of bloatware one update prior to Froyo2.2. There was such a public out cry that I don’t think they would do that again…