I like the Hero I've got, but the OS is still a little buggy & in it's infancy. They predictive text for emailing/texting is great – i just mash the keys on the screen & 95% of the time it correctly guesses the word I want!
I'm happy enough with it anyway, may be worth you looking at getting it from somewhere like Expansys, as I could get the same deal through them but on a shorter contract & the phone is unlocked too, so win-win really as I can freely load update ROMs as they come out…

IPhones are better supported though, that's for sure.

I've been deciding between these 2 phones over the last week. I ordered the Hero on Saturday
Did plenty of research and even watched the videos on youtube where some geek reviews them both together. I could genuinely not see why/how O2/Apple warrant the cost of the iPhone (i'm not normally one to bother with the cost of things if it's what i want/it works).
I'm really happy with my choice, should be with me in a couple of days will give impressions then

Check out http://www.mobiles.co.uk/ – they're very good for online deals.

HTC with Android works 1000% better than all the windows based 'smart' phones i've had, battery life is an issue though, but going to try some of the fixes for this

I have the iphone 3G at the moment, and to be honest, as good as it is for most things, i still find it frustrating in a couple of areas. Its lack of syncing with anything other than outlook on the PC for one ( i dont use google ). The second is the roundabout way I have to use to store files on it for viewing on the go.

The iphone is just too locked down and restrictive after a while to me.

HTC HD2 may be my next phone I think.

has anyone mentioned iPhone battery life(!) yet?

if you want to carry a charger around with you, I'm sure they're great…

I'm a waiting for the N900!

I have a Hero and it's excellent. However, it must have the updated ROM because it was pretty sluggish on original one. The new ROM is available as a download off the HTC website and literally makes it twice as fast.

You still can't transfer files by bluetooth though which is a pain in the arse. MInd you I don't think there's bluetooth file transfer on the iPhone either

Plus it's worth buying solely for the cool Google Sky Map app that you can't get on the iPhone

If i could have waited i would have been tempted with the X3

Damn just looked and it maybe released next month, when i last googled it the release date was going to be next year!

I've got both a blackberry curve for work and a 3GS for personel use – I love my iphone, the interface, the aps, everything. The blackberry is pretty good from a business point of view but its just a phone, where as the iphone does loads more.

Worth noting that the curve is pretty flimsy, I'm on my 3rd in about 2 months as the ball/pearl thing keeps breaking. don't show it any moisture in the slightest (I had it in my jersey pocket on a road ride) because it severely buggers the buttons.

has anyone mentioned iPhone battery life(!) yet?

if you want to carry a charger around with you, I'm sure they're great...

Think you'll find the Hero & 3GS are pretty much the same on battery life. As always it depends on what you are doing/what is turned on your phone, such as 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, Push email. Me (iPhone) & my friend (Hero) get about the same out of our phones.

@Houns: Rachael, the X3. Now that's a whole new can o'worms… I'd seen that slated for a jan/feb '10 release date, so if I could do a side-by-side comparison with that, the Hero and the Iphone 3Gs, I'd pretty soon know which was going to win my cash…

@Flange: Cheers for the lookout on the Blackberry; I ride with my phone in my jersey or in my camelback and take it into the gym, so a phone that can't handle a bit of moisture would be no good to me at all.

I had no idea that the iPhone had such poor battery life. I knew the Hero did, and I thought that the new firmware had sorted that by addressing the sms client problem. Not something that you can do with an apple? (but correct me if I'm wrong.) Having had to carry a cxharger with me in my TYTN2 days, it's not something I'll be keen on doing again. If I'm gonna do that I might as well buy a netbook and get a proper browsing experience!

I just carry spare batteries for my phones, but with the iphone you can't do that.

"I just carry spare batteries for my phones, but with the iphone you can't do that. "

If it's an issue, you can carry a 3rd party external battery/charger thingy. Never needed it myself, except when camping and away from mains electricity for several days.

Hmm… Spare battery. I had one once, but where did I put it? Y'see, I lose stuff. It's not the phone's fault, I've always done it (once lost TWO watches in a week) but it does mean that carrying spares is a pretty risky option for me.

Thing is that either of these phones will mean you need to keep charging up in mind as they don't last that long. I found that most generic USB-chargers don't work with the HTCs, they must use a different pin-out than other phones for their "ext-usb" connector.

My hero charges off my garmin usb charger, so I can use the garmin car charger too

I always keep at least 2 or 3 batteries in my wallet. These li-po ones are diddy.

iPhone. Purely because it has a far less gimpy name than the other.

Sorry to highjack the thread but i'm looking at a new phone too as my contract is up in a few weeks, been using a Nokia N96 for the last year and i'm pretty happy with it, but it is laggy and i'm keen on getting something thats not so laggy…

I've always like SE phones for use especially texting, i was tempted with a N97 but read last night that they are just as laggy as the N96, ironically the N96 was the only phone on the website that had a 5 star rating, SE are releasing the Satio is this actually any good ?

I had a touch screen phone before that used to annoy me cause i was disconnecting calls with my ear, has this changed think i read somewhere the Iphone deactivates the screen when up against your ear, do the other touch screen phones do this too ?
My main priorities are texting, music, and calls really, a gps would be good too…

Thanks for any suggestions….

The screen on the hero blanks while you're on a call, to stop your ear/cheek/etc., from activating the screen. 😉

@ colin@rush

the satio runs off symbian s60 i think so will more than likely be no better or worse than the N96/7.

having previously owned an iPhone i'd say go for the palm pre. Does all the things you need it to and can multitask.

HTC Hero is also going to get Android 2.0 shortly, which will include proper sat nav built in for free. To get an idea of how big this will be, TomTom stock fell by nearly 30% today when Google announced it.

Fabulouso – how far away is Android 2 on the Hero, I wonder? Its going to be launched on the Motorola Droid in the states on the 6th November.

I like my Hero a lot.

Colin

My Hero was waiting for me when i got home last night, apart from sleep i haven't stopped playing with it yet, its great! However never used a phone with a qwerty keyboard before so taking a bit of time getting used to texting

Don't have either although i do have an i-pod touch – it's all very good and everything and have used the apps quite a lot and lay on the couch with Safari – have to say i found myself getting bored of it really quickly.

did occur to me that apple should make a much bigger version and sell it as a tablet

Both have their advantages, but the main reason that people chose the Android here at work is because they wanted to play with it on a code level. They are geeks and always like to play.

I bought an iPhone because I wanted to combine my music with a phone that does GPS and a load of other things. It does all of these well. Yes, it has limitations (Skype not running in the background, low battery life, etc), but it is a very good phone for everything I want. It also synchs my work Exchange mail very easily.

Whilst the Android phone does all this, it is not as polished.

I just wish that Apple would open the phone up a bit more. I'd like to be able to add things to it, tweak it and play a little more.

I like my blackberry curve, battery life is ok, and it is easy to use, I also like my girlfriends hero, the battery life isn't as good though.

Also, I am generally quite hard on phones so I don't want to pay extra money on top of my conract for something I will break in after a year or so.

i added the Handsent app for sms and whereas at this time of day i'd have 25% battery left after a full charge over night i now have 68%, so i'm impressed!

Haven't used the Hero, but recently switched to iPhone after several Blackberry handsets, entirely because of the poor syncing between BB and OSX. As that's not a problem if you're using Windows, the Blackberry Bold or Curve would be a viable alternative option.

My last BB was a Bold – nice phone, good screen, reasonable battery life. You can add in apps like Documents to Go which gives you a fair degree of functionality in terms of writing and editing MS Office docs.

The Bold was also pretty tough – mine was dropped onto hard surfaces a couple of times and kept going despite having lumps knocked out of the chrome surround. I've been alarmed by the number of people I've met who've shagged their iPhone by dropping it and cracking the screen. No idea how good or bad the Hero is in this respect.

rOcKeTdOg, this also worked for me for 24hrs then the battery reverted to being sh1t again. I've since swapped SD cards and got it working properly (for now anyway), which makes me think the phone is writing something to the card (via an app or widget) that kills sleep time or battery. Just a heads-up in case it starts acting up again.

Anyone thought about an HTC HD2? Comming to an O2 shop soon – maybe in teh next 2 weeks – a bit bigger but HD quality visoe 5mega pix camera 1Ghz processor…..