FOGEY 5 Smartphones

The Fogey 5 are the best five products in their class by virtue of expert and consumer review from at least 10 respected and authoritative websites.

Samsung Galaxy S II

The updated version of the Galaxy S is, apparently, even better than the very fine handset it supersedes. The technorati have been unanimously moist in their lusting for the S II which has a dual core processor (helps keep multiple apps going speedily and simultaneously), Super AMOLEDStands for: Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode - and don't you forget it. It's a type of screen technology, currently prevalent in smartphones and now finding its way into TV sets. Makes for an extremely luscious picture. 4.3-inch display and ‘PCShort for personal computer. Most commentators use the term as a shorthand differentiator between Windows-based computers and AppleFruit, record label, world dominator in the slick boy's toys department devices. But an Apple computer is still a personal computer.-like browsing thanks to the Galaxy S II’s downloading speeds of up to 21mbps or lightning fast downloads with Dual Channel WifiUsually refers to the wireless antennae in a smartphoneOpposite of dumbphone. Device with which which to do pretty much anything except make telephone calls. The best smartphone handsets, such as the Apple iPhoneCostly but beautiful smartphone made by Apple. The standard by which all other smartphones are judged. and Samsung Galaxy, are expensive (the iPhone 5 starts at £529) and to get a 'free' phone you have to commit to a 2 year contract. As we know, new phones come crashing onto the market all the time, so today's state-of-the-art handset will be seriously old hat long before that contract expires. (plural because there are two - for the 2.4 ghz band and the 5 ghz band). WiFi comes in more than one flavour and having dual band WiFi means you can access both which in turn means there won't be a wireless hot spot (in, say, a coffee shop) in which your phone's WiFi won't function..’ It does look uncannily like the iPhone 4, though, and in spite of collaborating on iPad screen manufacture, Apple and Samsung seem to constantly be at legal loggerheads over patent infringement (see the hoo-ha over the Samsung 10.1-inch tablet) and how similar two products can be before they are the same. ‘The Galaxy S II’s screen is nothing short of spectacular. Blacks are impenetrable, colors pop out at you, and viewing angles are supreme,’ said Engadget. ‘A superlative smartphone from Samsung, with a fabulous screen, oodles of power and a cracking camera to match,’ said PCPro. It’s also very thin, if that’s your thing. Launched Q2 2011.

More info here
Handset only – around £500
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Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc

For a number of years Sony Ericsson have been scrabbling at the fringes of the smartphone scrum. Not any more. The Experia Arc is a biggie, blessed with a ‘4.2” Reality Display with Sony Mobile BRAVIA® Engine.’ Brrrm brmm. And ‘a Sony Exmor R™ for mobile CMOS sensor’ which is the thingy wot records the photos you’ve taken. Of Exmoor, possibly. And let’s not forget the ‘- GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900, UMTS/HSPA 800/850/1900/2100, UMTS/HSPA 900/2100’ networks it can access. To be fair, all smartphone specifications are peppered with this drivel and it’s not as if the car industry, for example, doesn’t also enjoy a meaningfully obtuse statistic but come on!!!! ‘Can I make and receive phone calls with this handset wherever I am?’ is what I’d like to know and to this day, no manufacturer or service provider has been able say ‘yes’. ‘Will my phone randomly drop calls even when I and my caller have plenty of service bars and aren’t moving around (like on a train)?’ Yes, it will, especially if it’s an iPhone. After that mini-rant, back to the Xperia Arc: By comparison with the Xperia X10, ‘It’s running the very latest AndroidAn operating system for mobile devices developed by GoogleStarted life as a mere search engine; now hell bent on world domination. More PhDs work for Google than any other single organisation and they're determined to know everything about everyone. For some reason Google thinks this inside info will help them and their chums sell us more stuff.. It is now the principal competition to Apple's iOS (i operating system). It has gone through several versions, all of which have been given wacky nicknames. The latest is known as Ice Cream Sandwich. Those Google geeks are sooo hilarious! 2.3.2 version of the OSOperating System. Windows, Apple's iOS and Linux, for example, are operating systems.. It’s arrived on time. It’s fast, and it’s very, very stylish indeed,’ said Tech Radar who gave it 4.5 out of 5. ‘With an up-to-date version of Android and a stunning wide-screen display, the Arc is a phone we’d be happy to show off,’ said Cnet, who also discovered that, if you thrash it, the battery won’t even last a day. Cripes! Launched Q1 2011.

More info here
Handset only, around £370.
Best deals here

Apple iPhone 4

The only handset that survived the cut from the first Fogey 5 and still the benchmark against which all others are judged. There is an iPhone 5 (okay, it was a 4s…) just around the corner and Chinese opportunists have not only produced copies of it from a leaked pre-production photo but are sending them from mainland Shenzen across the water to Hong Kong via a fishing line pulley system. How naughty. One can only hope the full force of the anti-piracy lobby is brought to bear on these evil-doers. Anyway, anecdotes aside, Mrs Fogey has an iPhone 4 and seems to like it very much (but she likes her noisy, rattly automatic Fiat 500 too, so this tells us precious little). More than the apps and the relative loveliness of the software and operating system it’s the design of the thing that sets it apart. Try as they might, none of the wannabes has made a handset half as handsome. The sausage-of-finger will struggle with the keypad but so you would with any smartphone.

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Handset only, around £500 for a 16GB model and another £50 or so for the 32GB version
Best deals here

Google Nexus S

The Nexus S is made by Samsung and runs the same hardware as their Galaxy S smartphone. Differences? The Nexus doesn’t have an SD cardSecure Digital card. Those memory cards just bigger than a First Class stamp that slot into the side of a camera, PC or phone to provide additional storage. At first 32 megabytes was a good amount of storage spce on an SD card. Now 16 gigabytes (ie 50,000 times more) is common. As with USB memory sticks, the price of high capacity SD cards is now very low - a 16GB SD card is under a tenner. slot but does have a ‘near field’ chip which is the gubbins you’d need to make credit card-type transactions with your phone (in theory). And issues with the Galaxy S sat-nav have been sorted. Its forbear, the Nexus One, was made by HTC so perhaps Google, proprietors of the Apple-ternative Android operating system, are simply spreading their munificence via this Samsung alliance. The Nexus S uses the Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS, has a 4-inch ‘super AMOLED WVGA PenTile matrix display’ (which sounds ever so fancy) and all sorts of whizzy processors and RAMStands for Random Access Memory. If your computer's processor is the conductor, RAM is the orchestra. It dictates the speed at which stuff happens on your computer. Older PCs with 512 megabytes of RAM will seem ploddingly pedestrian compared with newer machines with 4 gigabytes or more., bam and wham that make it highly desirable. In white and black, like the iPhone. “If you’ve got deep pockets and a yen for a phone that’s smarter than you are, the Nexus S won’t disappoint,” said Cnet. “We were fans of the Galaxy S design so we’re relatively impressed with this too,” said Tech Radar. Launched Q4 2010.

More info here.
Handset only, around £300 here
This handset is now so old hat that only discount emporia stock it – a hint that this entire post needs an update.  Soon.

HTC Desire HD

It might seem odd that there’s only one HTC handset in the Fogey 5, given that they make so many that are either good or outstanding. But while Apple makes one smartphone, HTC has 16 on its roster. No wonder the accolades are somewhat diluted. Aside from a MUCH BIGGER screen it’s a challenge to discern significant differences between the Desire, Desire S and Desire HD (the Desire Z’s slide out QWERTY keyboard is an obvious departure) but here are some of the HD’s features that aren’t abbreviations or acronyms: 4.3 inch screen, 8 megapixel autofocus camera with dual LED flash, up to 32GB storage with Micro SDHCSecure Digital High Capacity. As the name suggests - an SD card with more storage capacity. Not backwards compatible - older devices such as cameras that take standard SD cards won't be compatible with the newer SDHC cards. Newer devices that do take SDHC cards will also take standard SD cards. Got all that?Like an SD card but smaller. About the size of a little finger nail, a Micro SD card is often used to store stuff on smaller mobile phones. Adapters are available that let you plug a micro SD card into a standard SD card slot. card, weighs 164g. Well, ok, a couple crept in. It couldn’t helped. All HTC’s posh phones now come with HTC Sense – a user-interface (or not) that does too much to be summarised. The full mind-bogglingness is here. “For smart-phone fans who want the biggest, most feature-packed beauty that money can buy, the HTC Desire HD delivers in style,” said Cnet. “Certainly one of the best devices available today,” said Pocket Lint. Launched Q4 2010.

More info here
Handset only, around £250 here