i want a smartphone but cannot spend £££ galaxy ace, htc wildfire?

[kaz110]

ok, i would like to scrap my ancient (pre-camera generation) PAYG nokia and would really like a smart phone.

problem is i don't have a lot of money to spend. with PAYG, i rarely spent more than £5 a months but would like a smartphone for then convenience of being able to go online when needed, to take pictures or little videos (digicam gave up then ghost recently as well) etc etc. i have internet at home and in the office so won't need a very high download limit and i don't make an awful lot of mobile phone calls (hence only a fiver).

saw some deals for a samsung galaxy ace for £12.50. is the galaxy ace a decent phone? saw also affordable deals for the htc wildfire? any opinion on that? or any other suggestions?

I have the galaxy ace and it's fine... I have it on a £13 per month contract (100 mins talktime, couple of thousand texts, unlimited data) . Prefer my old Noikia E71 but that developed a fault thus why I got a new phone. I miss having a keyboard - galaxy ace is touch screen, takes some getting used to the keyboard. I've disabled the Swipe keyboard and gone with the Samsung one, which is more basic.

The Galaxy Ace (at least, the version I have) does not do Flash. It does access YouTube.

It will take photos, which then get automatically uploaded to Google+ private photo album, so like an internet backup.
I've not tried video but it will do that, don't know if that gets auto uploaded or not (I guess not, due to filesize).

I run a few mapping apps on it - Viewranger (Ordnance survey maps and walking routes), Waze (traffic and navigation). I also have social network apps like Tweetdeck and FourSquare.

Depending on what apps you endup using... one problem with the galaxy ace is that the internal phone memory is quite low and some apps do not install to SD Card, so take up that internal phone memory. It's a bit annoying but I suspect that more and more apps will over time be SD Card installs, or moveable to SD Card. This may be an issue with any Android based phone... some apps are written such that they use the SD Card, whilst others only use internal phone memory.

I had the wildfire,it was well made and re;iable but god was it slow.I now have the Galaxy ace and I love it.It does what I want at a half decent speed ,being rural the internet is painfully slow but I regularly Mumsnet on it,also have the Kindle app,so if I,m out and about and have time to kill,I,ve always got a book with me

Like Nick, I have a Galaxy Ace (mine is on PAYG as the Three store was out of stock of the phone I wanted at the time, the [much smaller] Galaxy Europa [priced at 50 quid instead of 120 or thereabouts {double drat that it is now thrown in on the contract they offer now}].

Have not used Google+ so my photos get stored on my micro-SD card (I bought a 16 GB card cheap online some weeks back).

Am interesting in the apps Nick has mentioned (though I won't bother with Foursquare or Tweetdeck as I don't touch social networks).

For a few quid (3 or 4, it was some time ago) I bought the SlideIT keyboard app, which I have found works well for me.

I went for a SIM only deal [poor credit rating because I was bankrupt for some time] and for 15 quid I get 600 minutes, 3000 texts and unlimited internet.

I think you'd be better off with the Ace than the Wildfire - have heard of a fair few stories about it being frustrating because it is the 'starter' phone compared with the HTC Desire and others that HTC do. The Wildfire (mini) may have a bit more RAM than the Ace, but the Ace runs Android v2.3 while the Wildfire might be stuck with v2.2

The Wildfire S is better than the original Wildfire, and has a similar with a similar screen size to the Galaxy Ace, and more RAM.

You can compare the Ace withother phones on *> GSM Arena

As a cheap first smartphone, you can get ZTE Crescents, branded as T-Mobile Vivacity, cheaply on ebay. I bought one as my wife's first smartphone and it seems very good to us, but I couldn't compare to Galaxies, HTC Desires, etc.

If you are buying them Brand New In Box, they go for around £85, a bit more if they are unlocked. Nearly new, locked examples go for about £65. Typically these seem to be unwanted upgrades which have only been used for a week or two. If you are reasonably technically savvy you can unlock them yourself .

As a PAYG deal, Talkmobile gives you 25MB per day for about 30p per day, whereas the bigger networks seem to charge £1 per day, but you should get a bigger allowance for that. We do things like downloading apps on the wifi network at home, so we only have to pay data charges when we really need to use it on the move.

I have the Galaxy Ace for £10.21 a month on Virgin, though I was with them already and threatened to leave if they didn't do me a deal