This morning I posted to Twitter:

T-Mobile want to charge me £170 to upgrade to an HTC Desire. Yet another reason I’ll probably switch to Vodafone next month.

£170 for the upgrade, on a contract that was already costing me about £30 every month? No thank you very much.

People can say what they like about Twitter but it’s great when I start getting responses like these, it makes it a great place for me:

gavinlew: speak to @vodafoneukdeals for a good deal on a htc desire – there is a nice guy called Ben who is helping me out

artesea: if you want I can get you 30% the line rental on any (standard) tariff. Makes £35 a month only £24.50

VodafoneUKdeals: We can do the Desire FREE on 18 month 300mins unlimited sms and data for £30 all in [and] artesea’s staff discount would still be available on the £30 offer saving you even more! :-) ^BH

After a quick chat with Vodafone’s Web Relation team, they knocked that £30 monthly contract down to £25 and signed me up. With any luck, artesea (Ryan Cullen) will still be OK giving me that 30% staff discount too.

Here’s a random graph I thought I’d put together just for the fun of it:

Hooray for the interweb!

The G1?

With the G1 I have a smooth, clean, and fast experience that was designed from the start to be a touch screen interface to be used with your fingers (i.e. without a stylus). Combine that with the 5-row keyboard and I’ve got a device where I can type out very fast text messages and happily browse the internet.

Biggest negatives? The battery life is poor and the camera isn’t too hot.

The N97?

Within days of owning the N97 I had constructed a hefty list of niggles – fairly major problems that I was having with the device. There were 28 of them!

My main outstanding issues are simply summed up like this: the S60 operating system is terrible for a touch phone. A bit harsh? Maybe. The underlying issue is that Nokia have taken their usual OS and added a few touch features to it, ending up with an inconsistant mess that’s frustrating to use. Really, so bad that I packed the phone back in it’s box two days ago and wondered if I should sell it.

All is not lost though – the N97 really does kick G1 butt when comparing both the camera and battery.

Is that enough?

Today’s decision

The N97 simply does have better hardware. It may be frustrating for me to use but that doesn’t mean it won’t eventually do what I want. The G1 on the other hand will never take as good photos or remain charged for as long – it physically can’t.

That’s settled then, for now, the N97 has it’s new home in my right pocket and the G1 will stay in my rucksack, available as a backup and for any moments where I need the extra Google connectivity with it’s better GMail and GTalk clients.

Every time I go to demonstrate the fantastic Street View mode in Google Maps on my new G1 handset, I find that it never knows which way it should be facing. This was also true when using the Wikitude application (which is also very cool). So – how to fix this? I’ve found a method on the internet which works every time for me.

All you have to spin the phone pretty quickly in your hands, obviously keeping a firm grip on your expensive handset, but flipping it fairly agrressively in all sorts of directions. For example, rolling it over and over in your hands is how I usually do it. And that’s all you need to do to calibrate the T-Mobile G1/Android handset’s compass feature, and the fix only takes a few seconds!

Now I can show people the Eiffel Tower and scenes around New York whenever I like. I hope this works for everyone else too.

UPDATE: Of course this also works on all the other Android handsets too. I now have an HTC Desire and this calibrates the compass perfectly.

This will be my third HTC handset. It has the speed advantage of the first (HTC BlueAngel) and the size / style advantage of the second (HTC Touch). Combined together it makes one awesome phone!

What to do with the old phones? The HTC BlueAngel functions as my bedside MP3 player. The Touch is still a great phone and a tech-savy relative might like to get hold of it. We’ll see.

For 3 years or more I was on a minimal Vodafone contract (Singlepoint actually, acquired by Vodafone back in 2003). We’re talking £12/month in the basic contract (750 off peak same network minutes and 50 texts) with bills sometimes going up to about £20. Not very much expenditures at all!

My new Orange contract is a completely different saucepan of penguins: £31.50/month for 500 cross network anytime minutes and unlimited texts. Since they bundled in the headphones and £100 cashback, their offer is far better than anything Vodafone offered me. I even went into the store and they admitted that they don’t have the phone I want or anything close to my needs.

But now my old mobile – hurrah! a Nokia 6310i – gets called every day from Vodafone’s Retention team (08080000133) trying to offer me stupid little deals, such as reducing my current contract to £10/month. This is not what I want at all. I’d gladly pay Orange the extra line rental – I’m using it heavily and I’m going to push the limits of their “unlimited” (aka 3000) monthly texts.

To Vodafone: I spoke to 5 people in various teams before deciding to end my contract, you simply can not convince me at this point to continue with you. You don’t give me what I want.

To Orange: Thanks!!

UPDATE: Vodafone also seem to be using this number (08080000133) for other purposes. I registered my interest in pre-ordering an iPhone from Vodafone at the end of 2009 and they’re now chasing those that showed an interest.