Mobile Phone Buying Guide
The mobile phone market just keeps on growing and the choice now available is truly endless. To make choosing your next mobile phone easier decide on the type of user you are and what you really want from your next mobile phone. If you are a type of user who just uses there phone for calling and sending texts, then you should consider looking for a basic handset towards the lower end of the market. These mobile phones can often be identified as the retailers will offer them on pay-as-you-go tariffs and they usually have a 2 megapixel camera or lower. Recently Nokia released the 7210 and 7310 supernova’s which are great examples of low spec handsets aimed at the lower end of the market and the growing developing market.
Music phones
2008 is the year when mobile phone manufacturers challenged the MP3 market by offering gigabytes of built-in memory and MicroSD™ memory card support. Apple was the leader in this market by offering the iPhone with 8GB of memory, unfortunately it did not offer much else. If you want to use your mobile phone as an MP3 player you should be looking for a mid range handset with lots of memory (8 GB’s or above) and MicroSD™ support to allow you to store all your favorite tunes. Based on one song being 3 MB, 8GB of memory will store 2500 tunes. Many of the music based handsets have dedicated music player controls, shake control and support all the main file formats (MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAc+, MP4, OMA DRM 2.0, WMA). Remember to consider connectivity when looking for a music based handset, Bluetooth 2.0 and USB 2.0 are very useful when transferring music to your handset. Many of the mobile phone manufacturers have released handset ranges designed to specifically target this area of the market. Nokia have released the Xpressmusic range, these handsets have dedicated forward, rewind, play & pause buttons and a Say & Play feature which allows the user to select a tunes with voice controls. Samsung have gone one step further with their Walkman range by teaming up with Bang & Olufsen to ensure a high quality sound and using their patented DNSe (Digital Natural Sound engine) which enhances natural sounds and provides deep bass.
Camera Phones
If the reason you are looking for a new mobile phone is because you want to ditch your out of date 3 megapixel camera then you are in for a real treat. 2008 has seen the launch of 8MP camera phones. As with music based handsets, memory is also important when choosing a camera phone, even more so now as the picture quality is growing, so is the size of the image. Ensure your next camera mobile phone has MicroSD™ support, this will allow you to upgrade the memory to 16 gigabytes. Other features you should be looking for when selecting a camera phone are digital zoom between 8 and 16x, auto focus, face detection and an image stabilizer. Having these features available to your disposal will ensure good quality photos every time. If you like to take photos at night, perhaps when you are out with friends then a flash will be very important feature to have on your next camera mobile phone. There are a large variety of flashes available from single LED right through to a xenon flash, which is the one you should be looking for if you consider the flash to be important. Sony Ericsson C905 is a brilliant example of a high end camera mobile phone. It packs a punch with an 8.1 MP cyber-shot camera with 16x digital zoom and a xenon flash. Samsung will not be left behind as they have released the Samsung i8510 INNOV8 with an 8 MP camera featuring autofocus, panorama shot and image stabiliser.
Business Phones
Blackberry have always been the market leader when it comes to business mobile phones, with so many all singing and all dancing mobile phones being released this is no longer the case. If you are searching the market for a business mobile phone we can safely assume having instant email or push email as we know it will be very important. Connectivity as a whole should be one of the main areas to compare the latest business mobile phones before you purchase. For example the Nokia N95 and N96 will allow you to send an email with an attachment but the Blackberry Bold 9000 will not. Do you require this as part of your daily work? We would recommend reading a variety of independent reviews before making your final decision on your next business mobile phone.
TOP TIP: Ensure you read lots of mobile phone reviews to get as many opinions as possible before buying.
