I bought my current phone (a Huawei U8100) a short 8 months ago and I upgraded to a new phone this weekend. I always expected that I wouldn’t use my cheap Chinese android for very long (what’s a Huawei?), especially considering its price (I think it was $180+tax – $20 rebate = $183.40). My phone before that, the E71 cost me $300 and I used that for a year, so 8 months sounds about right :).

I upgraded to Google’s second phone – the Nexus S (constructed by Samsung). It came out at the beginning of this year, and the hardware is (only) a slight upgrade over the the Samsung Galaxy S. I’m not so worried about the hardware (or that it is out of date), but wanted the Nexus S because:

• It is a stock Google phone with no provider (i.e., Wind/Mobilicty) or manufacturer (Samsung) customizations.
• It will receive OS upgrades first and promptly (it’s already running Android 2.3.3)
• It’s a developer phone (like the Nexus One before it)
• I’m happy with the Android ecosystem and willing to invest more into it
• It is a considerable hardware upgrade (screen, processing power and storage) on my existing phone

When it was launched, you could go to the Best Buy in the US to buy it for $529. It launched in April in Canada for a variety of prices. Wind is selling it for $525, Mobilicty is selling it for $500 and Koodo is selling it for $425. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it from Koodo because their model doesn’t support AWS. I ended up getting it for $470 ($531.10 incl tax) from a Mobilicity dealer in First Markham. I think I could have negotiated it down to $450 as I heard some dealers (in Ottawa though) were selling it at that price, but I had also heard that the dealer price in Toronto was around $480.

Since I’m familiar with Android, I set it up and it works well. The only thing to mention is that if you are going to root the phone, it will do a complete factory reset and will completely wipe the 16GB internal memory (since there is no microSD slot). So don’t make the mistake like me and do this after you’ve setup your phone or you’ll have to download and customize twice! Rooting will (visibly) void your warranty – there is an actual unlock icon on boot once you’ve rooted.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, cellphones, google