For the past two years we’ve been using Optus pre-paid phones. The phones have changed a few times, but the plan has been the same.  Phones have included an old Motorola RAZR, a Samsung flip-phone, a cheap Nokia (purchased the last time the RAZR died, which it did on a regular basis) a Blackberry Curve, and a Blackberry Pearl. While some would consider those last two ‘smart-phones’, I’d lump all of these into the ‘feature-phone’ category with some having more features than others. Whatever the case, having an iPad for the past year has brought me to the somewhat regrettable conclusion that it was time to get new phones.

Plans

In our case, we paid Optus an average of $25.00 AUD/month/phone. The plan was okay, but it was very limiting for texts and some/most calls, with the former increasing in price dramatically over the two years we’ve been with Optus. The only other comment I have for and about Optus is that the incessant calls trying to sell us on contract plans were irritating and one of the prime reasons I chose to move to a different carrier. Many months ago I added Optus to my address book with a custom silent ring tone.  This reduced the irritation, but it’s the thought that counts.

In addition to the phones, I’ve been using a Vodafone $10.00 AUD/250MB/30 days pre-paid plan for my iPad. As far as usage goes, I don’t think I ever used more than 50MB over the 3G connection on the iPad in a month.

So, in total we have paid an average of $60.00 AUD/month for two phones and one iPad.

The new plan is a Vodafone two-year business contract with very favorable voice, text and data rates/quotas. As with most contract plans, new phones are included, which we’ll get to in a minute. In addition to the phones, two ‘free’ 1GB/month iPad data plans are also included. The price for all of this? $74.00AUD/month, and I negotiated for enough credit to cover almost six months of service.

I should mention that I’ve been following the 2011 F1 season, so that may explain my choice of carrier and that photo at the top. Also, it doesn’t hurt that the Vodafone service on my iPad was inexpensive, trouble-free and didn’t come with any telemarketing.

Phones

Enough on the plans, the new phones are… Androids. Specifically, a Google Nexus S and an HTC Legend, both of which were ‘free’.

The Nexus S was an easy choice.  It’s fast, has a bunch of acronyms and initialisms in the spec sheet, and it comes completely unlocked. The HTC Legend isn’t the newest or fastest Android phone out there, but I’m willing to bet that it’s one of the best made and nicest. Between the two, I prefer the size, design and build of the Legend and the superflous features of the Nexus S.

Why no iPhones? There are a few reasons, but the primary reasons are 1. price and 2. iOS.

1. Price. The cost for a 16GB iPhone from Vodafone with the same plans as above is $60.00AUD/month and $47.00 AUD/month (the HTC and Nexus have different plans). Add a 1GB/month iPad plan, as above, and the bill hits $75.00 AUD/month and $62.00 AUD/month for each phone. So, in an apples to Apples comparison we’re looking at $74.00 AUD/month vs $137.00 AUD/month. Over the 24 month contract the iPhones would run $3288.00 AUD while the Androids come in at $1776.00 AUD, which is a difference of $1512.00 AUD, or about one nicely-optioned MacBook Air, which, coincidentally, I’m also considering.

2. iOS. I have nothing against iOS, in fact, I like it quite a bit. The issue I have with iOS on my phone is that we already have iOS on a couple iPods, my iPad and soon-to-be second iPad. I thought it was time to try something else.  At this point I don’t foresee not having some sort of iOS device, but I don’t want to be limited to only iOS devices.  As an alternative to iOS, Android seems to offer just about everything I want or need, and iOS (including iOS 5) doesn’t appear to have much, if any advantage over Android (3.x).

I was very tempted to get a Windows Phone 7 phone, but there aren’t any phones running Windows Phone Mobile 7 that I liked as much as the Nexus S. On a side note, the imminent ‘Mango’ update for the Windows Mobile Phone 7 OS looks promising, and some of the aspects of Windows Phone 7 Mobile Phone look more interesting and potentially better than the comparatively similar iOS and Android. On the down-side, Phone Mobile Windows 7 seems too focused on games and an Xbox something or other, neither of which interest me. Anyway, I’m going to use the new phone with my Google Apps domain, and as you’d expect, Android phones tend to work very well with Google’s other offerings.  On top of that, the Nexus S is nice phone (have I mentioned that?), and that alone was probably enough to sway me to Android.

Etc.

So, there we are.  We haven’t had the phones long enough to give a meaningful review, but that will be coming.  I’ll be looking at Android, and I suppose the phones themselves, from a long-time and current  iOS user.  Topics I’m currently dealing with are the migration of data from Blackberry, Android integration with OS X and MobileMe, and brushing-up on current Android news.

Okay, so this is an iPad.  Specifically, it is the Australian iPad 3G 32GB on a Peruvian llama blanket.

Why? Well, I was looking at netbooks and really never found anything I wanted.  If you recall, I did get a Microsoft TechNet membership, which gave me access to Windows 7 without getting new hardware. Now, it would have been reasonable to assume that I could have gone with any Apple notebook so that I could use Windows 7 on a portable system.  However, I went with the one Apple portable that can’t run Windows, or OS X for that matter.  As a side note, the recently announced  Toshiba Libretto W100 may have been a good Windows netbook, but the price would have been too high.  Also, I recently worked with an Asus 1005P.  Being roughly one half to one third the cost of an iPad, I was impressed with the system and would probably consider one if I were still in the market.

Anyway, back to the iPad.  I’m not going to cover the size, cost or design of the iPad as may others have already done this.  I’m not even going to include any review links– just do a search and I’m sure you’ll see hundreds of reviews.  Instead, I’ll discuss some of the software and uses I’ve found for the iPad in the first few weeks of use.

First, news (RSS) readers.  I’ve been regularly using Google Reader for the past few years.  I’ve found news readers are a convenient and quick way of keeping up with my preferred news sites.  Shortly after receiving the iPad I purchased a copy of Reeder, one of many iPad RSS/news readers. The Reeder interface is intuitive, minimal and works very well on the iPad.  While Reeder can import the subscribed feeds from Google Reeder, it lacks Google’s ‘Recommended Items/Sources’ feature.  Even with this omission, I far prefer reading the news on the iPad over a laptop or desktop.

Flipboard is a ‘social magazine’ (pseudo news reader?) that I’ve tried.  The Flipboard interface is nice, but the sources aren’t very configurable and are fairly generic.   On top of that, it isn’t possible to disable or remove the links to ‘my’ Facebook/Twitter accounts.  I have little to no interest in either of these services, so their prominent presence in the interface is annoying.  On the other hand, I don’t think I’m in the target audience for this app, so my complaints are likely irrelevant.  I suppose Flipboard puts more emphasis ‘social’ than I’d like.

UPDATE: I received an invitation to associate my Twitter account (I don’t have a FaceBook account) with Flipboard, and the result is shown above. I only ‘follow’ the TWIT network, so the result is less than impressive.

Second, newspapers.  In addition to getting my news via RSS feeds, I do like some of the single news source applications.  The NPR, BBC News and Thomson Reuters News Pro apps are all excellent.  On the other end of the spectrum we find USA Today, which has a nice interface, but the content isn’t any better than the paper version.  While not a newspaper, the Bloomberg app is a nice single-source news app with some nice charts.

Third, books. Like the iPhone, the iPad includes iBooks, a book reader from Apple.  There are some other book readers out there, but I haven’t seen the need to try one.  The iPad is very nice for reading books, though I’m not convinced it will replace my paper books, yet.  As far as books go, the iTunes store has quite a few books, and some free.  Another good source is Project Gutenberg, where you can find thousands of free books and periodicals.

Number four, video podcasts.  I listen to quite a few podcasts, but prior to the iPad I didn’t have much interest in video podcasts.  However, the iPad makes viewing podcasts convenient and makes the video versions of some of the shorter podcasts more appealing.  So far, the Cranky Geeks podcast and the new iPad Today are the only video podcasts I’ve been watching.

Number five, 3G: I chose to go with the pre-paid Vodafone 3G data service for the iPad.  Vodafone offers a free SIM card and data plans from $10/250MB/30 days to $30/4GB/30 days and some long-term plans including $150/12GB/1 year.  There are several other carriers with iPad data service in Australia, but most don’t offer free SIM cards and none have the selection of data plans.  Optus, with whom I have my pre-paid phone plan, isn’t very competitive with very short expiration periods and generally high prices.  The Vodafone service has been good so far, and their pre-paid phone plans appear to compare favorably to Optus as well.  If things continue to go well I may switch all of my services to Vodafone.

Other info: I’ve been using the iPad in an eBay $5 silicon case, as seen in the first photo.  The case is very toddler friendly, and is quite good considering the price.  However, I may make a new case for it soon.  This case design looks pretty nice.

I haven’t found a need for it, but it is now legal to jailbreak your iPad, iPod touch or iPhone.  I did have my iPod touch jailbroken for a while, but it didn’t offer anything I wanted.  It went back to jail and has been happy ever since.  The iPad will remain in jail for the foreseeable future.