I am researching which phone I want to use when I move to China. I am currently using a Blackberry and like many of its features, and would like a similar cell phone. I think I've narrowed down my choices to the Touch Diamond or the Touch Pro. I think the Touch Pro will suit me best since it has the full keyboard which makes emailing easier. Do these phones have the "push" email feature, so if I get an email from work or Yahoo or whatever, it gets "pushed" to my phone? When I go to another country can I buy another SIM card and use it there? For all you expats using similar cell phones, if you have suggestions or advice go ahead and sound off. Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated. Xiexie (trying to practice Chinese : )

HTC is most popular smartphone at smart chinese.

I'll second that RussianBear. Use the old Touch myself and love it. A bit frazzled getting Chinese and English as I did all the setup myself; however, all is no great with the Touch.

I have the touch diamond (not pro) and love it. Yes it will push/pull to all of your email accounts, outlook, hotmail, gmail and show you status of each of your email accounts. I like the soft keyboard (intelligent QWERTY) which allows me to input text very fast so don't need the keyboard and the other feature the pro has is the added storage card and all this comes at a slightly higher purchasing price and about 50% more weight for phone and slightly fatter.

I use multiple prepaid SIM cards, one for US, one for Europe and one for China. Each time the airplane lands I load in the SIM card for that country and a message comes up the phone noticed that it is not set up for that SIM card, and asks do you want phone to configure settings for new SIM card. Press yes and about 1 minute later you are good to go on new SIM card.

The HTC has recently had a ROM upgrade and make sure your phone has it because the original ROM had some features on phone not very user friendly that were corrected. Also certain items that did not work were corrected. The latest ROM is 1.93.401.2WVE If you don't get this ROM upfront, make sure you upgrade the phone as soon as you get it because it is a pain to upgrade once you have a lot of new programs in your phone.

By the way, the HTC touch products are great to practice your Chinese with the addition of Pleco Software.

I am now into my third month with this phone and it is by far the best I have ever had so the halo effect has not started to wear thin yet. It gets 3-4 hours of use every day.

Renovator, I recently received one as well (as a present) and finding it kind difficult to adapt to a phone without keys - it seems that no matter what it's simply more cumbersome and fault prone than a phone with keys. I also can't find any merit in the touch interface. At the end of the day writing emails, sms all seem to be much slower. What's your take on this?

I previously own an XDA2 so writing text for SMS thru touch screen isn't new to me anymore albeit now keys are bigger (semi QWERTY) on my Touch which I got in HK 2 weeks ago for $2.7k HK.

I might upgrace to Touch Pro by Xmas if budget permits

I have a HTC phone which needs repair. Is there a place in Shanghai which can look at it?? I have tried looking for a HTC repair agent via google and cant seem to find anyone.

cheers!

4FS (4 floors of Sh1t). Cnr XiangYang and Fuxing Lu. Go up the escalator to level 2 (all the phone shops). At top of escalator go left to the very end, in that top left hand corner is a tiny little repair shop. He's good!. Will fix anything.

I love my Touch Diamond, had it 9 months and would not swap it, BUT there are some issues with it -:

Battery life is not great - 30 hours max
Booting up is sometimes unsuccessful
Opera internet facility sometimes just hangs up
The onscreen keyboard is too big when using MSN

There are other little niggles - but these are my main ones.

There is a new Touch just released which I believe addresses many of these problems.

I got my Touch Pro last October in HK and I really like it...it does what it is supposed to do as advertised although not speedy at times.

Since I got mine in HK, it was unlocked so that means any country you go to, just buy a SIM card there, pop it in and just go. It even has a handy feature of auto configuring the phones settings to the service provider of the SIM card such as voicemail # and data connection settings. When I went back to the US last month, I popped in my T-Mobile SIM card and the phone was running just fine.

I know most phones in China are branded China Mobile so I'm not sure if they are locked or not. Also, since I got mine in HK I have Wi-Fi which is great because I don't have to pay for a data plan. Most branded phones don't include Wi-Fi so the mobile providers can charge you extra for using their internet connections.

Battery life isn't that great, but for my uses it will make it through 2 days: sending some SMS, a couple calls, using Wi-Fi, some programs.

The keyboard is fantastic and you'll have no problems writing emails, SMS, and other things which require typing. I got the TP because of the keyboard; using the screen as my only input source would piss me off since I like the tactile feel of physical buttons.

I definetly recommend the phone...it's a huge mofo compared to my old Nokia E51 but it is a very capable phone.

If you have any questions, just send me a PM and I'll try to help out.

BTW, for those of you with Windows OS phones, what software do you use for writing Chinese? Mine came with CE-Star and while it works, I’m not that happy with it, the user experience is far from great.

I really liked Nokia’s implementation of changing between writing languages.

Thanks for the advice regarding gettting my phone fixed. I am not Shanghai ren... I am in Hefei and travelling to Shanghai next week. Sorry to bother you again, but can you tell me the name of 4FS??

cheers and thanks!

Locky

It's just called Shanghai Electronics market, or something like that. You'll see it. Corner of Fuxing and Xiangyang.

fantastic thanks for your help!

4F'O'S = Modern Electronics Market - despite the amazing piles of outdated crap some of the stallholders have (Beta VCR remotes, anyone?).

It was a great phone, I had it last year, but I type a lot of sms, I got so frustrated and started to hate it, so I gave it away. If you just use it for media and calls, fine, but typing is terribly slow.

FIJI_IronChef wrote:BTW, for those of you with Windows OS phones, what software do you use for writing Chinese?

Pleco
http://www.pleco.com/products.html

FIJI_IronChef wrote:I definetly recommend the phone...it's a huge mofo compared to my old Nokia E51 but it is a very capable phone...

what's the exact meaning of that sentence ?

huangheilong wrote:

FIJI_IronChef wrote:BTW, for those of you with Windows OS phones, what software do you use for writing Chinese?

Pleco
http://www.pleco.com/products.html

You can't use pleco to write Chinese in any other application except for pleco. If you have Pleco, you also need CE-Star or other smilar program, to write Chinese in SMS and other applications on your mobile. It is nice, however, with Pleco 2.0 to be able to move your phone SMS to clipboard and then read using Pleco or decipher any Chinese characters you don't know.

Dudes, Blackberry and Treo - for internet users. Both have full keyboard.

Buhaoberry??? my husbands got it from the company he works for, he hates it!
But I want to give him a Touch Pro, but still can't find it here in Shanghai...
We are going to HK in august, maybe I'll buy it there.
Any place someone can recomend me there?

I also hated my Blackberry - gave it away.

iara wrote:Buhaoberry??? my husbands got it from the company he works for, he hates it!
But I want to give him a Touch Pro, but still can't find it here in Shanghai...
We are going to HK in august, maybe I'll buy it there.
Any place someone can recomend me there?

I got mine at the Gome retail store across the street from Times Square in Causeway Bay. But honestly, you can pick one up almost anywhere in HK. I saw some TPs in SH at retail stores and there is definetly a premium so I'd recommend buying it in HK.

There is an electronics store/building I go to everytime I'm in HK. It's in Wan Chai and if you take Exit A out of the subway station it will be on your left. I'm not sure what the English name is but "Electronic" is probably in the name of the building (Chinese name is 电脑城-Computer City).

Lots of electronics there: cell phones, laptops, cameras, PDAs, accessories, you name it its got it. Many of the electronics here are gray market so warranties won't be honored etc, but they are cheaper so make sure you ask if it is gray market or not (水货-shui huo).

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions.

huangheilong wrote:

FIJI_IronChef wrote:BTW, for those of you with Windows OS phones, what software do you use for writing Chinese?

Pleco
http://www.pleco.com/products.html

Thanks. It just means it's a large phone.

I'm owned Treo 270, own Treo 600, and definitely will buy Treo 750. Just 1000 RMB on market right now. Full keyboard, web serfing, e-mail client. What else we need ?
I LOVE THIS DEVICE.