I'm looking into replacing my trash phone, and I'd love to have something I could Skritter on, but so far all I've really seen has been huge price tags. Does anybody have a good knowledge of what's out there, what pros and cons each offering carries, whether or not there are any options that won't break the bank?

As far as I understand, the current requirement would be Android 2.2, though I'd be willing to go with an iPhone and wait for the iApp as well. The main requirements would be ability (now or in the foreseeable future) to Skritter on the phone and the ability to get one without a carrier lock for a decent price (either in China or elsewhere).

So, anyone want to help me get into the 21st century of telecommunications?

if you've got the cash, definitely get an Android 2.2 tablet. Skrittering on the phone is nowhere near as pleasant as on the tablet.

if you don't mind signing your soul away for 2 years-- AT&T has deals on refurbished Galaxy S's that are free (besides the service charges obviously), as long as you open a new line. You can then transfer this to an existing family plan if you are already on att

They run 2.1, but are very easily flashable to 2.2 (voids warranty)

that route would cost probably 60 a month with all the cheapest options, if its a new line and account

I'm not the one with the Android phone here (it's George), so I can't say how much the speed matters when it comes to doing daily practice, but if you are looking at Skritter as a big part of your decision, the iPhone app is going to run faster and be nicer than the Android version. But, it will yet take me a long time to finish it. So that might not be worth the wait.

Regarding Android phones, if you are willing to wait a little, it might be worth waiting till CES end of January, during which a lot of new Android tablets and presumably phones will be released. That should give you more choice regarding flash enabled aka 2.2 phones. With the dual core phones soon or already released the faster mobiles with 1Ghz Snapdragon CPU should fall in price so that Android 2.2 phones should become more cheaply available during the next weeks.

Anki is free for Android and should work on slower phones too. It works offline so this might be an alternative for mobile Chinese learning on one of the cheaper phones. The iPhone app is quite expensive though.

@James - I'm specifically looking into a phone, rather than a tablet, though I'm sure that it would indeed be nicer on one.

@g1itch - No dice on a contract deal - I'm in China.

@Nick - I would love an iPhone. Unfortunately, they cost over $1000 in China. Could I afford one? Yes. Is it worth it to me? Not even close.

@MasterOfComboBoxes - Waiting for CES might be a good option. Still, three year old models still sell for their original US price (sans contract) in China, so I don't know if it would do me much good...

I guess I'll just be picking up a cheap Nokia brick or something in the meantime - my current phone is really jacked up. Maybe one of these days I'll either be able to justify the exorbitant price of one of these phones, or they won't cost so dang much...

I lost my Blackberry intermediate phone on my birthday party yesterday, so we went to the China mobile shop to lock the SIM card and get a new one today.
You might want to check to get a contract. They have free phones included, although you have to pay upfront then get the money back in terms of reduction of your monthly payment.
I got a OPhone based Samsung Anycall S5680 which is almost free if you have a 2 year contract with 188RMB quite nice except having no GPS. There are some cheaper options like a Nokia C5 or X5.

I was excited to see something about flash in the settings but it must be the flash light as Skritter does not work (first thing I tried).
OPhone is Android based, so maybe there is a chance it might be upgraded at some point. the phone is apparently from May 2010 so there might be a chance this could work in the future.

Apart from that it has everything and is pretty responsive. It is the Touchwiz surface of Samsung which is quite nice but that is personal feeling probably.

China Unicom also has those deals with contracts. You pay the phone but get the monthly fee effectively reduced. They have iPhone3GS and iPhone4.

Taobao has pretty cheap options, the Samsung Galaxy S (not the Tab) was around 3500RMB last time I checked a few weeks ago.

Good luck hunting,
Alex (from Beijing)

Thanks, there's a lot of good information there. I might look into one of those contract plans from China Mobile - I didn't know they had contract plans here.

I hadn't thought about Taobao, but I don't know if I trust their sellers enough - I've only bought two items from taobao before, but I'm pretty sure they were both fake. They're good enough for what they are, but they're not expensive electronics. I had a bad experience with a fake Nokia N97 here, so I wouldn't want to put out that much money for a suspect product. I wouldn't necessarily know the difference, but the lower quality, lesser ease of use, and increased frequency of headaches would make that a less worthwhile option. Not to mention that 3500 RMB is pretty much the ceiling of what I'd be willing to pay, and that's assuming I could get something really bangin' for my buck.

Skritter runs well on my HTC desire with Android 2.2, bought for around GBP270 second hand (but still boxed) off ebay here in the UK. That's around 2800 RMB equivalent.

That looks like it's worth looking into - I'm seeing them even cheaper on US eBay, and my sister's coming to China in a month so she could bring it for me.

Does the Desire work in China? This whole GSM vs. CDMA thing confuses me, and it's not always straightforward figuring out what system a given phone supports...

Aside from Skritter, how do you like the Desire?

I'm not sure if the Desire works in China, it works fine in Hong Kong though. My guess is that it would work, the phones I've had before have all worked fine in China. The only thing I've heard is that the "market" doesn't work or doesn't work well in the mainland.

For Chinese, good things on the phone apart from Skritter are: good IME support (handwriting recognition with the right apps, sogou / qq IME), freely available CEDICT based dictionaries are available, some apps to download Chinese novels for free also available.

Generally it seems pretty good, browser and email work well, some of the phone functions can be a bit fiddly on the touch screen. Haven't used too many other smart phones before so can't really compare though.

Android market in China - you can get the free apps no problem, th paid ones aren't available.

This whole thing keeps sounding more and more like a headache and a bad idea - I'm asking around on another forum and the guys with 17,000 posts on a smartphone forum can't even tell me which phones will work on China's data networks and which won't... And no Android Market for paid apps? Maybe I'm just better off getting a 250RMB Nokia for the time being...

Although it currently doesn't run Skritter properly due to still being on 2.1, can I just say how much I LOVE LOVE LOVE my HTC Wildfire? Android phones rock. Maybe you could go to the shop and see what they have available and test if it will Skritter before you buy?

(2.2 was pushed to Wildfire just before Christmas, but still can't get the update from China Mobile...grr!)

Ha, Nicki, that was yet another hangup I've been worried about - I wouldn't expect any updates to occur without somehow manually doing it (is it strange to anybody else that the "open source" phone OS wouldn't be user-updatable?), and I don't know if that's possible at all. Since most of the phones out right now are 2.1 at base and need to be updated by the service provider to get to 2.2 and mobile Skritter happiness, it's not necessarily acceptable if the Chinese networks won't update them...

While I'd love to have a nice phone, I'm leaning toward giving up on the idea for now. If they stopped price gouging in China, it would be a much easier move to make - when the prices for unlocked phones are thousands of RMB higher in China than elsewhere, and it's not clear what phones from outside the country will work fully on China's networks, it's an increasingly unlikely move for me now.

This page says China uses 900 and 2100 MHz, while Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan also use 1800 MHz.

http://www.worldtimezone.com/gsm.html

There is apparently a CDMA-specific version of the Desire, which I would imagine is confined to the USA:

http://www.htc.com/us/products/desire-uscellular?view=1-1&sort=0#tech-specs

but the GSM specs look very reasonable for China:

http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_desire-3077.php

If it costs too much, that's another issue entirely.

I haven't used a Desire, but I have a Nexus One, which is made by HTC and my mother has an HTC Aria. They're both excellent phones; my only complaint is that the battery runs out pretty quickly if you don't turn the display brightness down and leave auto-sync on. I would say that the Aria's screen small for Skritter, although the Desire's is a little bigger (3.7", same as the Nexus One) and should be OK.

James