Expert: DebiN - 12/27/2011

Question
I am from India. I have a Sony ericsson vivaz mobile. i have to charge the phone for 3 hours and later when the battery gets full i start listening to songs and the battery gets over in almost 3 hours. I dont use the speaker of the phone too and even then the battery drains fast.

And i would also like to ask a solution for the problem of good sound not coming from the speaker of the phone. The sound that comes out is very shrill.

And can you please suggest me a good smartphone?? My budget is around 20000 INR to 35000 INR. it needs to have a 8 mp or more camera. Good sound quality from the speaker of the phone as well. Good processor. and any OS is fine with me.

Please reply.

Answer
The phone you have should give you up to 13 hours talk time on a 2G network and 430 hours of standby time on a 2G network, so it basically has a very good battery. What I would recommend is that when you charge it and want to listen to music, turn off the cellular network, the bluetooth and the WiFi so that all you are doing is using it as a music player. If these other things are on, even though you are just listening to music, the phone is searching for a wireless network, it's searching for WiFi and has bluetooth on. With them off, it will just be a music player and playing music uses very little battery and it should last much longer.

If the sound is not coming out of the speaker, then the speaker may be damaged. I'm not a big proponent of fixing cell phones, so I don't really have advice for this one.

I live in the US and am not familiar with the conversion of INR to US dollars or what is a good price for a SmartPhone since here, they are all pretty close to the same price and we get them much less expensive because of getting a two year agreement with our carriers. What I can tell you is that I am a fan of the Android OS and also of the Samsung devices and if you can get a new Samsung SmartPhone that uses the latest OS for Android, that would be my recommendation. I would not recommend Sony or the Symbian OS as it just hasn't taken off of the way that Apple or Android or even BlackBerry OS has. These three are the only OS I would recommend for a SmartPhone. An iPhone or Samsung or BlackBerry is what I recommend. I hope this helps.