Need some technological advice.

[haele]

46. Make sure you get an battery upgrade -

Laz and I have the Galaxy Nexus (Andriod) phones with the battery upgrade.
Each phone lasts a good 24 hours until the next recharge under full use: calls, lots of texts, twitter feed (Laz loves his twitter), music (doubles as an ipod), "kindle/blog" reading, playing music, camera use, and the occasional game, checking e-mail, or internet upload/download, as well as a few RSS apps like weather, traffic, meds schedules etc, that are on 24/7 in the background.
What's nice about the Android phones for Google is that they don't come with a proprietary overlay and I've been able to access pretty much any internet site on normal view using the latest Android Google as a browser; which saved my ass big time when I had to get onto Turbo-Tax (Hint - not everyone is on IE 10 or the latest and greatest of everything else!) and download/e-mail a pdf of my 2012 tax return on very short notice. There have been times I've done classwork (Windows Compatible!) and run Powerpoint presentations from my smart-phone, when my personal laptop couldn't connect to the local server, so there is a lot that is possible.
However, many mobile "apps" or mobile views for business websites from service provider app stores suck major ass if you want to do something your phone service consider "not normal for mobile", so you need to make sure you do have the ability to view web pages in normal mode (even if they do become teeny, tiny pages and they're a bit out of proportion).

Best thing to do is read some reviews - both positive and negative on both the phone and the service you want to subscribe to. Many of the negative and "meh" reviews will show you where the pitfalls an average user can trip over, while many of the positive reviews are made by professional techies who know what they're doing discussing what the phone is capable of doing, so it's best to try and balance the reviews that describe actual functions and how the phone works over various providers and plans as opposed to the reviews of "it's great/it's a piece of crap/I hate Sprint/I hate Verison".
You need to figure out what you will be doing with your smart-phone, and do your homework on which is the most capable phone and service for your needs.

If you go to a phone retailer, ask to see the personal phone the salesman or the manager is using. Yeah, they're going to try and sell you the most expensive, but they've probably went ahead and ordered the phone they felt was the best.

Haele