Do you need help determining the best smart phone? The iPhone gets a lot of hype, but it's not the only choice when it comes to the smart phone. Some even argue that it's not the best choice. What's the competition, and how does the iPhone stack up? Keep these features in mind when you're shopping for your next phone upgrade.
Touch-screen Interface
Virtually all of the major cell phone providers now partner with one or more manufacturers to offer smart phones with a touch-screen interface. Apple has the iPhone; but Samsung has Glyde, Instinct and the SCH series. LG has Venus, Voyager and the Dare. Depending on your cell provider of choice, you can find several choices for phones with a decent-sized touch screen. The Palm Treo and Centro both have a touch-screen interface and a QWERTY keyboard, saving you the trouble of bringing up the internal keyboard and typing on the screen. The Palm models with the combined touch/QWERTY interface may be the best choice if you need to type lengthy emails from your phone.
E-mail Capabilities
E-mail capabilities are one area where the differences between the smart phones truly shine. BlackBerry, while lacking the touch-screen that many smart phone enthusiasts love, provides powerhouse email capabilities suitable for the corporate business executive. BlackBerry's support for Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino and Novella GroupWise make it the smart phone of choice for corporate applications. If you're a casual, Web-based email checker, most other smart phones provide comparable basic email capabilities.
3G: Built for Speed
3G technology enables fast data transfer, making the Web-browsing experience on your 3G smart phone relatively painless. Bandwidth-heavy websites that might take up to 2.5 minutes to load on the 2G network load as quickly as 30 seconds on the 3G network. Less bandwidth-intensive websites load almost instantly. Samsung's Instinct, Apple's iPhone and Nokia's N81 all operate on the 3G network, and you'll find more smart phones that are 3G capable as the market expands. If you intend to use your smart phone for Web browsing, invest in one with 3G capabilities to save yourself painfully slow load times.
Web Browsing and Mobile Applications
Smart phones are useful in many applications, but Web browsing and mobile applications are consistently popular across the brands, and may make or break the smart phone experience. Some smart phones use proprietary Web browsers, while others use mobile versions of Opera, Safari and Firefox. These browsers typically perform similarly, so the difference in smart phone use often lies in the mobile applications. While Palm has an impressive array of mobile applications for its smart phones, the iPhone really takes the cake with mobile application availability and installation. Apple monitors mobile applications and theoretically runs a tight quality control, so the apps you're likely to find for the iPhone are useful and ready to roll. The ease of download and installation of mobile apps is where the iPhone truly shines, and makes it a great choice for the smart phone user on the go.
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