Every six months or so I want to try and capitulate on the major
players in smart phones. I want to answer the question if you wanted
to buy one today, what's out there?
A product snapshot today
shows 4 major players. All of them capitalize on the notion of total
web connectivity and things like the ability to bridge to online social
networks, assist in navigation, and, to manage and create media in the
form of music, photography, and video. The trend in smart phones is to
make everyone a node from exactly where they stand.
The top 4 smart phone buzz makers you've been hearing about.
For those like me who understand the market only in happenstance, it's worth knowing right away that these phones are each directly affiliated for distribution by their
respective carriers. All the major wireless providers like Verizon have their own PDA mother ship, even if only as
a temporary arrangement. For instance, you can't get an iPhone as a
Sprint subscriber, and you can't get myTouch if you're with AT&T.
When you settle on a phone, you're more or less settling on the
carrier. If you're like me, that makes no sense and you conversely get
the affiliated smart phone of your current provider. That is unless
you don't find anything wrong or taxing about jumping providers to suit
a particular taste in hardware. While younger folks seem to accept
such hopping as all part of digital life, it seems to me like a lot of
extra paperwork, research, and re-adoption to a new provider when, in
the end, any of these phones will "wow" you in their coolness as well do
the things you need them to actually do.
Only the iPhone comes closest
to justifiably pressuring anyone into such a dramatic hopping event,
and, in fact, the three other phones all work to compare themselves
favorably to the iPhone in an attempt to draw service hoppers themselves.
That, or, at least maintain a current subscriber base from defecting to AT&T and the iPhone.
This Will Not Be a Review
Mind
you I'm not into reviews. The goal of this feature is only to underscore
the current buzz makers for a fundamentally confused audience so that they can
pursue the right Google reviews on their own.
In order to assist you in connecting a commercial you may have seen to a particular phone, I've sought out and included You Tube embeds of said commercials after each product.
This
phone is manufactured by Apple and works over the AT&T network.
This is basically considered the top of the line, and, of course, the
one you've been hearing and seeing so much about over the past couple
of years.
Smart phones depend on a mixed network of in-house and
independent developers to create their phone applications (which is
what "apps" are), and because the iPhone's sweeping dominance right
now, hundreds of thousands of apps have been developed for it. Any
quality issues aside, those of you who find investment security in
universal adoption, the iPhone is as close to such smart phone
omnipotence as you'll get.
The Palm Pre came
on the market in October and is the current offering of Sprint. They
say the key things about this phone are the smaller size (it appears to
be the smallest of all of them), and, the fact that it multitasks
exceptionally well.
If you're already on the Sprint network (one of
the 27,000 people currently leaving your cell phone in a cab - which,
creepily, Sprint knows about), this is the baby you'd be focusing on.
I think, initially, the Palm Pre folks thought this might be a
formidable competitor to the iPhone so that it might actually encourage
service hopping to Sprint. So far as I can tell, though, that isn't
happening, great a phone as it may be.
This
is Verizon Wireless's deal. They say it's a splash too! It runs on
Google's latest version of the Android operating system ('Droid', get
it?), and that if there is another compelling phone to
encourage service hopping, this it'd be it.
At the very least it seems
well poised to keep the Verizon Wireless teeterers from falling over to
the AT&T and the iPhone. With this nifty phone no one is going to
feel like they're missing much by sticking with Verizon. This is
particularly important since an iPhone for the Verizon network seems
little more than a pipe dream now. The Droid's chief working point of
interest to me is the dual implementation of an external and virtual
keyboard which solves the conflict many people have in deciding one
phone or another. You can't go wrong here because you get both.
T-Mobile
offers its subscribers the myTouch 3G. This is another Android based
phone and so therefore, much like the Droid, has an implicit
relationship to Google's world view. Judging by the videos I've
watched it interfaces well with such things like Google maps and the
general Google search engine (as Verizon's Droid does, being of the
same OS DNA).
Personally I get annoyed by such singular "usage" themes
because I prefer to build my own web experience from scratch as an
independent. But, really though, anything you may endeavor to do
outside the Google framework can probably be accomplished readily
enough using a decent series of well coordinated bookmarks. Of
interesting note is the fact that this phone actually follows the G1
which was considered the first viable challenger to the Iphone in 2008.
