Guide to Smartphones: Part 1

No matter if you like the iPhone or not, it has changed the smartphone market. I bet you notice this: everyone’s creating a touchscreen phone now. Name it: HTC, LG, Asus, Samsung, etc.

So, for me at least, it’s kind of a bad thing. Touchscreens may be an outstanding technological improvement in terms of software, hardware and user experience, but sometimes it’s just not that practical. You can’t text while driving. You can’t blindly do stuff on your phone while it’s in your pocket. So then we have phones that have both touchscreen and a keypad, QWERTY (having all letters from A to Z just like your computer’s keyboard) even. But to combine these things, they either have to a) make the screen small enough to accommodate a keypad or b) make it a slider phone to accommodate a Qwerty, meaning the phone has to be bigger somewhat.

Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 - having both a touchscreen and a QWERTY keypad

Now don’t get me wrong, I love all these new bells and whistles. But here’s the thing; let’s say I have all the money in the world in my wallet, I’d still don’t know which phone to buy. Because basically when you’re looking at the smartphone market, you’ll be looking at what I call Camp WinMo.

A typical home screen of a Windows Mobile 6 phone

Windows Mobile is the dominant operating system in the smartphone market right now. They go in HTC, Asus and many others. They have the largest range of models to offer, a wide price range, and possibly the best hardware around (the new Asus P565 has the fastest mobile processor to date, running at 800Mhz). Think of any smartphone feature you like and I bet there’s a WinMo phone out there that packs all of it, be it 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS or TV-out. But here’s the problem, and I’m gonna assure you that I’m not just saying this because I’m using a Mac: They all run Windows Mobile. WinMo is a great mobile OS…..back then. It can do a lot of stuff, but the interface and speed is not catching up with the times. You can Google around and read that a lot of really good phones, such as the HTC Touch HD or Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 is wasted on the same main drawback that is WinMo. In the effort to combat this, they try to come up with some kind of another interface layer that sits on top of WinMo. For the mentioned phones, HTC has their TouchFLO 3D and S.E has their X-Panel (as in the picture above). While both interface layers are very impressive, they still have to rely on WinMo and would slow down anyway. So basically, it’s like having a very useful, interactive, and good looking desktop theme for your quad-core Alienware PC…while running Windows 98.

TouchFLO 3D

The ugly part is that these companies producing well-equipped phones sometimes just don’t have a choice for an OS, thus having to implement WinMo anyway. S.E used to have the OS named UIQ for its phones (like in the P1i) but if I’m not mistaken, the contract is over. Palm OS is dead. RIM’s Blackberry is only for Blackberries, so as OSX iPhone is only for iPhones. So that only leaves us with WinMo….and Google’s Andriod, which is pretty immature now. Fortunately, HTC is up there working on Android at the Open Handset Alliance (with Motorola and others too) so hopefully we’ll have a powerful phone running on a much better version of Android soon enough. Of course, Windows Mobile 7 is coming out soon too, so look out for the war between WinMo 7 and Andriod some time in the future. It’ll be a good one.

Windows Mobile 7

The T-Mobile G1 - the only Android phone right now

Continue to Part 2, or skip to Part 3