Guide to Smartphones: Part 2

Now that you know how the smartphone market is packed with WinMoes, let’s take a look at other realms

RIM Blackberry Storm

Here we have Camp Blackberry. Well sorry that I don’t really know about RIM’s (Research in Motion, the company that makes Blackberries, which is actually the product name) devices, but I assure you that they have very good choices among the competition. They also have unveiled their first touchscreen phone, the new Blackberry Storm. But it depends on what kind of person you are. Blackberries are more favoured among the corporate types with Push Email being one of its main feature. Push Email is getting an email delivered right to your phone (just like an SMS) the moment it gets into your Inbox (important for some people). Actually they are a lot of phones that support Push Email, but not as good as this. It’s just that Blackberries does not come with a good camera. I guess most of you reading this are like me: you’ll want a phone with a good camera because you’re just lazy to bring another gadget around. Thus, out goes the Berries. But then, there’s still that one other phone that does Push Email as good, or maybe better. Enter…

Apple iPhone 3G

Camp iPhone. Undeniably the most hyped gadget out there, but the drawbacks seem to be a big hit…for me at least. No MMS, no video recording, poor camera, no Bluetooth file transfer, no video calls…on paper it looks like you can’t even call it a smartphone. And most importantly, you can’t even purchase it ‘cleanly’ in Malaysia. Heck, no copy and paste! But lacking all that doesn’t stop it from being one of the best selling phones today. I’m sure you know how good the operating system and user interface is, and it is indeed a very capable smartphone. But here’s an advantage that’s not quite known to most people. If you compare the iPhone touchscreen with other touchscreens, you’ll notice how it is much more sensitive. This is because the iPhone (and iPod touch) uses a capacitative screen, compared to resistive screens used in almost all other touchscreen phones. The difference is that capacitative touchscreens are more sensitive to a human finger, but sucks when used with a stylus (that pen-like thing). Resistive touchscreens are less sensitive but works well with a stylus. But why almost all manufacturers stick with resistive? Because they cater to the Asian market, which rely heavily on a stylus to input characters such as Chinese, Japanese or Korean. Now, the iPhone does has its own way to input these characters but I’m not sure how well does it work. Another huge part of the iPhone is MobileMe. It’s a RM300+ per year service you can subscribe that lets you synchronize calendars, contacts, and even enjoy Push Email (MobileMe has a lot more features but I’m not going into that). So personally, I’d say iPhone + MobileMe is a huge contender to Blackberry, but since my first Bluetooth phone, the classic S.E T630, I can never part with Bluetooth file transfer And I hate lugging my camera.

MobileMe

Both the Blackberry and OSX iPhone performs much better than Windows Mobile, with superior user interface as well. But because of both operating systems are proprietary (not available to other companies), smartphone giants like HTC are not allowed to employ it in their feature-packed phones. So now we can really see how big the impact is from a hardware and software point of view. Actually this scene was evident years ago in that mother-of-all-things-tech-land called Japan. You probably know all those cool, funky phones, termed as J-phones. They had phones capable of watching TV since…well, so much earlier. They had 3G even before we had GPRS. They have a freaking Sony Bravia phone (Bravia = Sony TVs). Sony Ericsson and Sharp phones in Japan are just plain crazy, but they also suffer the same thing: they have very poor operating systems too. Analysts actually predicted that iPhones won’t do well in Japan because it is too primitive when compared to said SEs and Sharps, but when the iPhone was launched there, it managed to get good sales thanks to a very good OS.

Sony Ericsson W44S BRAVIA

So now you can see how divided the smartphone market is. First we have Windows Mobile, the slow and outdated OS that finds its way in great, powerful phones. Then we have the Blackberries and iPhones, which offers a very good user interface and solid OS, but lacking on the hardware side. I’ll skip Android for this article because it won’t be fair to judge it by now. So where the heck would you find the balance between hardware and software? The answer, for now, lies in Symbian, featured in the next part of this article. I also have some really good stuff about what can you expect from mobile phones in the future…with the invention of a new mobile processor. From who? I had a whole post about the company few weeks ago. Figure it out

Proceed to Part 3 or rewind to Part 1