So you want a smartphone?	Visited: 1150 5.0/5.0 (3 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by David Liu April 01, 2010

Shopping for a cell phone these days can be something of a pain, with all the research that goes into checking everything from which cameras have the highest megapixels, to the best email applications to the best battery life.

Here are a few categories that may help you narrow down your search. Excluding application support (which favors the iPhone tremendously, and rightfully so), service provider preferences, and sale price – let’s look at the smartphone devices on their own to see which one offers the best fit for you.

What can it do?

When you’re reading up on the products that are available on the market, also remember that just because a device has the market cornered on popular culture doesn’t mean that the phone is right for you. The most popular phones used to be revolutionary in their creation, and seemed to bring something new to the table as far as features went. The iPhone revolutionized the touch screen in 2007, just like how the Blackberry popularized the handheld email device back in 1999.

Finding a phone now, however, depends on which options you actually need, and which missing features you are willing to do without, since no phone on the market is perfect, and many of today’s handsets offer similar setups. If you want to look at high-tech specs or side-by-side function comparisons, then BillShrink.com has a good chart of some of the top selling smartphones.

Social Media

Unless you’re trapped in commercial steel building, any smartphone (or any regular phone for that matter) can offer enough support to keep you twittering and facebooking at real time speeds. The real question is which one serves your needs better. The casual user can get by with basic support, such as status updates and live inbox totals.

The advertising and marketing professional however, will need much more, such as live video feeds, full posting features like image uploading or link embedding support. Entertainers and club promoters who need to consistently network through their phones can upload footage and pictures while on the road. For them, the Droid and the iPhone are perhaps the most capable machines for uploading video and accessing social websites.

The iPhone 3GS is the newest in the current line from Apple (and also the only iPhone to offer video recording/editing support), and it offers the option to upload video without any extra apps, directly from the video menu. The Droid requires an app, but the process is rather quick and painless as well.

The Keyboard

If you need your smartphone for business purposes, such as for email access and good document editing capabilities, then the Blackberry Curve, or any device with a buttoned keyboard, will be invaluable to you. The Blackberry Storm is the sole blackberry without a keyboard (though not the only one without a full qwerty keypad), and many touchscreens, such as the Palm Pre Plus, also come with pullout keyboards. While the Blackberry Curve may not be as dynamic in terms of video editing or app support, it is by far the most efficient in what it can do – and that’s email, sync (either through Outlook, Google, Microsoft Exchange), and keep your business needs at bay.

Smartphone touchscreen and keyboard combos are a dime a dozen as well, though many of them are designed for texting rather than writing office documents and may not be as effective if you plan to use it for long periods of time. There are many keyboarded phones around today that offer relaxed typing, but limited support as far as where you can take your text. If you plan to type up reports on the go, or email Excel edited spreadsheets before your plane lands, then make sure you’re looking at a smartphone and not just a messaging phone like the LG Rumor or the Pantech Link, which both offer plenty of features, but not ones based towards Office support.

Multitasking

For the most dynamic document and multi-application support, Palm’s Pre Plus (or the Pre, since the Plus version only adds a few changes) is perhaps the best bang for you mobile dollar. It offers “unlimited” multitasking, which means it can keep plenty of programs open at the same time, such as Pandora for background music, a few webpages open for reference, and Microsoft Word to write it all down.

The Nexus One is also ahead of the competition in terms of handling multiple programs, since there are currently videos floating around the web of it successfully running 20+ programs at once. While the Droid offers a limited amount of programs to run simultaneously (6), it still offers plenty for the average user, which is still more than the one-app iPhone is capable of.

For what it matters, though, all of the aforementioned multitasking phones still tend to lag slightly, which is to be expected from a handheld computer. The Nexus One, which sports by far the fastest processor at 1GHz (faster than many pre-2000 PC’s), has perhaps the best response time, through the 550MHz Droid is not far behind. At least in this department, the iPhone matches up quite nicely – though running a single app gives it a bit of an advantage on memory as well.

Do your research

If you plan on using your phone for heavy social media use, the Motorola Droid or the iPhone may be the best options. If you primarily use Google for your calendar and mail, then the Nexus One should be your best fit.

Other options such as multi-tasking programs, battery life, and overall reception (some devices are poor in steel frame buildings, for example) can also dictate what phones are better for you. And if you’re big on reliability, then the Blackberry is perhaps your best bet since newer phones tend to still have plenty of kinks to work out.

In the end, picking a phone should be based on your own needs, both for your personal enjoyment, as well as for your technical uses, such as email for work or checking traffic and GPS directions. The first step is to decide whether or not you actually want a smartphone – as in whether you want email, application downloads, computer syncing, and any other of the “higher level” features that distinguish a smartphone from a simpler and less expensive device, and then think about which options will serve you better because no phone is perfect, but a little research can find one that’s perfect for you.