In Review: Android, Blackberry, iOS, WebOS, and Windows

Loyal readers of WordsFinest know that I'm a gadget hound, tirelessly searching for the perfect phone. The phone has become the most essential iteration of the personal computer, and consumers are caught in an epic war between some of the biggest names in the tech industry. The stakes are high - the very future of mobile computing rests on the successes and failures of these bizarrely-named phone religions: Android, Blackberry, iOS, WebOS, and Windows Phone 7. In the past year, I've had the opportunity to try every smartphone platform on the market, and there are certain trade-offs with every platform and piece of phone hardware that you're going to want to be aware of when choosing your next phone.

Lots of choices...but how many good ones?

Apple's iOS

We have to start with Apple because the iPhone has become the sore benchmark by which all other phones are judged. You can't pull out a phone with a touchscreen without having someone ask you if it's better than an iPhone. I've spent quite a bit of time with an iPhone 4 and iOS this year, and here are my thoughts:

Buy it: I found the iPhone 4 to be the most premium-feeling, quality-built piece of hardware on the market. I hate using iTunes, but it helps give iOS the best media importing and playback experience of any phone. iOS also has the best-stocked app store, and there are a number of awesome apps that you simply can't get for the other phones. Lastly, iOS has the most consistent and reliable user-interface; you can never get 'lost' in an iPhone, and it's always easy to navigate through the various menus and functions. 

Toss it: There's no hardware diversity. Apple only makes one version of the iPhone a year, and they're all going to have the same screen size and form factor - and you still can't even get the white version because they've had trouble manufacturing it; apparently Apple has never ever shipped a white product. Additionally, Apple's iOS keeps you chained to their 'benevolent' restrictions: very little customization, and no ability to purchase or install apps anywhere outside of Apple's totalitarian App Store. 

Google's Android

In past articles, I've caught a lot of flack from Android fans. Without a doubt, Android has the most vocal and oddly defensive fanbase of any smartphone OS - but with generally worthy cause. I got to play with a few Android phones this year, including a Nexus One, T-Mobile G2, and Galaxy S phone.

Buy it: Android can definitely feel liberating if you've been trapped in Apple's claustrophobic little world. There's an incredible diversity of hardware, enabling you to find your dream device with just the right screen size or optional keyboard. On the software side, I thought Android was incredibly customizable, [typically] open for installing apps from any source (including Amazon's upcoming app store), and beautifully integrated with Google services like Gmail and Voice.

Toss it: I'm going to invite more flack, but I still think Android is aesthetically unattractive. With Froyo and Gingerbread, it's been making some slow user interface improvements, but the sum of the experience is still incredibly frustrating. I hate how it allows app icons to look disorganized, and all the sophisticated functionality of Android is buried in these incredibly frustrating menus, blocking out even the simplest functions (Example: If I'm writing an email, I shouldn't have to open a menu to send it - there should just be a 'Send' button right in front of me). Another frustrating point is the 'splintering' of software updates. When Google puts out a new update for Android, they expect the hardware makers to make the update work for their phones. This is just stupid, since hardware makers have no incentive to provide these software updates for 'older' phones if they're trying to sell newer models. It'll be frustrating for people who buy brand new Android phones and find out that they aren't "new" enough to come with the new Gingerbread update. 

RIM's Blackberry OS

Blackberries still hold the highest market share and demand the respect of countless professionals. I used a Curve for a long time and borrowed a friend's new Torch for a few days.

Buy it: Actually, don't buy it. Seriously. 

Toss it: I know Blackberries have great hardware keyboards and everybody loved their Pearls or Curves, but the Blackberry OS has become seriously dated with old user interface paradigms and incredibly sluggish performance. Even with a new web browser and better app support, the new Blackberry OS 6.0 is still a mild improvement that just doesn't take Blackberry phones far enough to compete with iOS, Android, and the other major players. RIM is investing heavily in the new QNX platform for their tablets, and I seriously hope we see QNX replace the ancient Blackberry OS that RIM is still cramming into their phones. 

HP-Palm's WebOS

I have a serious affinity for the old Palm PDA devices, and I was definitely excited when Palm first announced WebOS and the Pre phone in 2009. I used a Palm Pre Plus for a week to give WebOS a spin. 

Buy it: Multitasking has been the most-talked about feature in smartphones this year, and I can comfortably say that WebOS has the best multitasking solution in the group. Unlike Android, nothing 'hides' in the background to kill your battery. WebOS operates on a 'card' paradigm, similar to opening and closing windows on your PC - this is how it does multitasking. All of your running apps are shown in front of you as 'cards' that you can focus on or flick away to 'kill'. It's very elegant, and supported by slick UI design.

Toss it: WebOS suffers from a very small app store and a really weak selection of hardware. Since 2009, our choices have been various rehashes of the Pre and Pixie phones, and neither of them suited my needs.

Microsoft's Windows Phone 7

The new Windows phones just came out, and I haven't spent as much time with them as I would've liked. However, I did get to get spend a bit of time with the new HTC HD7.

Buy it: I hate saying it, but I think Windows Phone 7 has the most attractive user interface at the moment - but you'll definitely have to see it in motion to believe it. Its live-updating 'tiles' metaphor is wonderfully streamlined and futuristic-looking, and every screen offers really stylish transitions and aggressively-large, clean fonts. The touch experience is superb; I was shocked that this Microsoft product was responsive and easy to control. Xbox Live integration and a solid media playback experience through the Zune player makes WP7 a pretty impressive play for Microsoft. 

Toss it: Unfortunately, it lacks multitasking for 3rd party apps, and Microsoft seems to think people will prefer to navigate to their apps in a ridiculously long alphabetical list, rather than in organizable pages or screens (which is what everybody else is doing). I was also underwhelmed by the hardware selection for Windows phones. It's nice that they're offering various screen sizes and optional physical keyboards, but none of the phones I've played with have premium-feeling hardware. Most of the phones felt cheap and/or bulky, and often wrapped in fingerprint-loving glossy plastics (which I can't stand). I've heard the Dell Venue Pro is the exception.

Phew. That was a lot. At the moment, there's no 'best' phone platform here. I can see reasons for using any of them, and I can see problems with all of them that might keep me from pledging allegiance to any one 'camp' in the near future. The important thing is to avoid brand prejudices and ask yourself what you want from your phone...But seriously, don't get the Blackberry. Please?

The Race to the Perfect Phone

The mobile phone is constantly advancing. The big software players in the tech industry seem to agree that the phone has become the most essential iteration of the personal computer. It's a behemoth opportunity to make an operating system platform that has the same mass-market adoption as Windows does for PCs. Each company has their champion: Apple has iPhone OS, Google has Android, Microsoft has Windows Phone, HP-Palm has WebOS, etc. Each operating system goes a long way to represent the fundamental ideology of its creator, and its creator's vision for the future of mobile computing.

They're all pursuing different routes to achieve market dominance, but the problem is that none of them are doing it quite right. In the last twelve months, I've had the opportunity to play with each of the major contenders in the race to the perfect smartphone, and I haven't found a clear winner. Here's a breakdown of what I liked and didn't like about each platform.

Blackberry OS

This is where I started my investigation a year ago. I found Blackberry hardware to be superb; an excellent keyboard and lots of extra hardware features. The OS is another story. I liked its straight-forward layout and capable messaging tools, but it often felt like an ambitious cell phone- - not always a smartphone. It had some of the ideas of a pocket computer: advanced customizable options, downloadable apps, a web browser, and even some rudimentary file management. But each asset felt like a poor add-on to a regular cell phone. The advanced settings were buried in an illogical network of menus. The apps lacked diversity and quality consistency. The web browser was awful. What it all revealed was a company that had a great understanding of phones, but a poor understanding of software. The race to the perfect phone has become a software race, and though Blackberry is leading the popularity race today, they're going to lose it if they continue on this gradual, add-things-as-we-go approach to their OS.

Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6.5

In some ways, this is a really underrated software experience. Considering Windows Mobile 6 is ten years old, it's amazing how much of it still holds up as a full-featured smartphone experience. High customization, decent software support, and still the best information management - assuming you use Outlook on your PC. The problem is that in those ten years, it didn't make enough progress - and now it feels incredibly dated.Windows Mobile was conceived as a stylus-operated platform. No part of the OS feels friendly to fingers, and not even HTC's impressive user-interface additions on my Imagio phone could fully solve that problem - it was incredibly frustrating to suddenly discover a menu that I could really only access with the stylus. The other major problem is that as a smartphone competitor, WM6.5 really doesn't integrate the internet very well into its experience: certain apps, social networking feeds, and web browsing were either poorly-implemented or simply unavailable to Windows Mobile. 

Palm's WebOS

This could have been a big deal. The initial demonstration of the WebOS platform was praised by journalists; Palm had created a beautiful, clean OS that took everything we liked about iPhones and gave it many of the things people still wanted: multitasking, less restrictive software support, and a physical keyboard. The whole 'cards' paradigm for multitasking apps in WebOS is brilliant - in my opinion, it's still the best multitasking solution of any smartphone. There were two problems that killed Palm and WebOS: Palm didn't have enough clout to seduce app developers to write apps, and the flagship Palm Pre phone had a horrible marketing strategy involving confusing television ads starring a creepy pale girl being worshiped by hordes of orange-clad Asians. No joke.

Google's Android

Android is doing so many things right that many consumers have placed their bet on Google winning this race. Google believes they can put out a very open operating system that each manufacturer can customize and tailor to suit their specific desires. Unsurprisingly, I found the 'plain' Android to be pretty...ugly. The fonts have an unprofessional Linux-distro feel, there's no color coordination anywhere in the user-interface, and the app organization sometimes felt cluttered to me.  Some manufacturers like HTC have shown the merit in Google's vision. HTC makes excellent phone hardware, and they also have great software developers who crafted the beautiful "Sense" UI - an advanced graphical skin on top of Android that offers a blend of unique functions and aesthetic improvements. The problem is that for every HTC, there's a Sony-Ericsson or LG -- manufacturers that just haven't figured out why it's important to take this extra step in the software experience. This is what could kill Android: it places far too much faith in the manufacturers of the phone hardware. Inthe past, manufacturers haven't had to worry as much about providing their own high-quality software on phones. With Android, they're suddenly all but required to dabble in software, and many are failing to provide that measure of competency. This is creating a splintering effect among Android phones, where some experiences are undeniably better-supported than others; it could be extremely frustrating to buy an Android phone, and then immediately see a sexier souped-up version of Android on a different phone, and then find out that Google's latest Android "Froyo" OS update will not be available on EITHER of these phones.

Apple's iPhone OS

This is a tricky one. I wanted to completely hate Apple's flagship device. But I have to admit, there are many things that Apple has figured out that other developers are still stumbling over. Simply put, it answered my desire to carry just one pocket device better than any other phone. It easily provides the best experience for importing music and photos to your phone. The web browser is pretty impressive, and the sheer breadth of the app catalog is astounding; the idea that I could be carrying a respectable port of Street Fighter IV on my phone is unbelievable. Most importantly, there's a certain visual logic and navigational cohesion throughout the entire operating system that makes even complicated tasks much simpler to perform than on other competitors; for example, conducting a three-way conference call was incredibly easy. BUT there are still some serious gripes I have with the iPhone. It needs needs needs multitasking. The camera features needs to be expanded immensely. Battery life could stand to be improved. The GPS navigation features weren't impressive. On a more personal note, taking it out in public made a false statement about my consumer habits that I didn't appreciate.

OS platforms to watch...
Like I said, there's no clear winner yet. And it's only going to get more hazy as the current OS platforms are updated and new competitors enter the race.

Windows Phone 7: Microsoft went back to the drawing board and came up with a total reboot of their vision for mobile phones. Windows Phone 7 is one to watch because it's being leveraged forced into the market by the richest software company on the planet - and it actually has some pretty innovative design philosophy. In particular, where most of the other competitors are organizing their interfaces with pages and pages of apps, WP7 is all about organizing the stuff you want from those apps into more manageable panoramic "hubs" of content. It's also got Xbox Live. Still, WP7 is pretty late to the party and that could hurt its adoption.

Android "Gingerbread" Update: We haven't heard much about it yet, but like I said: Android's doing a lot of things right.


Blackberry OS 6: Blackberry is at the top of smartphone sales, and although I found its current OS to be pretty weak, there's something to be said about a company that has earned the trust of both consumers and corporate users. Their upcoming OS 6 doesn't need to outperform any of the other competitors; it just needs to add enough to keep current users loyal to the brand.

iPhone OS 4: This could be a big deal, as it answers the multitasking problem in a pretty innovative way - assuming it works. It's also adding some other hefty features, including a social gaming network and some alleged video-chat functionality. Other companies should watch these improvements closely.