Palm Pre, BlackBerry Bold, Android G1, iPhone: What’s best?

Monday, January 19, 2009

The recent announcement of the new Palm Pre completely changed the competitive scenario in the smartphone market.

I’ve been a faithful Palm user for years, with different Palm organizers, Treo and more recently the Tungsten. It’s pretty clear that all the smartphones now available from RIM, Palm, Apple and Google are not addressing the same target market, but most people in business would love to use the same smartphone during their “normal life” too.

Palm Pre

The new Palm Pre, announced at the CES 2009 in Las Vegas a couple of days ago, is certainly amazing. Its new webOS has nothing to do with the previous versions of PalmOS and it’s completely designed around messaging and internet browsing.

Together with a 3.1-inch touch screen with a 320×480 resolution HVGA display, the Palm Pre is also provided with a physical keyboard, preferred by most people to the slower and less usable “virtual” keyboard offered by the iPhone.

Moreover, accelerometer, GPS, a 3Mpix camera and a 8Gig internal memory make it comparable to the most advertised and popular iPhone and cut&paste is not certainly a missing feature in the Palm Pre.

Last but not least, multitasking. I wrote about this already and I firmly believe this is a must have in any next generation smartphone. The Pre is also provided with a “notification bar” where users can find realtime notifications coming from email, IMs etc.

BlackBerry Bold

I own this phone so I’m not impartial…. Right now, the best device I’ve ever had.

Always-on, king of messaging and emails, multitasking, stunning display, fantastic keyboard. It’s the only device in this post that is not touchscreen, but blackberry bold owners seem not missing it. I tried the touchscreen of the Blackberry Storm and it’s not comparable to what we are used to with, for instance, the iPhone.

Moreover, the Bold is a very nice phone and the built quality is superb. Lots of applications available and after a couple of weeks using it intensely, I can definitely recommend it. The only downside is the available memory for running applications, so you have to care of how many apps you are using at the same time. Mail, browser, twitterberry, google talk and facebook work fine all together. On the contrary, you don’t have limits for multimedia contents, since you can store them on the micro SD card (up to 32GB).

Android G1

The G1 is the long awaited phone powered with the Android OS by Google and, of course, Google-centric. People who own it seem to be very satisfied and the only complaint is about battery life. Everything you find on the iPhone is there, now even multi-touch.

Another point to highlight is that many people are not completely satisfied about email sync. Unless you are using Gmail, maybe the Gphone is not for you. Aside from this, the G1 is a multitasking device as well, scoring a very important point.

Like the two previous devices, the G1 provides a physical keyboard. I think this is a very important choice, since it lets owners get a typing speed never achievable with a virtual keyboard.

I personally never tried the G1, but the idea I got is that it’s an uncompleted device. Reading reviews here and there, it seems the OS needs to be fine tuned, but I presume we will see lots of improvements very soon.

iPhone

What to say? Maybe the most popular smartphone to date. Stunning UI, great usability and the first phone to introduce some innovations like accelerometer and multi-touch.

Having tried the 2G version for a couple of months now, I have to say it’s a very nice phone and everyone cannot but agree on that. Problems come as soon as you try to use it intensely for business. Simply, you can’t. The iPhone is not a multitasking device so that operations which look normal on a blackberry are not available on the iPhone. Forget push email, forget realtime notifications from other apps since you cannot have more than one app opened at a time.

This is a serious downside to me, because messaging and communication should be the core of every phone and you can never get the always-on experience you can get with the other smartphones above. This, together with other minor lacks like cut&paste (minor? mmm can’t count how many times I used it on my Bold…) and the not removable battery, make the iPhone a very good phone for a “normal” usage but definitely something to be avoided by business users… unless Apple decides that the firmware v3.0 will completely change the game. I really look forward to it, of course.

Conclusion

What’s best? It depends on your needs. My personal list is:

1) Blackberry Bold

2) Palm Pre

3) iPhone

4) Android G1

The only reason why I put the G1 below the iPhone is because I never tried it. I bet that if I could test it out, maybe the order could change…

What do you think? What’s your favorite smartphone?

Palm Pre, BlackBerry Bold, Android G1, iPhone: What’s best?

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