Not everyone is in the market for a smartphone, and there’s some good discussion of some important considerations in the comments following Julie’s post, Using Super Smartphones for Productivity.
For those who are considering such a device, the two big players right now are the iPhone and a slew of Android phones. (There are smaller players such as Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and WebOS, but they seem not to get much attention these days. Yes, I’m aware that Blackberry is actually a pretty big player in terms of sheer numbers, but they seem to get more attention in the corporate world than among average end users. At least that’s my impression.)
Lifehacker recently ran two posts on the iPhone and Android operating systems: Which Do You Prefer: iPhone or Android? and iPhone vs. Android Showdown: Which Phone is Best for Power Users?. Their conclusion in the second of those posts? Android narrowly edged out the iPhone, though the editors will readily admit that their evaluation is very subjective.
Among the members of Team ProfHacker who are smartphone users, we’re pretty equally divided between the iPhone and Android devices. There are all sorts of reasons why we’ve chosen one sort of phone over the other. Those reasons range from the philosophical (some prefer Android’s open source approach to Apple’s closed system), to carrier preference, to app availability, to participation in already-existing family plans.
All of these are important things to think about. When it came to a phone, carrier dictated my choice; I’m not with AT&T and I’m unwilling to change carriers, so the iPhone was never an option for me. However, I’ve used both the iPhone OS (up through version 3.1.3, on a 1st-generation iPod Touch—feel free to add comments about iOS 4 in the comments) and the Android OS. What follows are a very few thoughts on my experience with each of them. [Note that the following presumes that the device is not rooted or jailbroken; I’ll have a bit to say next week about why rooting/jailbreaking might be worth considering.]
iPhone OS:
- The good: The OS is very easy to use. There’s a strong community of developers, so you can find an app to do just about any task you might want to do with the phone; the App Store is very well stocked. It syncs very nicely with iTunes, so taking your music with you is a breeze.
- The bad: The only negative thing I have to say about the OS (people have various opinions about AT&T as a carrier) is that there’s no way to install non-App Store applications without jailbreaking.
Android:
- The good: The OS is easy to use—in my experience, just as easy as the iPhone OS. If you’re a user of All Things Google, the synchronization can’t be beat. It’s easy to install non-Market applications without rooting your phone (unless your carrier has disabled that option).
- The bad: At present, there are fewer applications available for Android than there are for iPhone, though the Android Market continues to grow, as does the developer community. Though Android can sync with iTunes, it doesn’t do so out of the box (Mac users wanting to sync with iTunes might want to take a look at DoubleTwist; I’m not sure what options are available to PC users, but it’s also possible to just copy files to the phone’s SD card).
At present, I’m using my Android phone exclusively, and will be sending the iPod Touch to Gazelle. Not that it isn’t a handy device, but all the applications that I regularly used on it are now also available for the Android platform, and there’s no good reason for me to hang onto both. (The last application I was waiting on was Kindle for Android, which became available earlier this week.)
If you’re a smartphone user, what OS did you choose, and why? What have you found to be the benefits and drawbacks of that choice?
[Image by Flickr user Geoff Livingston / Creative Commons licensed]