Gizmodo’s Guide To Smartphone OSes

Gizmodo’s in-depth look at smartphone OSes provides you with the pros and cons of each, allowing you to make an educated decision, if you’re in the market for a phone that also has email, a web browser, a calendar, and a decent contacts manager. If you’re attracted to the open source Linux-based Android by Google, you’ll also have to keep in mind that there aren’t that many business features. Other contenders include the Blackberry by RIM, which is great for email, but is completely closed and proprietary. The Apple iPhone is very pretty but lacks some basic features. They cover Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Palm Garnet too. It’s certainly a handy guide since most people haven’t used all six.

10 thoughts on “Gizmodo’s Guide To Smartphone OSes

  1. If you call the blackberry by RIM “completely closed and proprietary” (which it is) you should say the same about the iPhone. The blackberry, through it’s j2me support, is actually more open than the iPhone (at least you don’t need to sign an NDA to develop software for it).

  2. Dude, that’s Gizmodo, can you say: ‘biased’?

    1 – windows mobile
    2 – android ( taking up winmo’s position as soon as it spreads and matures a bit )
    3 – iphone
    4 – symbian
    5 – crackberry

  3. How can you possibly say one OS is better than another? Really, I am a believer in “it depends”.

    Windows mobile and blackberry seem to have clunkier interfaces, and the user who just wants to browse the web and listen to music would probably be happiest.

    Compare that to the needs/wants of a hacker. I know I personally would want something that doesn’t require a ton of work to customize. palmos and windows mobile are probably the most customizable, in that order. Least convoluted, anyway.

    Don’t call out a bias, then show one yourself!

  4. Actually, if you get a Nokia NSeries, you can run maemo on it. The N810 has it by default and possibly the N800. If it’s not there by default, everything right down to the N770 will run it if you install it yourself. In fact, not only do they not try to stop you, they post instructions on how to do it!

  5. wow, i was brilliant this morning. i meant to say that the user who just wants to browse the web and listen to music would probably be happiest _with an iPhone_. with that bit of info, my earlier post just might make a bit more sense…

  6. Anyone know of a guide that compares them from a developer’s standpoint?

    For instance, for WM my impression is that you can program with the same APIs as you would use for .Net on windows. If you could use the same code base (or almost the same codebase) for both a phone version and a desktop version of a program, that could be extremely attractive. How true is this?

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