The best-selling tech item around the world is a cellphone and, for the last two years, it’s been all about the smartphone, the device that puts the Internet in your pocket.
But unlike computers, which give you two main choices, Windows or Mac, smartphones come in four distinct varieties offered by several different wireless carriers.
Each platform — Apple, Google’s Android, BlackBerry and Windows — has its pros and cons. (Palm, bought by Hewlett-Packard, is no longer heavily marketed.) Most smartphones sell for $199, with a two-year contract, although some carriers are offering holiday deals.
Apple
The iPhone helped reinvent the category in 2007. Some 50 million iPhones have been sold, fueled by the App Store, a collection of about 300,000 software programs, for free and for sale, that enhance the iPhone. Apps include everything from airline schedules and calendars to games. There’s even a program that lets you plug in your electric guitar and have the iPhone replicate an amplifier.
“The experience on the iPhone is still the best,” says Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research. “The range of apps and things you can do with it and the amount of information that is out there helping you learn about interesting and new things you can do with the iPhone is almost overwhelming.”
The major drawback with the iPhone is the phone service. Consumers complain about dropped calls with the iPhone, and Consumer Reports declined to recommend it earlier this year because of problems with its antenna. And AT&T, the iPhone’s only U.S. wireless carrier for now, was just rated dead last among the big four carriers, by CR. The biggest problem: dropped calls.
Verizon (No. 1 in CR’s rankings) is expected to add the iPhone to its offerings soon. “I tell everyone who’s interested in buying an iPhone, ‘Wait until next year for Verizon,’…