Wednesday, June 18, 2008

What's your smartphone choice?

For gadget geeks and smartphone lovers, there's a veritable mass of devices to choose from at the moment - too many some would say, with the keenest of gadgeteers unable to hold onto a device more than a month or two before succumbing to the latest shiny new pretender than is supposed to be able to solve all those (often not) lackings of previous devices.

Current kings of the smartphone hype market are, depending entirely on your point of view/loyalty etc are, and in no particular order:

There's a thread on this over at Palm 247 today which gives the contributor's views, and Murray over at Palm-Mac has recently made a number of as always shrewd and succinct insights into the current state of the smartphone market - forgive me Murray but I won't link all the relevant posts here, but dear reader head on over to his Blog and enjoy - I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

So where does that leave us/me/you?

Well, I still have my Windows Mobile HTC Vox S710, which at about a year old now is terribly old hat in smartphone terms, although it does everything I need a smartphone to do. To be honest it doesn't get used much, except on occasions when I need robust battery life or wifi, mostly because I struggle to get on with the WM interface, and God knows I've tried. Maybe the HTC Diamond's flashy interface is a step in the right direction for us smartphone users that don't want to delve into the WM back end constantly tweaking settings or dealing with the same old arcane file structures.

So, my device of choice currently is the Palm Centro. Yes, the interface (Palm OS) is dated, but by golly it works and that's all I ask. Yes it still looks like one of the Treo family, but come on, the Treo line is a big seller for Palm - albeit a bigger seller over the other side of the pond than in the UK. I like the Centro. It does (almost) everything I ask of it, and most of that pretty well, and I'm sticking with it.

But.....I do have an irresistible urge when shiny gadgets are around. If, and it's a big if, the iPhone 2.0 was available on T-Mobile, my current network provider at the same tariff I'm on now, I'd snap their hands off. Currently I have no desire to move from T-Mob to O2 and pay more than I pay now (I don't need to) to get the level of service I need just so I can get an iPhone.

Not yet anyway.......

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