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Smart phone buying guide

BlackBerry

Though things looked a bit shaky for a while, BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion finally settled its longstanding dispute with NTP and shipped new versions of its Enterprise Server software recently and, more importantly, software development kits (SDKs). And if we learned anything from the company's legal mess, it was how much people rely on these devices to stay in touch.

Ease of use
The darling of corporate America (and many areas of government) wouldn't be so adored universally if it were complicated. Although an interface driven entirely by a thumb wheel might seem awkward and slow, users invariably find it easy to learn and quick to operate. Admittedly, the lack of a stylus and a touch screen--staples of other PDAs--slows down certain operations (such as hitting a link in a Web page), but the beloved built-in keyboard accelerates others, such as composing e-mail. Ultimately, the BlackBerry interface may not be the most efficient, but it's certainly one of the easiest to use.

	BlackBerry 7130g (click for full review)

Core applications
The BlackBerry OS does a better job managing your contacts than managing your calendar. The Address Book applet offers all the amenities you'd expect, plus contact grouping and unsurpassed integration with the phone and messaging apps. To send someone an e-mail message, for instance, you simply highlight the person's name, press the click wheel, and then select E-mail Joe Smith. There's no need to open the contact's record and navigate extra menus.

The calendar on BlackBerrys is a bit unwieldy by comparison, perhaps due to the awkward process for navigating between different days and views. The Week view is particularly cumbersome, requiring serious "wheeling" to move the cursor from one day to the next. The Calendar applet itself is sufficiently capable, but suffers under the weight of the wheel-based interface.

RIM also supplies the obligatory memo pad and to-do list, along with an alarm clock, a calculator, a photo viewer, and a password manager--all functional but rudimentary applets.


Introduction Palm Windows Mobile		BlackBerry Symbian Which OS is right for you?

Desktop compatibility
Like a traditional PDA, a BlackBerry can synchronize with your PC, swapping data with Outlook or Lotus Notes; the bundled Intellisync utility makes this possible. Of course, the BlackBerry OS also affords robust wireless synchronization, meaning new appointments, contacts, memos, and tasks can be "pushed" from your office to your handheld (and back again), just like e-mail. That gives BlackBerrys a fairly major advantage over PDAs that rely on more traditional synchronization methods.

	BlackBerry 8700g (click for full review)

Office compatibility
Although the BlackBerry OS supports the big three Office apps--Word, Excel, and PowerPoint--it limits you to viewing documents only. You can't compose new ones or do any editing, which is surprising given the presence of a perfectly good thumb keyboard. As for PDFs, the OS can open them as well, but it strips most graphics and formatting in the process, leaving you with little more than text.

E-mail
Ever wonder about the origin of the "CrackBerry" nickname? In a word: e-mail. It's what the devices were born to do, so it should come as no surprise that they excel at it. Ironically, it's not the e-mail applet itself that's so addictive (though it deserves kudos for its streamlined efficiency), but rather the "push" method of e-mail delivery. Instead of having to be retrieved manually, new messages just appear like magic on the device. Although Palm and Microsoft have engineered similar systems for their smart phones, BlackBerry remains the undisputed e-mail champ.

Multimedia
Fully cognizant of the BlackBerry's reputation as a serious business tool, RIM has limited multimedia features on its devices. Although the latest models can play MP3s as ring tones, there's no media player to speak of--nor enough memory to hold more than a few tunes anyway. The same is true for videos, and the lack of a memory card slot means that even with third-party software, you'd be limited to very short clips. At least the OS includes a photo viewer, though you'll get a lot more mileage from one of the available third-party programs. Also, RIM has recently said that it plans to add multimedia features, such as music, video, and photography, to its future devices.

Third-party apps
Software developers haven't shown BlackBerrys the same love users have. We found only a few hundred third-party applications--a drop in the bucket compared with the thousands available for the Palm, Symbian, and Windows Mobile platforms. The essentials are there--a password manager, a Sudoku game, the popular RepliGo document viewer, and so on--and RIM promises plenty more to come thanks to new SDKs released in late 2005. But for now, the software pickings remain relatively slim.

Symbian

The Symbian OS appears primarily on cell phones and smart phones and offers a broad array of personal information management (PIM) features, including contact and calendar management and a robust library of third-party applications. Yet because the OS is usually tailored to individual hardware (in other words, it can look and act differently depending on the phone that's running it), there are only so many conclusions we can draw.

Ease of use
As we just mentioned, your experience with the Symbian OS depends on the phone. For example, on the keyboard-equipped Nokia 9300, we found the Symbian OS fairly easy to navigate, though it certainly wasn't as intuitive as, say, the Palm or Windows Mobile OS. On the candy bar-style Nokia 6680 phone, the interface struck us as downright confusing, and data entry was as painfully slow as you'd expect. Overall, we'd say Symbian has the steepest learning curve of all handheld operating system, but just how steep depends on the hardware.

	The Nokia E61 runs on Series 60 Symbian platform (click for full review)

Office compatibility
The Symbian OS incorporates full support for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, though again the ability either to create and edit these documents or to just view them depends on your hardware.

E-mail
When it comes to messaging, Symbian is as versatile as any other platform, if not more so. Out of the box, it supports the usual POP3, IMAP4, and Webmail accounts. If you want something a little more robust, you can choose from several push e-mail solutions, including BlackBerry Connect and Visto. The OS also supports the Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange platforms for maximum compatibility in the corporate world.

	Sony Ericsson's M600i feature Symbian OS 9.1 (click for full review)

Multimedia
The Symbian OS is pretty adept at multimedia, with integrated support for audio and video playback and recording, though not all those capabilities are realized on the devices themselves. The Nokia 9300, for instance, comes with both an MP3 player and the mobile version of RealPlayer, which enables playback of RealAudio, RealVideo, and MP3 files. But it can capture neither audio nor video.

Third-party apps
A recent check of software site Handango revealed more than 5,500 third-party apps for the Symbian OS--not quite up to Palm and Windows Mobile levels, but far more than you'll find on other cell phone operating systems. That's another big point in Symbian's favor, especially if you're weighing it against other phones.

Which handheld OS is right for you?
Now you have a general overview of what each operating system has to offer, but you still may be asking yourself: Which OS is right for me? This will largely depend on what types of functionality are important to you. Palm and Windows Mobile handhelds offer mass appeal to general consumers and business users alike with their mix of productivity and entertainment features. For years, these two handheld operating systems have competed fiercely to woo handheld buyers, but now, they're nearly evenly matched in terms of the core applications: address book, calendar, to-do list, and memos. Palm still holds the advantage in PC synchronization as it works with both Apple and Windows-based computers right out of the box, and the OS benefits from a large library of third-party applications; however, Windows Mobile is by far, the champ of multimedia capabilities.

For e-mail fanatics, the BlackBerrys' combination of push technology and integrated QWERTY keyboards is hard to beat, and though they've generally been more business-centric devices, RIM has made a push to reach more customers with consumer-friendly models, such as the entire BlackBerry 7100 series. Still, for now, if you want any type of entertainment features, such as music or video playback, you won't find it on a BlackBerry. Finally, while Symbian might not be the most recognized OS among the group, it offers corporate users powerful productivity and security tools, and the versatility of the OS opens itself up to more general audiences. The only setback has been the limited number of Symbian-based smart phones available in the United States.

To further help you with your buying decision, we've rounded up some of our top product picks as well as upcoming models for each handheld OS. Check them out below.

Palm	Windows Mobile	BlackBerry	Symbian
Palm TX	O2 Xda Atom Exec	BlackBerry 7130g	Nokia E61
Palm Treo 650	Dopod 838 Pro	BlackBerry 8700g	Sony Ericsson M600i
Palm Tungsten E2	HP iPaq hw6965	BlackBerry 8700v	Nokia N80