Smartphone Comparative Review Episode II:
11/02/2005
By: Carlos E.
Where have I been you may ask?
I've been on a smartphone kick for the last seven months, and now I have
compiled my definitive (for this year) review of the major smartphone platforms:
Palm OS vs. Symbian Series 60 vs. RIM(Blackberry)
Where are the Windows devices you ask? Well, I've played with many Windows
devices... many... and well.. it's like taking your younger brother's bike
with training wheels and competing against Lance Armstrong. You get the idea.
Application support and Windows Synch on Windows are great, but usability,
stability, and user experience still rank, in my book, below average.
So... enough about Windows...
Flash back 4 months...
I'm sitting in a Continental Airlines flight waiting for it to take off.
It's 9:15pm, and it was supposed to take off at 3:15pm... We've waited, waited,
and then got out waited in line, and then we had to return to get a crew
change, and then waited some more, and now.. finally.. we will roll out..
into a line of 100 planes waiting to depart from Dallas's airport... What
better environment to test how much use I can get out of the smartphones
that I own.
If it weren't for my ability to communicate with the office, call my friends,
and browse the web, I think these past six hours would have been.. well..
a lot longer. To communicate I was using a dual-slinger blackberry/treo combo.
The treo on the left hand and the blackberry on the right.. checking email
and calling... like any self-righteous technophile would.
Having used the Treo 650 for quite some time, and then having used both the
Blackberry 7100t and 7290, and now, the Nokia 6630 and 6680.. I felt it would
be appropriate to see which one was the best smartphone once and for all...
To make my evaluation criteria more transparent, below is a brief list of
the sorts of things that I look for in a smartphone:
1) Synchronization ease: Since I use an Apple, I favored phones that could
more easily synch with iSync, but I didn't rule out windows synching. I believe
the main purpose of a smartphone is to have your entire PIM information handy,
if the phone can't show it, it's worthless in my opinion.
2) Application Support: A true smartphone is capable of installing and running
more applications than those available by default on the phone. Thus, the
quality, quantity, and maturity of the applications for the phone's platform
are very important to me.
3) User Interface / User Experience: A phone should be intuitive, if I call
someone, I want to be able to easily store the number into the address book..
if I get a call, I want the picture of the person (if it's in my address
book) to show up.. little things like that..
4) Stability: There is nothing more annoying than having your phone crash.
5) Reception / Speaker Sound Quality: If the phone can't receive a call or
if the call sounds like crap, then it might as well be a paper weight.So..
based on this criteria, this is how I rank all of the phones that I used:
So now onto the comparison....
Synchronization Ease with Mac (via iSync):
1) Nokias (6680 & 6630) - Address Book pictures synch very nicely.
2) Treo 650
3) Blackberries (7290 & 7100t)
Synchronization Ease with Windows:
1&2) Blackberries (7290 & 7100t) & Treo 650
3) Nokias (6680 & 6630) - Nokia's PC suite is a joke full of bugs.
Application Support & Availability of Applications:
1) Treo 650 - Tons of applications such as Snappermail and Vindigo that add
a lot of value to the device.
2) Nokias (6680 & 6630) - Not many professional applications, but mail
using Profimail and QuickOffice work well
3) Blackberries (7290 & 7100t) - Crappy small selection
User Interface / User Experience:
1) Nokias (6680 & 6630) - Not complicated to use, clean, simple, and
skinnable so as to fit your style.
2) Treo 650 - Only one with touchscreen makes navigation easier, but menus
and options can overwhelm new users.
3) Blackberries (7290 & 7100t) - Although simple, feels unrefined, clumsy,
requires too much use of the scroll wheel.
Stability:
1) Nokias (6630 & 6680) - Rarely had a crash.
2) Blackberries (7290 & 7100t) - Had a crash about once a week, takes
a long time to reboot (longest of all).
3) Treo 650 - Even with the update, a crash a day wasn't out of the question.
Average was 3 a week.
Reception:
1) Nokias (6680 & 6630 on T-Mobile) - Much more reliable than the other
two in keeping and working with a weak signal.
2) Treo & Blackberries tied (on T-Mobile) - On average, hard to distinguish
between the two in their reception...
Sound Quality:
1) Nokia 6630 - Great, Loud
2) Blackberry 7100t - decent but better than Treo 650
3) Treo 650 - decent speaker, but not great speakerphone
4) Nokia 6680 - low volume, tinny sound
5) Nokia 7290 - Crappy volume, no speakerphone.. and it calls itself a business
phone?
A quick note on battery life for all of these phones....
all except the Nokia 6630 got me through a rough day's worth of calling.
The 6630 seems
to drain faster than the rest (tried several batteries on each).
Now, I want to cover each phone individually, and what my impressions were
of each (for the Treo 650, please refer to my review earlier in the year).
Blackberry 7100t-
Overall, the 7100t was a decent business phone. It doesn't have that many
frills and I wasn't crazy about the user interface, but it worked well
enough, and if I had to choose a blackberry to make more phone calls than
emails,
I'd take this one. However, what drove me crazy was the keyboard. It uses
suretype which is different than T9 and takes some getting used to. However,
since you're tempted to reply in longer messages, the suretype gets old
quick. I'd recommend this phone more for people who get email messages,
read them,
and then reply by CALLING not emailing back. For the latter, I much rather
the Treo 650 or the Blackberry 7290. Oh yes.. this guy had NO EDGE just
GPRS..
Blackberry 7290-
I hate the user interface for the Blackberries in general.. it depends
too much on the scroll wheel, and some actions require too many clicks
to 'accept'
a command. That said, the 7290 was even more painful than the 7100t because
it has the older style UI without the nice customizations, such as themes
which come by default with the 7100t. On top of that, there is no speakerphone
on the 7290, and the call volume is really low (you need to perfectly center
your ear on the speaker and then max out the volume). Ok.. basically, I
hated this phone. It would crash during phone calls sometimes and take
a while
to reboot, but as a mobile email platform that is easy to use, it worked
great. That's all it is.. a mobile email terminal. The keyboard was nice
to type on though.. that's something nice to say, I guess if I had to say
something.
Oh yes.. the quality of the bluetooth connection sucked big time. Unusable.
Oh yes.. again... this guy also has NO EDGE just GPRS..
Nokia 6630-
Overall a pretty peppy phone with a nice screen. The OS is stable, the
applications (Profimail and QuickOffice) worked well, and the camera was
fine. Bluetooth worked well.
The only
things that I didn't like about this phone were:
1) It's not quad-band like the other competitors
2) The camera bulge is huge.
3) The phone shape isn't that appealing
4) The batter life was relatively weak.
Nokia 6680-
This phone is great.. although not quadband, the battery life is improved
over the 6630, the camera is smaller and tucked behind a sliding door
that activates it quickly (has an extra camera for frontal pictures and
video
conferencing as well), synchronizes well.. shows calendar events on the
main screen (like the Today screen of Windows devices), and looks cool
(for a
smartphone).The only drawbacks are that Bluetooth is a bit buggy and
will not accept a headset mid-call, only before making a call, and that
sometimes it has memory issues when opening larger applications such
as Opera's mobile browser.
So who wins?
Well, first of all, from the point of view of a Mac User:
If I had to take one phone with me to travel the world (and bring my
laptop), I'd take the 6680 any day (I love that phone). However, if I
had to ditch
my laptop, I'd be willing to put up with the Treo 650's crashes, for
it still has the most versatility of any smartphone.
However, from the point of view of a Windows User:
I may have to put the Treo first, and then the blackberries and Nokias tie for second place. The blackberry's synch is better than that of the Nokias, but the Nokias are better devices.
Special Thanks:
I would like to thank my friends at USTronics for
getting me the 6680 and Jay in New York for the 6630.
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