2008 was a great year for smartphones. It was so great, that some believe it will wither the recession with little more than a hitch.
It all began, of course, with Apple releasing the iPhone. From then on the industry went into frenzy, trying to catch up with the three game changing concepts the iPhone has brought with it:
- Touch screen technology rocks
- User interface is everything
- App stores are where you sell software
Since then, a lot of battles were going on, in the blogosphere and elsewhere, between the different handsets and platforms out there. Popular battlefields were: iPhone versus RIM, Windows Mobile versus iPhone, Android versus iPhone and the all-popular all-vs.-all rumble.
Smart vs. Lotus – a bad comparison?
There is one thing that bugs me with these combat comparisons – they are done between handsets and operating systems: The iPhone is a handset, while Windows Mobile and Android are operating systems. RIM is somewhere in-between – they have their own OS, which they use on their own handsets.
Why can’t you compare the iPhone to Windows Mobile? Well, just look at the variance of the handsets you can get out of Windows Mobile:
- HTC Touch HD, an iPhone killer in all aspects of the handset. HTC, by the way, manufactures about 80% of all Windows Mobile handsets today.
- Samsung Blackjack, which has a Qwerty keyboard, closer to a classic Blackberry than to the iPhone.
- LG, which has just committed for 50 different handsets. I wonder how they will look like.
How can you compare the iPhone to so many different handsets?
Same goes for Android, which is an operating system as well. It has been slow to start, but will have its share of handsets soon. It too will come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. In a way, it will be hard to compare the end result of an Android phone with the vanilla version of it.
You can either compare a mobile operating system to another, or a commercial handset to another. After all, if you are going to war, you better choose your battlefields wisely.
Tags: Android, App Store, Blackberry, communication, design, handsets, iPhone, Operating system, review, RIM, RIM. Smartphone, software, user interface, VoIP, Windows Mobile
Comments and trackbacks
1. Sam | May 10th, 2009 at 3:09 am
Maybe you need to do a software engineering degree to learn the differences and i guess most people dont have the technical understanding to differentiate between the iphone and windows mobile OS -
Microsoft’s desktop Windows products are based on the NT operating system, first released as Windows NT 3.1. After NT 4.0, new versions of NT were assigned marketing names: NT 5.0 was called Windows 2000, 5.1 was Windows XP, and NT 6.0 is Windows Vista.
In contrast to Microsoft’s NT-based desktop Windows, WinCE an entirely different OS that only shares the Windows name and some user interface conventions, such as the Start Button.
In contrast to Microsoft’s NT and WinCE, the version of OS X used on the iPhone–and apparently also the new Apple TV, aka iTV–shares far more in common with the desktop Mac version, from its Mach/BSD kernel to its Cocoa frameworks.
2. Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 11th, 2009 at 4:58 am
Sam,
Your points are valid, but there’s a missing piece here:
WinCE is an OS that is used by multiple devices developed and sold by multiple vendors.
Apple’s iPhone OS X version is used… well… only by Apple. It’s not an open OS, but rather an in-house Apple solution for its own devices. It makes Apple’s life a lot easier and the design of their phones much smoother, but it also makes comparisons of Apple’s iPhone to Windows Mobile OS impossible – you need to compare one device against the other or one OS against the other.
Tsahi
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