Android vs Blackberry OS vs Symbian vs iOS

[LeetPirate]

Just this week I was researching Android OS and trying to compare to other mobile platforms. I realised Windows Phone 7 does not stand a chance as yet. I really like Nokia phones but I also like Android OS so I'm stuck. :D

Is it possible for you to download latest Android and install it on your phone or do you have to wait for the provider to release updates over the air? I'm learning towards either a Blackberry or an Android phone. Then I was reading that only certain models gets the updates for latest OS versions which I think sucks because everyone should get the updates.

Which smartphone you think I should pick?

I don't think I have that many complicated requirements:

1. I hardly use provider data services because they cost plenty, but I want WiFi abilities so I could browse and check email at home using my WiFi.

2. The phone must be able to sustain a phone call so iOS is totally out since iPhone4 cannot sustain calls.

3. I use SMS and MMS from the provider so phone must support those, don't care for video calling which Android cannot do as yet so no biggy.

4. I want to install a free dictionary on it, a real English dictionary not American.

Some optional stuff:

5. I would like the ability to get recent OS updates but I'm not sure how this is done.

6. Which OS has the most cool free apps in your experience?

Most importantly, I need to find a website that will sell me original phones for cheap with international shipping. You know sometimes these phones just accidentally fall off the delivery truck and somebody finds them and sells them cheap. I could probably check ebay but I dunno. :ph34r:

Lastly, I never owned a smartphone before so what advice you have for me based on your experience with these devices?

[bashar]

i've been a die-hard fan of Sony ericsson smart-phones

i had p800 and p1i right now

but i'm sick of the symbian OS , never had the chance to try android but i'm rooting for it to be the best

i recommend it over IOS and Symbian

cool , light , many apps , the future = android

[LeetPirate]

Well I would like to get Android and this Xperia X10 looks great but alot of the phones come with some old ass version of Android and upgrading seems impossible unless the carrier sends it OTA. Any way to manually upgrade your Android on your own through the pc cable maybe?

[RadioActive]

I'm also curious about this, I'm comparing iPhone 3GS (4G is too much for my budget) with Xperia x10 Mini. And was curious about both phones especially the OS. I know that the X10 ships with Android 1.6, but can it be easily upgraded to 2.2 or later? Because I know that iPhone is relatively easy to upgrade to 4.X.

[*dcs18]

Good-bye

[Lite]

My views on Android: Its free and open source. It has a massive community of active developers ("unofficial"). Its the fastest growing mobile operating system. Its market is supposed to overtake apples app store in terms of numbers soon. Even if officially your phone doesn't have the latest release, you can get unofficial ROMs of the latest version.

Symbian i think is a dying breed. iPhones are very expensive. I know nothing about BlackBerryOS.

Whats your budget on the phone?

@Lohengrin, SE say Q4 2010 for an éclair release.

[LeetPirate]

I don't want to go over 500USD. I actually like the Xperia, I can get the mini X10 for around 250USD from my phone company.

I have read about the upcoming update but it still isn't the latest Android OS and Sony Ericsson is taking so long to release the update. That's one issue, the other is how to install the updates, if it's only OTA updates then it means I will have to wait till the official SE update gets pushed along to my phone company and by then Android 3.0 might be released and they will now be sending OTA updates for v2.1 :D

The unofficial roms you speak of I will do some research on it, I might very well have to base my choice of phone on the availability of the latest unofficial android update roms.

[Lite]

The x10 is stupidly well "protected", so there isn't a great deal of development on that phone. Theres loads of other issues such as the lack of multi-touch and seemingly non-existent official support for this device.

Galaxy S or the Desire could be suitable.

[LeetPirate]

I'm going to check out the HTC website. :)

I just got some advice that corroborates your advice that the X10 is not the way to go if I want to play with roms and mods.

[HATE9X]

most android phones can be updated to newer versions (unofficial builds like CyanogenMod) even if the manufacturer isn't providing newer versions. first they must be 'rooted' tho (sorta like jailbreaking, but for androids [google nexus doesn't need this, as it's not restricted]).

i think android is looking very good. i'm interested in buying an android phone myself.

i've been symbian user for years and atm have a s60v5 touch fone. the huge amount of apps and games still make symbian great, but it's now falling behind android, iOS and the likes.. seems even nokia will probably be abandoning it, seeing their new OS meego (and formerly maemo [which was merged with moblin to create meego])

i'm interested to see how winphone7 will look/perform, but i'm sure it's not gonna catch up with android and others. guess it'll still do better than failed zune and older windows phone versions that were quite awful to use.

[mara-]

Well, I'm not sure if Symbian is dying. Symabian 3 looks promising. BTW, I have 5800 and I never sow so much popular phone. There is a tons of customizations. I'm currently running C6 firmware on my 5800. I even started modding myself, and it's not so hard.

Cheers ;)

[HATE9X]

Well, I'm not sure if Symbian is dying. Symabian 3 looks promising. BTW, I have 5800 and I never sow so much popular phone. There is a tons of customizations. I'm currently running C6 firmware on my 5800. I even started modding myself, and it's not so hard.

Cheers ;)

i also have C6 cfw on my 5530. oh and i saw 'some' mods by you included in 'some' cfw.. :P [and i went like, damn, that must be mara- from nsane! :D] good work! ;)

[i have a diff nick at DM btw]

sure i'll try to keep up faith in symbian. if they get the UI more touch-friendly and better cpus (+gfx cards!! [nokia, i'm looking at you!!]) on the phones, i see no reason for it to die indeed. it's a fine os. the smartfone os i've used the most in my life (actually i've had only symbian phones since buying my first symbian phone.. guess it's quite good proof the os is great).

[*dcs18]

Good-bye

[HATE9X]

02.) Crackers are able to debrand the latest android releases within reasonable timeframes.

android is open source dude :rolleyes:

:D

[Zeus_Hunt]

My personal Suggestion would have been Palm Pre... they are bringing out a new phone before the end of this year.

WebOS is an elegant OS with a huge community support - www.precentral.net

Palm gets official with webOS 2.0 and Pre 2: hitting France on Friday, Verizon 'in the coming months'

I find Android market quite fragmented.

HTC phones have good community support though.

Samsung Galaxy S has had great reviews.. I think it is a very nice phone to have, among Android.

Community for Android - http://www.xda-developers.com/

WinMo7 is an Amateur OS which will take time to come to a level of refinement now achieved in WebOS, iOS and Android

Symbian is dead. Even Nokia does not know what to do with it.

[mara-]

@ dcs18

I really don't understand such hype about Android. Can you tell why is it better then Symbian? I never used it, but I know it has higher hardware requirements, which is a big minus in my opinion.

Cheers ;)

[*dcs18]

Good-bye

[mara-]

Yeah, hype was not directed to you. But I hear most people say that they'll drop Symbian for Android and nobody is saying why is Android better.

Cheers ;)

[DKT27]

With all the respect to the personal views. Just read news online everyday and see how Apple's iPhone crosses the uttermost limits of hypes. Simply isn't worth it.

[Night Owl]

To get an iPhone 4 16GB in Canada, I would have to pay $159.99 and then sign my life away for three years agreeing to pay at least $50 a month (for just 200 anytime minutes, unlimited evenings & weekends, 500 MB data). So that's a minimum commitment of $1,959.99 for the cheapest iPhone 4 on the cheapest smartphone plan. :wtf: Canadians get ripped off. :angry:

[Night Owl]

the us is second in line at getting ripped off just look at DKT27 post in the news... or i might be NewsBot that posted that there but Canada was 62 dollars and the US was 58 dollars on average.

Yeah, I read that story, US, Canada have priciest cell phone plans in the world. The figures are even worse: $67.50 for Canadians and $59.99 for Americans. This story was on the Canadian news today. An analyst said that Canadians actually pay a lot more because this study didn't factor in items such as Call Display (aka Caller ID), long distance, etc. Canadians have the highest cellphone rates in the world and on top of that we get nickel and dimed to death. Grrrr. We're as mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore. :angry:

[LeetPirate]

I cannot bring myself to buy an iPhone. It defies science and logic for me to want to buy a phone that just does not work, the main purpose of a phone is to make a call and the iphone cannot do it unless you hold it upside down under your ass while standing on your head or you could buy a rubber case aka the iCondom. :blink:

There are also social repercussions for buying an iPhone, buying an iphone causes you to support the division of society into economic classes whereby owners of apple products perceive themselves to be upper class and superior to people who do not own apple products. Owning an iphone will also cause you to want to buy starbucks coffee because you will find yourself enticed by the newly growing ego within yourself that comes about from the fake feeling of being socially superior to the people you normally hang out with. Worse of all is the thought of Steve Jobs, a narcissistic devious criminal mastermind who stands proudly behind his perceived innovations that really have no real purpose other than to reduce productivity due to lack of functionality.

Steve Jobs preys on the weak-minded fool who believes the way to feel accomplished in life is through the ego. Well Dr Deepak Chopra has many sayings about getting rid of your ego because it's not a good thing.

Chopra: I tell friends to just put your attention in your heart and think of all the things you're grateful for. If you just do that, you can't have ego and gratitude at the same time. When you're ego acts up, feel the sensation to your body and it's not very good. You know what Nelson Mandela said? He said, "Having resentments which is an act of the ego is like drinking poison and thinking to kill your enemies."

Another wise person had this to say:

The company also known as Mac is one of the most harmful entities to enter the retail world since homosexual fashion designers decided to put their name on products and sell them for several thousand times more than what they are actually worth.

The last reason I will not be getting an iPhone is because iDon'tLookLikeThis.

Steve Jobs is the guy bold enough to tell you things like: Sure our mac servers is only a fifth the power of a linux server and costs 10 times as much but it just means you should buy 5 of our servers instead of 1 Linux server, and people swallow that with a smile as they hand over their money for inferior products. Not to mention: Yea we knew the iphone4 had a problem with signal reception but you have to buy it anyway because we will never recall anything, how about you pay us $40 bucks for an iCondom that really costs 50 cents and was made in a Chinese child labour facility? Steve Jobs uses deception and trickery to convince you that you don't need any functionality that his product is incapable of offering and of course the corporate drones buy into it because they want to fit into the upper social class.

It's not really a rant, just the facts. Take it or leave it. :D

On another note I always buy unlocked phones because I prefer to spend the money on the initial investment instead of paying it through a long term contract. Plus it's easier this way to keep my same phone number because I use the same sim card over the years. Right now I'm looking at the HTC G2 that comes with froyo and has one of the highest benchmark scores (1583) in quadrant, it beats the iphone4 (1400). Problem is I can't find it to buy from any of my favourite shopping sites and probably because its new so they don't have it as yet.

I also have no problems with Symbian except that it seems more difficult to get the latest OS updates and I like to update everything to the latest versions to see what they have to offer. Makes sense right afterall that's why this is my favourite website, I get all the latest updates to my favourite software. The Nokia X6 is a nice phone that fits my bill but I was concerned that there isn't a mem card slot to save pics and recordings, I have heard cases of people dropping their phones and it dies and they cannot retrieve their data from the internal memory, not that I plan to kill my phone but accidents happen.

[Hottwire]

I had a iPhone 3gs and as much as i loved it, I now have a HTC Wildfire, sure it doesn't do some of the fancier games and stuff that the iPhone has and it might not have all the apps but there are substitutes for what i had and some are better than that of the iPhone version also extra features such as free sat nav where the iPhone didn't and it also sync straight to my google account which is extremely helpful, no messing around setting up exchange then removing all the contacts to pc through iTunes to put them back on so they would be on the exchange server in case of losing them.

So overall out of the two I prefer my HTC Wildfire on Android over the iPhone, again no games but I don't really care plus because android market is open source some apps are cheaper than that on apple store!

But that's my personal opinion

[Zeus_Hunt]

I share your Feeling LeetPirate on iPhone. Hence never felt the urge to buy one

Unfortunately WebOS doesnt have a good Hardware to run on. Else it should have been a serious contender.

Its a Beautiful OS.

[DKT27]

@Leetpirate: Couldn't agree more.

@Night Owl: On the other side, India would be having one of the most expensive internet. I pay $22 per month to get only 129KB/s dl and 25KB/s ul max. :frusty: