Get Smart: A Guide to Smartphones

The smartphone, a cross between a cell phone and a portable digital assistant (PDA) is rapidly becoming an essential piece of business equipment, not just for corporate salary types, but for small business people, too.

If you need to keep up with e-mail when you’re away from the computer, if you need your full contact database and up-to-date calendar with you at all times, if you need to be able to surf the Web and keep up with news while you’re mobile, you need a smartphone.

All the major cellular carriers offer smartphone products. They range in price from $100 to $600, depending on functionality, power, design – and the duration of the cellular voice or voice/data contract you purchase with them. The longer you’re willing to commit to using (and paying for) their service, the more the carriers will subsidize the price of your smartphone.

The Blackberry Pearl, from RIM.

Most smartphone vendors fall into two camps: cell phone manufacturers, such as Nokia, that have added computing functions to their phones and PDA makers, such as Hewlett-Packard, that have added communications capabilities to their PDAs.

Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the popular BlackBerry smartphones, arguably makes a third camp. RIM started off making pagers and dedicated mobile e-mail devices and later added more PDA functions and, eventually, voice capabilities.

Decisions, Decisions
How do you choose a phone that's right for you? Consider five main selection criteria:

• Features and functions
• Physical form factor (what it looks and feels like)
• User interface (most importantly, how you input text)
• Type of cellular network it works on (CDMA, GSM)
• Operating system platform (Windows Mobile, Symbian, BlackBerry)

Most models offer the same core functionality. They let you make and take voice calls on a cellular network, store and manage personal information (contacts, appointments, to-do items, notes), synchronize this data between smartphone and computer, surf the Web (over the cellular network) and collect e-mail.

Many recent models also play digital music, show photos and videos and come equipped with low-resolution digital cameras. Most let you log on to corporate networks and some can function as modems, allowing you to connect a laptop to the Internet over the cellular network.

A few include a Wi-Fi wireless LAN network adapter, so you can also connect them to the Internet over much faster Wi-Fi networks when they’re available. And many offer Bluetooth wireless connectivity so you can add a hands-free wireless headphone – or hook up a wireless folding keyboard for faster data input.

A few smartphones also now come with GPS (Global Positioning System) transceivers and mapping software – products such as the slick BlackBerry 8800. You can locate cities and towns, businesses and other destinations, and even get turn-by-turn directions, spoken in a robotic voice as you drive and displayed on three-dimensional animated maps.

The Form is a Factor
The size and orientation of the screen (square, portrait, landscape) and the type of input technology used will determine the overall size and shape of the device, which is an important decision factor for many people.

All smartphones have larger, more colorful and higher-resolution screens than regular cell phones, but some are larger than others. Many also offer an easier way to input data than the tedious method familiar to cell phone owners – either tiny QWERTY keyboards or touch screens and plastic pens for hand printing, with handwriting recognition software to convert printing to computer text.

The models with the biggest – and therefore easiest to read – screens and keyboards naturally tend to be bigger overall and also squarer, more the shape of a PDA or pager. Those with smaller, portrait-shaped screens and numeric keypads or only touch screens look and feel more like traditional cell phones.

If your primary use for a smartphone will be talking on the phone, and you’ll only occasionally use it to send e-mail, browse the Web or manage personal information, consider one of these slender, more phone-like models – products such as the Verizon PN-820 (Verizon, $150 up), a flip phone, or the BlackBerry 7130e (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, $150 up), a candy bar model with numeric keypad.

If your first priority is mobile computing and e-mail, choose a PDA phone such as one of the HP iPaq models or a traditional RIM BlackBerry unit with keyboard. The bigger screen, plus keyboard or handwriting recognition input will make reading messages and Web pages and entering data much easier.

If you need the bigger screen and superior input tools of a PDA phone but find it awkward or uncomfortable to use as a phone, keep in mind that you can always connect a wired or wireless Bluetooth headset – they come in a variety of sizes and styles – and only use the unit itself to dial numbers.

The iPhone, from Apple.

Thumb Versus Stylus
Entering text on a smartphone is never easy, but it’s essential if you want to take full advantage of applications such as mobile e-mail. Do some hands-on research at retail stores or play with friends’ and colleagues’ smartphones to see which type of input technology you prefer – traditional telephone keypad, onscreen touchpad, QWERTY keyboard or handwriting recognition.

The only advantage of a numeric telephone keypad is that it simplifies dialing voice calls, mainly because the keys are bigger. But numeric keypads are not practical for anything more than occasional text entry. Ditto for oncscreen touchpads that phones such as the new Apple iPod (AT&T, $500 up) offer.

The QWERTY keyboards on BlackBerry and Palm Treo models, among others, have very small keys, but as long as you don’t have oversize fingers, you can learn to type fairly quickly with two thumbs while cradling the device with your fingers. Just don’t expect to be fast right away.

The other alternative is handwriting recognition. Don’t reject this technology just because you remember the stories about first-generation recognition software that garbled input when converting it to computer text. Current recognition software works very well. You will have to learn to print characters in a prescribed manner, though, so the software can recognize them more easily. We prefer a stylus to tiny keyboards; your results may vary.

There are also hybrid solutions. Some PDA phones include full QWERTY keyboards and handwriting recognition – the Palm Treo 700wx (Sprint, Verizon, $250 up), for example.

RIM started producing slim smartphones last year that use its patented SureType keyboard technology – the more recent Pearl (AT&T, T-Mobile, $100 up), for example. The 20-key keyboard has letters laid out in the familiar QWERTY pattern, but with two per key. You press a key and artificial intelligence software figures out which of the two letters you intended. It works surprisingly well, but it’s still slightly slower than typing on a fully QWERTY keyboard.

High Tech Computer. (HTC) Corp. has a model (Cingular 8525, $300 up) that, at a glance, looks like an Apple iPhone, with a large portrait-mode screen and no keypad. As with the iPhone, you dial using an onscreen numeric touchpad. But the back half of the 8525 slides out to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. You turn the unit so the keyboard is under the screen, which is now in landscape orientation.

Network Mysteries
Most cellular subscribers have no idea what kind of wireless technology their carrier uses, and they don’t need to know. Unless they expect to do a lot of overseas roaming.

Roaming is when you use your phone in an area where your carrier doesn’t have coverage. The carrier maintains many usually reciprocal agreements with other carriers who provide you service when you’re in their area.

Roaming is a more important issue with smartphones because now your phone is not something you can easily swap for another that works on the local network. The smartphone is also your mobile computer, stuffed with all your vital information.

So what’s the issue? There are two main wireless network technologies: CDMA, developed in the U.S. by Qualcomm, and GSM, developed in Europe. You can’t roam with a CDMA phone on a GSM network or vice versa.

It’s not a problem if you only roam within North America. Regardless of the network technology your carrier uses, you’ll be able to get roaming coverage wherever you go. However, elsewhere in the world, it can be an issue.

There are CDMA networks in Asia-Pacific, but virtually none in Europe, where GSM dominates. GSM is also widely used in other parts of the world, including in developing countries. So if you expect to travel outside North America and want to roam with your new smartphone, you need to look closely at where you’ll be able to get service. For most business travelers, choosing GSM probably provides a slight edge.

In the U.S., the main GSM carriers are Cingular (now AT&T) and T-Mobile, but many regional and local providers also offer service on GSM networks. The main CDMA-based carriers are Verizon and Sprint Nextel. All have upgraded to higher-capacity and higher-data-speed 3G (third generation) wireless networks – 1xEV-DO (CDMA) or EDGE (GSM).

Note also that if you want to roam overseas, you will have to buy a smartphone that can work on the radio frequencies used for cellular in the countries you’ll likely visit. Look for a “quad-band” or world phone (usually GSM) to give you maximum flexibility. You will pay a premium for a world phone.

The Treo 700wx, from Palm.

Pick a Platform
There are three main operating system platforms for smartphones: RIM BlackBerry, Symbian (which is used in Nokia and other phones) and Microsoft Windows Mobile, also used in phones made by several manufacturers. All have their claimed advantages.

Symbian, which has been around for a long time, but more in Europe than North America, has attracted many software developers who have created hundreds or thousands of add-on applications for Symbian phones – more by most accounts than exist for BlackBerry or Windows Mobile. Benefit: more choice.

BlackBerry traditionally offered the best e-mail experience and the best-designed user interfaces. Microsoft claims its Windows Mobile devices are easier for most people to learn and use because they work something like Windows on a computer. It’s also supposedly easier for Windows-based companies to develop applications for Windows Mobile.

Much of the wrangling for ascendancy in the smartphone market has revolved around how the phones handle e-mail, the most crucial application besides voice.

With most mobile e-mail solutions, you have to tell the device to make a connection with a mail server over the cellular network to download your messages. Most let you set up periodic checks – every 15 minutes or every hour, for example. Many will only get part of the message. If you want to read it all, you have to tell it to connect again and download the rest.

With ‘push’ e-mail, pioneered by RIM over a decade ago, you don’t have to do anything. RIM relays messages to you automatically from your regular e-mail box (at an ISP or on a corporate e-mail server) as soon as they’re received. And on BlackBerry devices, you always get the entire message, including attachments if you want.

Until fairly recently RIM had a clear competitive advantage in this area. Getting e-mail on a BlackBerry was simpler, faster and more reliable.

But with the introduction of Windows Mobile 5 last year and a new version of the Exchange e-mail server, Microsoft could also offer companies a push e-mail experience. And service providers have emerged that sell BlackBerry-like push e-mail service for Windows Mobile and Symbian devices through cellular carriers just as RIM does.

Bottom Line
For our money and in our experience, BlackBerry still provides the best mobile e-mail experience, though Windows Mobile is catching up. If e-mail is the most important application for you, choose one of these two.

Windows Mobile is easy to use because it's somewhat familiar to anyone who uses a Windows PC, but the BlackBerry and Symbian software interfaces are also very user friendly. If you’re looking for a small smartphone, you may find yourself gravitating to Symbian-based models.

If your company has any thought of developing custom mobile data applications or having them developed, Windows Mobile has a slight edge. There are more programmers and companies with skills to develop applications for it, and the costs may be lower because developers can use the same tools they use for Windows applications on the desktop.

Finally, consider carefully which added features you need. If you spend a lot of time on the road, for example, stopping at coffee shops and restaurants along the way, buying a smartphone with Wi-Fi capabilities will mean you can use hotspots, saving money on cellular air time, getting your mail quicker and surfing the Web at higher speeds.