Looking for a new smartphone? Flummoxed by all the choices? Not sure what you’re really looking for?
CBR looks at what is on offer for the discerning C-level exec.
5. The Palm Pre
Palm’s efforts at taking on the touchscreen smartphone giants have produced the Pre, a lovely phone featuring a slide-out Qwerty keyboard, removable battery, three megapixel camera and 8GB of memory on board. The 3.1-inch, 320×480 resolution screen is great for watching films in widescreen. The Pre also features Palm Synergy, which can combine your Outlook, Google and Facebook calendar, offering a simple way to keep up with your day-to-day appointments, and Microsoft Direct Push Technology can provide connectivity to your email account.
4. Nokia E72
More of an upgrade to Nokia’s successful E71 phone than a new device altogether, this is probably the closest you can get to a BlackBerry without buying one. The major upgrade involves improvements to the messaging capabilities. From the home screen you can access work emails via Mail for Exchange or IBM Lotus Notes Traveler, as well as personal accounts such as Hotmail and Gmail. The E72 also has a 5 megapixel camera with flash, a full Qwerty keyboard and remote device management options to protect against theft or loss such as device lock and wipe.
Considered by many to be the standard-bearer for touchscreen smartphones, we feel that the iPhone 3GS is let down by poor battery life and less than excellent Internet coverage, especially on the O2 network. Those problems aside, it is a superb phone. It is said to be twice as fast as the original iPhone and has hands-free voice control and a 3 megapixel camera capable of recording video. Users also have access to Apple’s App Store, which now features over 100,000 apps to choose from, ranging from social network tools to travel information to news and games.
The industry leader for enterprise smartphones has been making waves in the consumer space recently with its touchscreen Storm device, but traditional smartphone devices such as this are still RIM’s forte. This is smaller and lighter than the original Bold and has replaced the trackball with a trackpad. As with most RIM devices the email functionality is excellent and the Qwerty keyboard is small but easy to use. RIM has also launched its own app store, called App World, which features all the usual app suspects as well as business-centric tools such as salesforce.com.
1. The HTC Hero
The Hero runs on the open source Android operating systems and HTC has customised it to produce a fantastic, intuitive user experience. There are a number of widgets that can be added or removed from the home screen at the user’s discretion, meaning you can choose what you access from the main page. You can also change from weekday to weekend mode for when you are on “down time”. For the social media-aware executive the Hero comes with its own Twitter app, called Peep, although the user can also read recent tweets or make status updates without opening the app.