There has been a lot of buzz in the market about who is better – BlackBerry, Symbian, iPhone, Microsoft, or the latest entrant Android? But, so far iPhones are winning the lead among the other contenders.
However, of course people have their own thoughts – some are in the favor of Android and some are of the opinion that Symbian is ten times better than the other names. So many thoughts, so many opinions and so many fans…who gets to be right and who wins?
Which is the Best Mobile SmartPhone?
According to the commercial developers, there are three major areas, which need to be seen when judging. These are:
Who has a larger fan following and defined market?
What is a more efficient channel to reach that market?
What is the cost for developing products for that market?
If you study PC Microsoft, you’d notice that all three traits are evident. The PC market was huge and well defined, Microsoft and its partners had retail channels to deliver the products, the Windows SDK’s were economical, and Windows itself was amply urbanized which made development job more efficient, faster, and rather low-priced.
In the race of mobile OS, even if SDK’s were low-priced, so far the only channel to market the products was the carrier, and a mass of platforms and form factors led to driving the costs higher. Although many changes have been witnessed, nevertheless, the in-house lessons haven’t been made by all the vendors so far.
BlackBerry, Android or iPhone?
Now let us take a look at the top troupe ruling the market these days in terms of the three traits mentioned above– BlackBerry, Android and iPhone.
BlackBerry
Blackberry has the largest market.
Although, BlackBerry doesn’t have a very conspicuous channel to reach the market, however BlackBerry AppWorld is fairly good and developers can still choose to go with the carrier store, or even have direct distribution. However, to look at it from customers’ end, looking around for an application in various locations makes a pitiable experience.
The development cost is significantly high owing to excess of form factors and the conflicting versions of the operating systems on the phoneset. Even if the model number is the same, you’d find that BlackBerry’s sold to AT&T has different versions of the OS compared to BlackBerry’s sold to Rogers or Orange. The test matrix for BlackBerry is off-putting, excluding the part that they are the largest commercial developers so far.
Android
Android’s have a burgeoning market, which is still considerably large.
Android has multiple stores available similar to BlackBerry. Again, oddly enough, the channel choice doesn’t essentially make up for a good customer experience or a competent way for a developer to be able to reach the market.
Similar to BlackBerry, Android devices have different OS in a single model – no uniformity. Vendors pick any form factor and combination of features as they desire, which makes it a suffering for developers.
iPhone
iPhone has a large market and huge fan following.
It has a single store – AppStore – that makes it easy to search and efficiently buy from user’s perspective. Developers’ products have a better chance of being found conveniently by the customers.
The development cost is low. Fundamentally, the operating systems for iPhone and iPod touch are the same and users can easily upgrade themselves to latest version quickly using iTunes. With a uniform technical structure and a single test platform, it makes it quite convenient from the developers’ perspective to rely on a given set of features being available, making the cost noticeably lower as well.
The biggest benefit iPhone has over the others is that the homogeneity of the iPhone platform and channel makes it convenient from a developers’ perspective. Owing to the economical pricing associated with development, it can be safely said that developers will target iPhone compared to others for marketing new products. If products are successful, then they can expect to see them transferred on other prominent platforms.
Therefore, one can easily predict who is better than the other and who needs to work much on their end.
Ever since VoIP phone services have been introduced, iPhone popularity has increased even more. As Voice Over Internet Protocol or VoIP is the latest technology for making cost effective phone calls to business, families and friends living father away and the ease to be able to stay connected, more and more people are signing up with VoIP services.
In iPhones, owing to the above mentioned benefits, developers and users both have found satisfaction in developing and using for the latter. If there were multiple OS for iPhones, perhaps VoIP applications compatibility would have been a question and people would have had to find alternatives to iPhones even.
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