What makes a “perfect” smartphone? Some of my fellow journalist buddies and I wrestled with the question, and here’s what we came up with:
First, some part of “perfection” depends on the person. For example, I love QWERTY keyboards, so my personal favorite phone is a Motorola Droid 4. Most people could care less about QWERTY keyboards.
You can also spend a lot of time arguing over which is the best smartphone operating system — Android, as far as I’m concerned — but as Adrian Kingsley-Hughes recently pointed out in his piece on Android vs. Apple’s iOS, for most people, most of the time, there’s no significant usability difference between the two major mobile operating systems. I know, I know; we can argue about the virtues of one OS over another until the sun goes out and the oxygen freezes out of the air, but practically speaking, most users can’t tell the difference.
The real key operating system-related question is: “Are the applications you need available on your platform?” If they are, you’re good. If they’re not, who cares how great the underlying operating system is?