The 81-Day Experiment

I called it "The 81-Day Experiment," but some of my friends called it "temporary insanity."

Over a period of 81 days last year, I tried out nine of the top smartphones on the market, including the latest Palm Treos, BlackBerries, Symbians, and of course, Windows Mobile devices. Each device got a nine-day trial, and then I moved on to the next one. My goal was to find the perfect smartphone, but perfection is relative and goes beyond a simple evaluation of what the user needs—it must include style and personality as well. (Note: This magazine uses the word "Smartphone" with the initial "S" capitalized to refer to specific Windows Mobile devices. The word appears in this article un-capitalized to indicate that it refers to devices with PDA and phone capabilities that may or may not use Windows Mobile.)

I once heard a radio announcer talking about the qualities that he was looking for in a partner. He said that he was seeking someone who had the looks of Cindy Crawford, the heart of Mother Teresa, the brain of Einstein, and the wealth of Bill Gates. If I took a similar approach with smartphones, I would go for the look and feel of the BlackBerry Pearl, the full QWERTY keyboard of the T-Mobile Dash, the reliability and speed of devices running on the Verizon network, and the international support of the T-Mobile or Cingular networks. Unfortunately, like the ideal partner, the perfect smartphone is hard to find. I had to have a focal point for evaluation, so my emphasis in this experiment was on usability. Without it, even the most stylish device is useless.

I did eventually decide on a device, but more importantly, I came up with a process for selecting a smartphone. I will summarize this at the end of the article, in a section titled "The 3-step process for selecting your smartphone." The truth is, mobile technologies are advancing rapidly, and by the time you read this, newer and better devices may be available. My hope is that this article will provide some insight that will help you select your own "perfect" smartphone, even with the rapid change in technology.

Four categories of smartphones

Back in the days I was writing business plans and meeting with venture capitalists, I always included a 4-quadrant diagram in my presentations. It was not only visually interesting, but also helped to explain the market and the positioning of the various players. Initially, I took the same approach with the world of mobile devices.

Obviously, there are many ways to slice and dice the market, but one that developed lists the business capabilities on the vertical axis and the entertainment (multimedia) capabilities on the horizontal axis, is shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1: My initial 4-quadrant organization of mobile devices.

You can quickly see that most of the full-featured smartphones I was interested in all fell in the upper-right quadrant, which ranked high on both business and entertainment features. I ranked the BlackBerry Pearl and Cingular 3125 lower in this quadrant because they were not as full-featured as the Treos and the MDA. The Motorola Q and the T-Mobile Dash ranked a little higher on the business axis than the BlackBerry Pearl and Cingular 3125 mainly because of the full QWERTY keyboard that they offer. The Q and Dash ranked slightly lower on the entertainment axis because of their form factor (which is slightly larger and not as slick looking for social events).

It became evident to me that I had to divide things up into sub-categories to evaluate the devices. I chose the following: