New Smartphone

I’m in the market for a new phone right now. My current phone is a couple years old, and it’s constantly getting made fun of when I pull it out. It’s a T-Mobile MDA phone, which uses the HTC Wizard base model. I’m actually not quite sure if it’s a Wizard or a Hermes model, but that’s beside the point. The point is my phone is very old.

A month ago, I had it in my head that I was going to buy the latest HTC Windows phone, the HTC Touch Pro 2. It’s a pretty slick phone, it has all the latest touch screen features and is 3G enabled and has a slide out keyboard. It has been toted as the iPhone killer, but then again, so has almost every new smartphone that has come out recently. On my Facebook profile I posted a link to the phone and said “My next phone, aka the iPhone killer!” Well, that prompted a couple of people to comment on my post, most of them disagreeing with my statement and saying the iPhone was better. My brother actually made the best point of the bunch when he pointed out the biggest reason why the iPhone was better than the HTC phone had nothing to do with the phone technology itself, but with Apple’s App Store. Both phones are on par with each other, technology wise, but only the iPhone has the big content base at the App Store which gives the phone so much more added value.

Most consumers don’t care about the exact specs of each phone; which phone has the most memory or the slightly better camera. What they care about is all the “cool stuff” you can do with the phone. Right now Apple has a huge advantage over all other phones and applications stores because you can do more “cool stuff” with their phone than you can with other phones. That doesn’t mean their phone is better. It means that Apple got into the market early, built up a massive installed user base, and is now leveraging that user base to build out its complementary App Store service. Microsoft or Blackberry can roll out phones with better specs and functionality than the iPhone, but until they build out their user base and offer equally as cool applications on their own stores they won’t stand much of a chance against Apple. Which is a bit of a catch-22… how do you get more people to use and develop apps for your phone if the only way they’ll do that is if there is a bigger user and developer base for it?

In the ideal world (for consumers), we’d see a uniform platform used for all these phones and all the cool and innovative applications would work on any smartphone. That’s probably not going to happen anytime soon, but it would probably spawn a lot of growth in the mobile apps market. As it is right now, Apple has the dominant standard in the industry, but I can see Microsoft investing a lot of time and money trying to get their Windows standard spread out across the mobile landscape. It will be interesting to see the tactics they’ll use to achieve this…

Ok, back to my next phone purchase. I’m not sure what I’m going to do now. The HTC phone is nice, and would work well with my current carrier (T-Mobile), but it’s still priced really high even with a 2-year contract. I’m not sure if I’m ready to switch over my family plan to AT&T, so that limits some of my options. One thing I am considering is buying a separate phone line just for the iPhone, so I can play around with it over the next couple of months. I’m also *maybe* thinking about buying an iPhone unlocked and using it on the T-Mobile network. I’ve heard you can do this and pretty much everything works properly. I may go down this route just to go down the route… it sounds pretty cool and hackerish! :)