[General Topics] eaglesteve:
Hi all,

In the past three years, we've witnessed greatly increased competition among smartphones. Android and iPhone are considered by some to be the two most serious contenders, and both have attracted many new users who migrated from the other platform. I myself was a devoted winmo user, and had used every generation of winmo phones/PDA since the late 90's. When iPhone was first released, I did not take it seriously at all, because there were so many limitations and the initial phone did not support third party applications. I made the change from winmo to iPhone only in 2009 after a rather detailed comparison exercise between winmo and iPhone. I've been more than happy with my decision and the jailbroken phone. However, technology does not stay still, and there has been lots of changes especially in the hardware end and the entry of Google into the smartphone business. Personally, I'm greately tempted by the potential of hugh screen size offered by handsets such as the HTC supersonic, and would like to understand if my smartphone experience could be enhanced even more by switching to Android. I also think that this topic area would appear on the forum for every single Android phone, and it might be good to centralise the discussion to get the maximum input possible. Hence this thread.

RULE FOR THID THREAD:

Rule 1: General Courtesy:

I would like to state that this is not a thread for any basher or haters of Google or Apple. If you're one of them, please leave and preach your anti-evil corporation philosophy elsewhere. This is also not meant to be a thread to try to convert any Google phone user to iPhone or vise versa, so while I recognise it's going to be hard, please try your best to stay objective and refrain from imposing your opinion as the only possible logical choice on others. I plead that all you all observe this, so as to get to the end of all the discussion and research as efficiently as possible.

Note: While it is not within my power to remove trouble makers, I will not be responding to any troll on this thread.

Rule 2: Discuss one area at a time, with suitable heading in the title of your post.

This thread may become very long, and people interested in finding out specific comparison should not be made to read through every word in every post. So, let's always describe in the title of your post what your points pertain to.

For now, the title descriptions to be used are: (If you feel the need to have additional topic area for comparision, please let me know so that it can be added here)

- Cut and paste design

- Multitasking design

- hardware button design

- multimedia capabilities

- Touchscreen technology

- Storage capability

- Processor and graphic capability

- Market place

- Application software

- Vendor support

- Firmware upgrade

- Battery life and design

- Camera and video

- Best GPS software (I feel that this is important enough to warrant distinct segregation)

- Theme and UI customization capabiilty

- User interface of applications

- User interface of desktop/sprinboard/program launcher/widget/task switcher

- Application defaults

- Notification handling

- Best web browsing application

- Global search

- Speech recognition

- Device management (backup, restore, syncing, etc)

- Side loading of applications

- File Management and Access

- Using it as a business phone

Rule 3: FULL potential of the phone. You can tweak, customize, as long as the procedure could reasonably be expected of an ordinary user.

Since this thread is mean to help END user choose the BEST phones in the market, the capability that you discuss must come from application programs that has already been made available to the public rather than something that can be done but requires programming knowledge to achieve it. Similar, it. A jailbroken/rooted phone's capability can be discussed as long as the jailbreak tool is available and could reasonably be performed by an average user without hacking skill to personally do the hacking themselves. Also, since my intention is mainly to find out which should be my next phone, we should base it on OS4.0 in iPhone, iPhone HD, and the best possible Android hardware likely to be available in the next few months, and I assume this is HTC Supersonic.

Therefore, no "the phone is crippled out of the box" type of debates please.

Rule 4: Focus on describing the capability rather then merely state your opinion on your preference without backing it up. (For this reason, I'll only draw up a comparision chart after giving everyone the chance to state all the known facts.). Try to state the name of the program/utility that you would use to achieve that capability. I think this would be highly educational.

Enough rules for now. Let's see how it goes.

Thank you for participating on this thread.

Cheers.