Top 5 Best Smartphone Alternatives to the iPhone

When he announced the iPhone, Steve Jobs said to expect three things: “an incredibly great cell phone,” “the best iPod we’ve ever made,” and “the Internet in your pocket.” One out of three isn’t bad. Yes, the iPhone is the best iPod ever—ironic for something not even called an iPod! But it’s just a plain lousy phone, and although it makes some exciting advances in hand held Web browsing, it’s not the Internet in your pocket.

Agree or not, the iPhone isn’t a perfect phone by any means. It can’t multi-task or show Flash content on webpages, it doesn’t accept external SD card memory, it is limited to a 3 megapixel camera and it requires you to use iTunes. Whatever is your reason for not getting the new Apple iPhone 3G, fortunately it’s not the only smartphone out there and there are plenty of alternatives to it. In this article, we will look at five of the top smartphone alternatives to the iPhone. So without further ado, we present to you the top five iPhone rivals that have surfaced over the recent years, in no particular order.

Is an iPhone 3G too costly for you? Do you just dislike the iPhone in general? Then take a look at these great alternatives.

Blackberry Bold 9700:
The Blackberry has traditionally been seen as a smartphone for businessmen but it can be great for every-day consumer use too. It is the only one of our phones not to have a touchscreen but it makes up for it by having a full QWERTY keyboard and trackball for input. It’s business background is clear: the phone comes with mobile versions of Word and Powerpoint. The phone has some decent multimedia features and owners have access to the Blackberry App World to download extra applications.

Operating System: Blackberry OS
Touchscreen: N/A, physical keyboard and trackball input
Camera: 3.2 megapixels

Google Nexus One:
Google launched their own phone in January 2010 called the Nexus One. Running Google’s own Android operating system, the phone features voice recognition and voice-control. Nexus One also features integration with various Google services and a free Google Maps GPS navigation. It currently runs the latest version of Android – 2.1. Sporting one of the best virtual keyboards of its class, and with all the brilliant apps the Android market comes with, the Nexus One is thoroughly recommendable. Specification wise the Nexus has a 5 megapixel camera, 3G, Wifi, a 1Ghz Snapdragon Processor, a 3.7-inch (diagonal) widescreen WVGA AMOLED touchscreen, internal GPS, a high capacity 750 hours stand by time battery, 512MB RAM, a memory expansion slot upgradeable to 32GB, haptic feedback technology, proximity sensors and light sensors. However, the Nexus One isn’t quite the game-changer people hoped it would be, though it certainly trumps other phones in performance, display quality, and speed.

Operating System: Android
Touchscreen: Multi-touch, heat-sensitive (capacitive) touchscreen
Camera: 5 megapixels

HTC Hero:
The HTC Hero is a multi-touch Android smartphone with a 5 megapixel camera, assisted GPS, wi-fi and HTC’s Sense interface. The phone has been highly rated in the press: Mobile Choice named the Hero as their ‘phone of the year’ when it launched. As it runs the Android operating system which gives you access to the large wealth of applications in the Android Market.

Operating system: Android
Touchscreen: Multi-touch, heat sensitive (capacitive) touchscreen
Camera: 5 megapixels

Palm Pre:
Palm Pre is almost certainly, if not definitely, the best smart phone in the world for multitasking. The Pre will manage everything all at once seamlessly without so much as a sweat – quite literally, as battery life for all this multi tasking is pretty good. The Pre has the ability to link contacts, combine messaging and supports universal search. Pre’s webOS is gorgeous and easy to use and comes with highly responsive multitouch display. The key difference with the Pre’s WebOS operating system is that information from sources such as Gmail, Facebook, Outlook and Yahoo! are all collated together to produce a single address book. WebOS also collates together all of your conversations with each contact: for example instant messages and text messages will appear together in a single chat window. Unfortunately, there is no app store for the Palm Pre in the UK yet.

Operating System: WebOS
Touchscreen: Multi-touch, heat-sensitive (capacitive) touchscreen, slide-out physical keyboard
Camera: 3.2 megapixels with flash

Nokia N900:
Like the Palm Pre it has a strong multitasking OS, Wifi, bluetooth, a QWERTY slide up keyboard, assisted GPS, Micro USB port, an ARM Cortex A8 600 MHz Processor. It comes with 32 GB storage, and supports a MicroSDHC card for up to an additional 16GB. The screen is only resistive touch instead of capacitive, but is 3.5 inches and 800×480 pixels. The camera is 5 MP, 2576×1936 pixels, Carl Zeiss optics, auto-focus, Dual LED flash, video light. The Nokia N900 is a phone which really appeals to the geeks and gadget fans. Nokia calls the N900 a ‘mobile computer’. It runs the Linux-based Maemo operating system – the same OS previously used on the Nokia internet tablets. Because of it’s Linux background, it’s super-customizable and can  run applications such as a Firefox web browser with Flash support. My favourite feature of the N900 is the ability to hack it and play around it but you probably won’t want it as your first smartphone.

Operating system: Maemo
Touchscreen: Pressure-sensitive (resistive) touchscreen
Camera: 5 megapixels

Do you recommend another smartphone that can join the elite list of iPhone rivals? We’d love to hear from you. Drop us a comment below.

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