Mobile Internet Browser Face-Off

With most mobile phones featuring internet browsing capabilities, choosing which phone offers the best mobile internet experience is a pretty daunting task. It’s a good thing though that Gizmodo has come out with a very juicy comparison to help us out. It may be a very limited comparison leaving out the likes of the HTC Touch Pro and XPERIA X1 out of the picture, but it is, nevertheless very informative.

As you can see with their scores, the iPhone is still the best among the rest despite lacking Flash support. Garnering a B+ score is the HTC G1 with the Android OS while both the BlackBerry Bold and Nokia E71 got a B-.

The table below shows how all the phones fared using a 3G connection. Page rendering is denoted by a Poor to Excellent rating while the color (green is good; red is poor) takes into account both speed and page rendering accuracy.

This second table show how each phone performs under a WiFi connection.

All-in-all, it was a pretty interesting showdown. Some lived up to their expectation while some failed miserably. Safe to say, if mobile internet browsing is your kind of thing, then it seems that it’s best to go with the iPhone albeit lacking support for flash. For more details about the results and how they conducted the test, you can check out Gizmodo.

How about you guys? Which mobile phone do you think provides the best mobile internet experience?

Smartphone Showdown: 3 QWERTYs and a Touchscreen

As a response to one of my readers’ request, I'm pitting the latest smartphones in the market against each other to see which one really stands out in this elite group. Actually, I'm also quite curious ourselves to find out which is the best among the bunch as each one has a unique feature to offer that the others don’t have.

As you can see in the table, there isn’t one phone that clearly dominated in all the categories. Take for example the Nokia E71. It does win in the camera, size and weight divisions, but it has the smallest display in the group with the best one goint to the 3G iPhone. While the iPhone may also be considered a winner in terms of internal memory, all the others support memory expansion which makes their total memory flexible although I doubt there’s an SD card available now that’ll match the iPhone’s 16GB capacity. On the user interface side, QWERTY is still the most efficient way of entering long messages and composing e-mail, which makes the iPhone the blacksheep of the group albeit its highly advanced touchscreen. However, the Palm Treo Pro manages to incorporate both a touch screen interface and a QWERTY keypad into its design offering users a taste of both worlds.

As far as the OS is concerned, that is a matter of preference. While the Mac OS X mobile version is relatively new in the market, it is fast gaining popularity and many developers are now releasing apps for the iPhone. Both Windows Mobile and S60 have been around for sometime now and they have their own respective community of developers. The Blackberry, on the other hand, also has its share of software developers though they’re quite limited and not so visible as opposed to the others. Nonetheless, all of their respective mobile OS are equally capable and can get the job done at hand. It all boils down to how much you would like to expand its capabilities through 3rd party applications and additional software.

Clearly, there’s no one way to call this competition and it will all rely on what you need. If it’s a simple internet mobile device, the 3G iPhone is what we would recommend simply because the mobile Safari is unmatched in terms of performance. If it’s a serious business phone you’re after, you can’t go wrong with the Blackberry Bold, but considering its limited availability worldwide, I’d say its better to get the Nokia E71 or Palm Treo Pro instead though the latter is yet to be released. If you want an all-around performing device, the Nokia E71 gets my vote. However, if availability is a major concern, you’ll narrow down the playing field to the iPhone and the Nokia E71 as both the BlackBerry Bold and Palm Treo Pro are not yet out in the local Philippine market.

But hey, this is just my opinion, how about you guys; which one’s the best smartphone among the group for you?

iPhone 3G vs. New 3G Phones

With the launch of the iPhone 3G a couple of weeks ago, the market for third-generation mobile phones has entered its most interesting and exciting phase so far.

Not only because the 3G version of Apple’s smart phone marks the arrival of the market’s best, although we do have legions of Mac diehards ready to attest to this proposition as a fact.

But more so because prior to Steve Jobs’ 3G move, there already is a great bunch of well-designed, highly capable 3G phones in the market.

iPhone 3G

Its launch-day software glitches, notwithstanding, the iPhone 3G has earned for itself the reputation for being the 3G phone to beat. It remains one of the most sought-after, eagerly awaited IT products of its generation.

From media reports and comments by users of online discussion boards, most Mac phone subscribers were not disappointed.

Nokia E71

Coming from the Finnish mobile phone giant, the Nokia E71 gives a new meaning to the smart in smart phones. This 114 x 57 x 10mm mobile computer, er… phone, offers optimized mobile email and messaging capabilities.

Despite its being pocket-sized, the E71 comes with a full QWERTY keyboard, offering one-handed typing convenience for mobile subscribers.

BlackBerry Bold

The boldest statement yet from Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry mobile phones that have become synonymous with mobile email, the BlackBerry Bold comes with high-speed connectivity, multimedia features, GPS and BlackBerry maps and Wi-Fi. A brilliant display completes its lineup of smart-phone features.

The BlackBerry Bold represents RIM’s strongest bid to retain the smart-phone crown.

Touch Diamond



This looker of a mobile phone comes powered by a Qualcomm MSM7201A 528MHz processor.

Its Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional OS, on the other hand, ensures that this handset from Taiwan’s HTC Corp. is compatible with a wide range of mobile applications.

HTC has been known for coming out with high-quality products. This 110-gram, 102 x 51 x 11.35 mm beauty continues this tradition.

Quite a number of mobile communication industry observers had feared for the 3G market, suspecting maybe that the third-generation mobile phone sector might fail to take off just as next generations of mobile telephone technologies were seen hovering over the not-so-far horizon.

Today’s 3G scene, hence, is a far cry from what the market used to be, and what some industry analysts feared it would become.

This bevy of well-designed and highly capable handsets demonstrates how strong the market really is.