It’s Thursday, so we’re talking technology here on ItsHeyNow.com.  Today’s post is about something that affects each and everyone of us each and every day, what type of cell phone we use.  I’m going to leave the battle between ATT, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile alone for this post and concentrate on the three big operating system choices for smart phones, which is where the market is heading towards.  Today, we will be concentrating on Blackberry, iPhone, and Android.  I will try to be as impartial as possible, as all these options have their pros and cons.  But before we start, I have to say that I was a loyal Blackberry user for over 3 years, who has recently switched to an iPhone.

Blackberry:

The folks at Research in Motion’s headquarters in Waterloo, Canada who manufacture the Blackberry smartphone have a truly amazing messaging machine.  Nothing beats the availability of true push email on the blackberry.  Emails are instantaneously pushed to each and every blackberry.  There were times my phone went off before my desktop gmail gave me the notice of a new mail message.  Blackberry messenger, a favorite among consumer and corporate users, is also a great advantage to users.  It allows for conversational, chat-like messaging over the data network.  Users can also share status updates on their messengers.  All blackberry users have blackberry messenger built-in.  Email and BBM are the biggest advantages of the having a blackberry, however anything past that is where the blackberry lacks in comparison to other smartphones.  Internet browsing and applications are lacking in comparison to its counter-parts.  Blackberries are available through all carriers.

iPhone:

The iPhone took the cell phone industry by storm when Steve Jobs and Apple introduced it.  It was the first truly good full touch-screen experience on a cell phone.  The iPhone is now on it’s 4^th version, with a fifth generation rumored to be hitting the market in the summer.  The current iPhone has the ability to bring almost desktop-like web browsing to a cell phone.  Apple’s app store has thousands and thousands of applications ranging from business and personal finance to ever popular games like Angry Birds.  Another thing that iPhone users also like is the ability to jailbreak (illegally) their phones in order to customize the phone to their own specifications. One of the biggest things lacking on the iPhone is the ability to truly multi-task, iOS 4 brought background multi-tasking whereby applications like Pandora can still play in the background while using the other features of the phone. Also, everyone has heard of the countless issues with the call quality of the iPhone on ATT’s network.  This is an issue localized solely to iPhone’s (not all) and does not really affect other phones on ATT’s network.  The iPhone was only available on ATT through an exclusive deal between Apple & ATT, but in early February became available on Verizon’s network.

Android:

It seems like only a year ago the only Android based phone was the G1 on T-Mobile’s network.  How times have changed!  Is it me, or is a new Android phone with some wacky name introduced seemingly every hour?  It’s becoming hard to keep up at times, but the wide spread availability of phones is because Android is open source and produced by many hardware manufacturers, including HTC, Samsung, and Motorola.  Android, like the iPhone offers an almost desktop-like browsing experience and an application store.  The Android operating systems has also been transferred to tablets.  Android phones come in all shapes and sizes, two of the most popular are the Incredible (Verizon) and the EVO 4G (Sprint).  One of the major downfalls with Androids is also its biggest strength, the open source nature of it whereby individual programmers can change the source code.  This causes the experience to be somewhat different on a HTC, Samsung, and Motorola.  With use, I have found that the best Android phones are ones manufactured by HTC.  Android phones are available on all carriers

Sorry to the users of Symbian, Windows, and HP/Palm/webOS BUT you’re irrelevant in the scheme of things!  Haha lol jk, but I just wanted to give an overview of the 3 biggest options.

Hope I was informative and impartial

Follow me on twitter @algrin … back next week with more tech!