When a cell phone grows up it wants to be a smart phone

When a Cell Phone Grows Up It Wants To Be a Smart Phone

Your old cell phone isn't anything like the new smart phones that combine the old cell phone capabilities with electronic data organization.

Smart phones have been used by business travelers to keep up with e-mail, appointments and office rumours while conducting company business anywhere on the planet. Now everyday users of cell phones are tuning into the benefits of today's Star Trek inspired Smart phones. Some people want to tap out text on a QWERTY-style keyboard rather than a small keypad of a normal cell phone. Other business and casual users are finding no reason to carry both a PDA and cell phone when a smart phone will do the job of both.

Cell phone manufacturers are beginning to design and market smart phones catering to users wanting slimmer and sleeker models, with simplified interfaces and setup menus geared toward users who like things fast and easy. The old one-button for all capabilities scenario that is the dream of technology challenged individuals around the world.

How do you choose a phone from the multitudes, well first decide just how smart you want you cell phone to be, we've grouped smart phones into two IQ ranges. What we call advanced smart phones come with laptop-like abilities in a palm-size package. You can create and edit spreadsheets and text documents, and they often come with Microsoft Outlook, Palm Desktop, or other personal information management (PIM) software for your PC. They normally have touch screens for accessing the phone's many features. They also let you load data onto the phone using standard-sized SD (Secure Digital) cards rather than micro versions found on basic cell phones on the market.

Run of the mill smart phones look and feel like regular phones and have fewer features than advanced models. They usually lack touch screen and PIM software, and don't allow the user to create or edit documents and spreadsheets. They work great if you want to read your E-mail, but creating or composing them and sending them is a little more difficult.

Depending on what you use your smart phone for you should consider the network you'll be running on. CDMA-based advanced smart phones work better if you frequently like to download data-heavy documents because they use the high-speed EV-DO network from Sprint or Verizon. The slower, GSM-based EDGE network used by T-Mobile and Cingular is best suited for e-mail with small attachments or light-duty Web surfing.

Each smart phone runs on a particular operating system, and each system has its own particulars.

1. Windows Mobile 5.0. This operating system links well with Microsoft Outlook on a desktop PC, but is non compatible with Non-Microsoft programs. It allows the user to quickly switch between multiple applications with no fuss. Lacks a touch screen on the basic version so navigation is difficult on the basic model. Go for the advanced version if you want better capability as this adds Office software and better e-mail features.
2. Palm. This operating system is the oldest and certainly the most versatile of all the systems. It supports full-featured e-mail and office software programs normal to smart phones. This OS is best for basic PDA functions - contacts, calendar manipulation, and to do lists -as long as they're running one at a time (this OS interferes with multitasking).
3. BlackBerry. This operating system is the simplest for sending e-mail, with easy setup of e-mail accounts, especially from T-Mobile. "Push" capability automatically sends e-mail to the smart phone so that you don't have to check it by hand.
4. Danger. This system has only seen use on the Sidekick smart phone. Uses a very simple interface geared toward text messaging quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, not all the features, including simple dialing, are intuitive to the average smart phone user so make sure to check out the smart phone your looking at carefully.
5. Symbian or Series 60. This operating system is found primarily on Nokia cell phones, but does appear on other cell phones on the market. The basic version of this system is difficult to use, especially for setting up and using basic e-mail features. It was also hard to navigate through the folder-based advanced system.

A smart phones overall shape and size is determined by its keypad and display for the most part. Some smart phones have a full keypad that slides out from behind the phone and hides when not in use. Others like the BlackBerry Pearl leave the keypad in plain sight for the world to see, but the keys will be doing double and triple duty-time when it's in use. Others like the Nokia 9300 open like an eyeglass case to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. The one that is more convenient for you will probably depend on the features and functions you use in every day use.

Make sure you look carefully at the plan you are going to purchase, the network dependent abilities of the smart phones on the market today require both a regular (voice/text) phone plan and data plan for Web surfing and sending and receiving e-mail messages. If you're planning on getting both prices will start at around $45 to $80 a month with a two year contract. Be careful though you can easily spend hundreds of dollars once you add minutes, text messages, and the other services on you're plan.

Unfortunately, if you already have a "family" plan, you may have to move your smart phone's number to a new account, as we had to with Verizon and T-Mobile.

We found that price and flexibility make Sprint's smart-phone plans the best value overall. T-Mobile's plans are relatively inexpensive in comparison to other plans on the market. Cingular's cheapest plans have a megabyte limit, above which you pay at a higher rate. While we found Verizon's plans to be the most expensive and least flexible of the plans we looked at.