Symbian vs Android vs Windows Mobile vs BlackBerry vs iPhone

Ok, so you want to buy a smartphone. Great choice. Modern smartphones gives you robust email integration, great organization capabilities (notes, calendars et all), great internet browsing experience, and above all, great extensibility through applications. They are mini personal computers that you can carry around in your pocket.

Now, the next question is, which one ? The engine behind a smartphone is its Operating System (OS). This presents you with 5 great choices, each with its own pros and cons.

First lets see a few charts to set the context:

Ok, now that the figures are out of the way, lets hit the road and consider each OS on the 2 most important parameters – user interface (how does the OS ‘feel’), and application availability (i.e. how many applications are available to extend the functionality of the phone – think news, social networking, dictionaries, productivity and other apps).

User interface is more important for most users, so it will be ranked on a scale of 10, while application availability will be ranked on a scale of 5. The sum of these two scores will be the final score for each OS.

Please note that we are only considering the operating systems for touch screens (which form a majority of the smartphones these days) – in fact, operating systems such as iOS (iPhone OS) and Android are designed only for touch screens.

Now, lets look at each OS in detail. If you are interested in only the final scores, skip to the bottom of thi

Ok, so you want to buy a smartphone. Great choice. Modern smartphones gives you robust email integration, great organization capabilities (notes, calendars et all), great internet browsing experience, and above all, great extensibility through applications. They are mini personal computers that you can carry around in your pocket.

Now, the next question is, which one ? The engine behind a smartphone is its Operating System (OS). This presents you with 5 great choices, each with its own pros and cons.

First lets see a few charts to set the context:

Symbian is the most popular operating system with about 40% share in all handsets sold (as of Q2, 2010). RIM (BlackBerry), Android and iPhone OS follow behind with about 20% share each.

Market share of Smartphone Operating Systems (Source: Gartner, August 2010)

Yet, the developer ecosystems of iPhoneOS and Android are much more active. iPhone OS has the most apps available for it – over 200,000, while Android is second with over 70,000 apps (as of Q2 2010). Such a large range of app availability means that you are never short of new things to do with on these smartphones.

Number of Apps Available in App Stores (Source: Mobile Developer Economics, 2010 and Beyond)

Ok, now that the figures are out of the way, lets hit the road and consider each OS on the 2 most important parameters – user interface (how does the OS ‘feel’), and application availability (i.e. how many applications are available to extend the functionality of the phone – think news, social networking, dictionaries, productivity and other apps).

User interface is more important for most users, so it will be ranked on a scale of 10, while application availability will be ranked on a scale of 5. The sum of these two scores will be the final score for each OS.

Please note that we are only considering the operating systems for touch screens (which form a majority of the smartphones these days) – in fact, operating systems such as iOS (iPhone OS) and Android are designed only for touch screens.

Now, lets look at each OS in detail. If you are interested in only the final scores, skip to the bottom of this article.

Symbian

The oldest smartphone operating system. If you have owned a Nokia smartphone, you are probably familiar with this OS.

Symbian was earlier a separate company but was acquired by Nokia in 2008. Today virtually all Nokia smartphones as well as some of the smartphones from the likes of Sony Ericsson, Samsung and LG are based on this OS. Lets rank it on the important parameters

User Interface (for Symbian S60) :

How do we put this ? As far as touchscreen phones are concerned, Symbian is robust and reliable, but its not really quite as intuitive as Android or iPhone OS.

Things which would require a 1-2 taps on Android tend to require 3-4 on Symbian with its often redundant sub menus. Still, its pretty solid, and doesn’t take much time to get used to.

Here is a look at the Nokia X6, based on the Symbian S60 Fifth Edition.

User Interface (for Symbian 3) : 

The new version of Symbian – Symbian 3 – available in the newer Nokia smartphones including N8 – revamps the ageing OS a bit, and improves the user interface, bringing in multiple personalized home-screens, pinch to zoom functionality etc, but still falls short of the more modern operating systems like Android in terms of intuitiveness.

Here is a look at Nokia N8, based on Symbian 3.

Application Availability : 2.5/5

Being the oldest among the big smartphone platforms (and the most popular), there is a decent variety of applications available for Symbian. The new Ovi Store makes it easy to browse and download apps straight on your Nokia smartphone. And a renewed push to the developer ecosystem (including introduction of carrier billing in several countries) indicates that Nokia is prepared to give a good fight in the face of hard competition.

That said, however, the variety of applications, currently available, still falls way short when compared to Android or iPhoneOS (see chart).

Android

Anything from the house of Google is bound to generate hype and interest, so in a sense Android was always destined to be successful. But it would be this successful, not many imagined. With great overall performance, and simple, sensible functionality that is the hallmark of virtually all Google products, Android has caught on the imagination of mobile manufacturers like no other OS.

User Interface : 

Android interfaces by the likes of HTC and Sony Ericsson have been praised unanimously as being beautiful and intuitive. Even the plain vanilla interface adopted by some manufacturers is pretty good, and makes up for its lack of flair with simplicity of use.

So Android gets a clear thumbs up here. It would have been foolish to expect anything else from Google anyway – they are great at designing brilliantly usable interfaces.

Here is a video demo of HTC Desire, running on Android.

Application Availability : 

So far the only platform to come even remotely close to challenging the number and variety of apps on iPhone OS, the Android application market has grown by leaps and bounds ever since its release. In fact it gets a leg up on the iPhone app store in terms of the ratio of free applications to paid applications.

 In fact some of the really good apps for Android are those already on the phone and created by Google itself – the troika of Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Maps, are brilliantly designed and sync flawlessly with your online accounts.

For instance, all your phone contacts are synced with your Gmail contacts, in effect you always have a backup of your phone contacts in your Gmail account, so absolutely no worries on that account, if your phone ever gets lost or stolen.