We all have to agree on one fact: almost everyone would want an iPhone. It’s beautiful, classy and has lots of capabilities. It is the ultimate and most well-known smartphone on the market.
But for various reasons, not everyone has fallen in love with the phone. Luckily there are a lot of alternatives available, and we’ve compiled a list of 7 other smartphones, which could serve as an alternative to the iPhone. Pick and choose as you see fit among a variety of brands, including both Motorola, Samsung and HTC!
7. Palm Pre
Palm, Inc., the brains behind PALM PRE, is a smartphone manufacturer from California that produces a variety smartphones like Pixi, Trio and Centro.
But their most well-known product is the Palm Pre, which is a multimedia smartphone that has a multi-touch screen and a sliding keyboard. What’s interesting about the PRE is that it functions as a camera phone, a portable media player and also has navigation capabilities. It’s needless to say that it also has built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity.
It runs on a 600 MHz Texas Instruments CPU and it also has a 3.15 megapixel resolution sensor for the camera.
Another great thing about it is its 3.1 inch capacitive touchscreen over a 24-bit color 320×480 resolution HVGA liquid-crystal display. Additional touch commanding is also available with its “Gesture Area”, a touch-sensitive area with LED underlighting, situated just below the display.
The Pre has 8.0 GB of internal flash storage and it’s important to note that it lacks a flash memory card slot.
The smartphone received positive reviews from critics, being called “an important step in the evolution of mobile computing” and also winning some important prizes. However, it was also met with some criticism: the slider mechanism sometimes becomes overly-sensitive, causing quite a lot of problems. Another bug is that characters tend to appear twice when typing, even though the user has only hit the key once.
The Palm Pre is situated at no. 7 with an overall rating of 3/5.
Price range: $299
6. Motorola Droid X
Motorola has been always been a great cell-phone manufacturer, and their smart-phones certainly lives up to the name. The Motorola Droid X and the Backflip have all gotten great reviews and sold well.
The company’s flagship Android device is the Droid X, which features Wi-Fi capabilities, HDMI output, an 8-megapixel camera with 720p video recording, 1.0 GHz processor, a 4.3’’ FWVGA LCD display, and 3G wireless with hot-spot capabilities.
The smartphone comes with 8 GB of internal flash memory, a digital player, a powerful browser, 3 way calling capabilities and a great set of batteries (up to 400 min).
The phone style is Slider, weighs 6.0 oz and runs on the Android 2.0 OS.
It has everything you need, including GPS.
The Motorola Droid X gets an overall rating of 3.5/5 because the great additional features it has. Yes, in this particular aspect it’s at the same level as the Palm Pre, but it offers slightly better multimedia applications.
Price range: $199 – $599
5. HTC HD2
HTC takes the seventh spot on the list with yet another smartphone. The HTC HD2 is the first one with a 4.3 inch touchscreen, the first Windows Mobile phone with a multi-touch capacitive screen and HTC Sense. It runs on a Snapdragon ARM CPU at 1 GHz.
It includes a proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, 3 axis accelerometer, digital compass and 512 MB in internal flash.
It also runs on 576 MB of RAM. The battery is quite strong – HTC promises up to 490 hours of battery time in standby and 6.3 hours of talk time.
It weighs 5.5 oz, and has a height of 4.7 inches and also a width of 2.6 inches. GPS is a given thing in this all-in-one phone.
Some earlier versions had a camera defect that caused a magenta color cast to appear on photographs, but HTC fixed this with a software fix.
The HTC HD2 gets an overall rating of 3.5/5 because of its fantastic design. It’s definitely way above the Droid in terms of looks. It also excels with an extensive library of multimedia applications and has a generous storing memory.
Price range: $199 – $599
4. BlackBerry Bold 9700
From businessmen to teenagers, everybody loves a well-crafted BlackBerry. And this model in particular, is simply fantastic.
The Blackberry Bold 9700 has everything you would need to forget about the iPhone: an optical trackpad; a 3.2 megapixel camera with auto-focus and LED flash; 480 x 360 pixel color Half VGA resolution display; an amazing battery (17 days of battery time in standby and 6 hours in talk time).
It is 109 mm in length, 60 mm in width and 14.1 mm thick.
The operating system that runs on the Bold 9700 is the Blackberry OS version 5.0.0.405, and it is good to know that all the familiar pre-loaded Blackberry applications are available on this one, including the WordToGo, PowerToGo, WordMole, etc.
The BlackBerry Bold gets a 4/5 ranking and here are the reasons why: it has an amazing design, great usability, awesome additional features and the quality of calls is mind-blowing.
Price range: $299
3. HTC EVO 4G
HTC has the most smartphones on this list, and that certainly proves the fact that the Taiwanese company can make extraordinary phones with sleek, original design and great capabilities.
This model is the first 4G capable phone sold in the United States. It is powered by a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor and runs the Android 2.1 operating system. It includes a TFT LCD capacitive touchscreen screen, an 8-megapixel camera in the rear, a 1.3 megapixel camera in the front and a HDMI port to connect to an HDTV.
Although it is said to deliver good 4G speeds, Sprint’s 4G network is limited at the time, making the $10 premium data add-on too tough to swallow for anyone outside of the coverage area. Another important thing to have in mind is that the HTC EVO drains battery rather quickly.
But it’s still one of today’s top Android devices, and with an ever-expanding WIMAX netowkr, it shows great promise.
The EVO 4G gets 3rd place with an average ranking of 4/5. Its perfect (not kidding, Google it) design makes you forget about all of the competition. Besides the look, its multimedia applications are top notch, making it better than the BlackBerry.
Price: $199.99
2. Google Nexus One
While some argue that Google should stick to search-engines, here is a smart-phone that tells us something entirely different.
The Nexus One is Google’s flagship smartphone that became available this January. It uses the Android open source mobile operating system.
It has a couple of great features, like the ability to transcribe voice to text, noise canceling and dual microphones. If you drive a lot, the Nexus would be perfect for you seeing as it has a fantastic GPS system.
What sets the Google Nexus apart from other smartphones is that it is sold unlocked, thus it’s not restricted to use on a single network provider.
The Nexus One has a 3.7 inch AMOLED screen and the raster resolution is 480×800 pixels.
The phone has a 5.0 megapixel auto-focus camera with LED flash and digital zoom, Bluetooth 2.1, MP3, AAC+, WAV and MIDI playing capabilities.
Choosing which phone that would top the list was a hard decision. Although the Nexus One is an amazing Android smartphone with incredible design and features, we felt that the Samsung had all of these as well, plus greater Multimedia applications. But nevertheless, the Nexus One is a fantastic piece of technology.
The prices without a plan or contract are 529$.
1. Samsung i9000 Galaxy S
Samsung is probably the world’s leading cell phone manufacturers today with a huge base of people who would gladly buy their products. I have to admit that I’m one of those avid buyers. After a fantastic 2009 in which they successfully launched the teenage-oriented Corby, they’re ready again to take over the Android market with this beauty: Samsung i9000 Galaxy S.
Samsung announced its i9000 Galaxy S model in March 2010, and it is now confirmed to be an Android 2.2 smartphone. What’s so special about this model is its 1GHz processor along with 8-16 GB internal memory, a 4 inch 480×800 Super AMOLED widescreen, a touchscreen display, a 5 megapixel camera and also a VGA front-facing camera. Another useful thing about the Galaxy is its PowerVR graphics processor that yields 90 million triangles per second. All of this makes this Samsung the best darn Android-phone on the market.
Another great thing that would push buyers to seriously consider buying the Galaxy is its Bluetooth 3.0. It is also worth mentioning that, with its 9.9mm, it’s the thinnest Android phone available.
So, it all comes down to this, the newest Samsung smartphone – the i9000 Galaxy S. Its amazing processor, internal memory, applications, features, design, camera and, let’s not forget, Bluetooth 3.0 shoots this baby up right to no. 1 on the Top 10 iPhone Alternatives!
Price range: $99.99 – $199.99 from AT&T Wireless
Conclusion
A Smartphone offers the features you need to manage the various details of your life and business, whether that includes scheduling meetings, tracking your family’s schedule, reading email, or surfing the web. All of the above phones offer you those features. Sure, some do it better than others – I won’t argue with you there – but they are all great in what they do and they all bring something different to the table!
In the end, one thing is extremely important to have in mind: iPhone might be dominating the smartphone market, but there are a lot of alternatives. Great alternatives!