I am continually frustrated by the smartphone industry. Smartphones are, essentially, the convergence of what used to be called Personal Digital Assistants (or PDAs) with wireless phone and Internet capability. They can make phone calls, check email, surf the web, and manage your calendars, tasks, and contacts. They can also usually play video and music, take pictures, and synchronize data with your computer. They are extremely useful, if you get yourself into the habit of using them to their fullest capability, but they are simultaneously frustrating.

There are now four major smartphone operating systems that collectively rule the U.S. smartphone market: Apple’s iPhone OS, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Palm’s Palm OS Garnet, and RIM’s Blackberry OS. Another system, Symbian Foundation’s Symbian, is very popular overseas and holds a majority of the non-U.S. smartphone market (although it is argubly one notch below being a ‘smartphone’ OS, being instead a ‘feature-phone OS’). There are also various small-market Linux-based mobile operating systems, and at least two major Linux-based smartphone operating systems in the works but yet unreleased: The Open Handset Alliance’s Android OS (supported by Google), and Palm’s Palm OS Nova (which might not be its official name when it is released).

I have now had two smartphones—a Palm Treo 650 running Palm OS Garnet and an AT&T 8525 running Windows Mobile Professional 6—and each has been disappointing. I knew their drawbacks when I bought them, but bought them because—when campared to their available competition at the time—they were the lesser of many evils. I am eligible for a discounted phone upgrade on November 24 of this year but, like my two previous smartphones, I find that I will likely have to settle for the lesser of many evils once again.

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