Choosing a Partner

Go ahead and try to survive a week without your cell phone. I dare you. Some of you might not think that’s a big deal but for the rest of us the thought of a day without our cell phone sounds more like a prison sentence than a vacation.

With the important role our phones play in our lives, the phone you choose to carry with you as a practical appendage is a pretty important choice to make. The phone we carry has become less a convenient necessity of a modern world and more an extension of our personality. People even go so far as to decorate their phone in an effort to further project their personality through it. I haven’t gone to those lengths but I do take the choice of cell phones very seriously.

The first choice nowadays seems to be do I get a “smartphone” or not. There’s no such thing anymore as a regular old cell phone since cell phone technology has come far enough along to allow even the simplest devices to do all kinds of crazy things; but some phones are more like mini computers that happen to make phone calls.

I fit into the smartphone category and I don’t think I know how to survive without all the bells and whistles they provide. I can practically manage my entire life and business from anywhere in the world from the palm of my hand. I get all my email, I manage my calendar, I search the internet, I take notes, you name it I can do it with my phone. Over the years I’ve had some good phones that have made my life much more efficient and I’ve had one or two that did just the opposite.

The Big Players

With the popularity of the iphone here in the United States, you may be led to believe Apple owns the cell phone market. In reality, they aren’t even on the radar screen. The top spot in that market belongs to Nokia who accounts for more than 30% of the total market share. Most of those sales come outside the US which explains why they might not have been your first guess. Not too far behind Nokia is a company called Research In Motion which is responsible for the Blackberry. The tried and true Blackberry is the pioneer in the smartphone market and still dominates that industry.

Blackberry

I personally have had a Blackberry that I was very happy with. Generally speaking, I can’t get a phone to last longer than about a year before it just gives up and fades off into cell phone heaven (or hell depending on the brand.) My Blackberry on the other hand lasted for over two years and would still work just fine today if something happened to my new purchase and I needed a backup.

The Blackberry has always been the model of dependability which may account for the popularity of the product and the dominance of the business market it enjoys. With the ever changing smartphone market moving ahead at just slower than the speed of light, it appears that Research In Motion has been caught a little flat footed. The newest trend in smartphone technology revolves around the apps that phone can support. Apps for the iphone and Android phones are about as numerous as dark haired babies in China while apps for the Blackberry are coming a little late to the party. I still believe Research In Motion makes one of the best smartphones out there but in this business you can’t get caught standing still or you might get rolled over by a giant Apple.