Best Smart Phone OS?

movilogo

Which one you think the will be the best Smart Phone Operating System in near future?

Best in the terms of popularity, availability of cheap/free applications, backing from large companies, a thriving development community and off course affordability of smart phone handsets.

almillar

iPhone's the only one without a vote?!!
I'm going for webOS, even though it blatently doesn't fit the bill for now. I think the answer now and in the near future is the iPhone (and it's iPhone OS, which is based on MacOSX. MacOS is dead and buried now!).
The only one where iPhone doesn't win is price in your criteria.
I think Palm WebOS brings together the dev-friendliness of Android (the open-ness of it all), along with easy programming, and adds in that shiny pretty layer that so many people gush over with the iPhone, without the restrictions that Apple place on them. Add this to the die-hard PalmOS developers and users who they hope to drag along, and you WILL see a thriving WebOS community. Our advantage in the UK is that the US has already grown a great community that is already producing great software, and Europe can hit the ground running with it.
Symbian is fine for phones, but I think it was always stretched a bot for smartphones, and changing a button oriented OS to try to do touch may have been that one stretch too far. Nokia is bound to get plenty of traction with Maemo I'd have thought.

stugib

almillar wrote: »

iPhone's the only one without a vote?!!

Fixed that for you And I don't own an iPhone.

I don't think it's about what the technology is capable of now, but the momentum behind it from developers, and I think there's more chance of Apple continuing to develop the iPhoneOS to meet demand from a bouyant market than there is of a technically superior product creating a market to match the iPhone.

WebOS - think a lot of the PalmOS developers have dried up and don't want to start afresh.

Maemo - theoretically a huge development group, but primarily geeky - I can see the first year producing more FTP clients than phone-friendly apps!

Symbian/WinMob - too old hat.

Android - capable of beating iPhone but they may, ironically, suffer from making it too open because handsets seem to be implementing something very basic at the moment.

movilogo

iPhone is always crippled by Apple. Unless you jail break an iPhone, it doesn't use its full potential. Also, Apple products are always too expensive.

stugib

movilogo wrote: »

iPhone is always crippled by Apple. Unless you jail break an iPhone, it doesn't use its full potential. Also, Apple products are always too expensive.

Apple's grip on it is putting me off getting one, but will probably relent in the end.

I'd guess 95% of iPhone users won't know or care about jailbreaking.

It's price doesn't seem to have done it too much harm so far!

almillar

I'm a Mac man, but you won't catch me using something that has such capable hardware, that has been crippled so much on purpose. eg Bluetooth. Phones had full blown Bluetooth long before the iPhone came out, and I can't think of a current smartphone apart from the iPhone that doesn't allow you to send files over Bluetooth. Ridiculous!
There are plenty of restrictions on iPhone development, like handing so much control over to Apple. Palm are trying to allow developers to have more control over their own apps, and WebOS is apparantly easier to write for from the start. People keep citing lack of apps on the Palm as a problem. Strange, how many apps were out for the iPhone when the App Store opened?! Plus one of the apps for WebOS is a PalmOS emulator, allowing you to use all the old ones that haven't been updated!

stugib

almillar wrote: »

I'm a Mac man, but you won't catch me using something that has such capable hardware, that has been crippled so much on purpose. eg Bluetooth. Phones had full blown Bluetooth long before the iPhone came out, and I can't think of a current smartphone apart from the iPhone that doesn't allow you to send files over Bluetooth. Ridiculous! There are plenty of restrictions on iPhone development, like handing so much control over to Apple.

Agree, but still say most people who the iPhone appeals to don't miss it. If a competitor started to get traction through features like this being demanded, Apple could enable it pretty quickly I'd imagine.

almillar wrote: »

People keep citing lack of apps on the Palm as a problem. Strange, how many apps were out for the iPhone when the App Store opened?! Plus one of the apps for WebOS is a PalmOS emulator, allowing you to use all the old ones that haven't been updated!

I've had about 5 Palm models and have spent hundreds on third-party apps over the years, so I'd love WebOS to be successful but just don't see it right now. iPhone apps had the advantage of not having much competition at the time: Palm was in the doldrums and were always PDAs or clunky phones, Symbian apps are pretty limited in features and quality and have a slow OS. Now any new player has got to compete with thousands of apps supporting an existing device pool of millions, a 'cool factor' driving demand, and lots of corporate and individual developers. Can't see many consumers outside the die-hards running the old PalmOS apps.

Again, think this battle is more about momentum and market share, not technology.

rash.m2k

Android and Maemo are the best.