Educate a smartphone noob

[RangerWickett]

I'm in the market for a new phone, and I'm thinking of getting a smart phone. I don't know how they compare, though, or really what metrics I should compare them with. So could folks help educate me?

Some specific questions:

How much data do you use a month? My university gets me a discount on Verizon, so I'm almost definitely going to go with them. Their data plans are $15/month for 150 MB, or $30 for unlimited. If I save streaming video for my home computer and just browse the internet, how much data might I end up using in a month?

If I purchase mp3s and ring tones or whatever, does that count toward my data usage? Is it only downloading, or uploading too (like if I send a photo)?

Is it possible to get mp3s from my computer onto my phone? How much storage do these things have these days?

Which is aesthetically nicest? If I get a touch screen, which one feels best?

What else should I keep in mind as I shop for a smart phone?

 

[Alan Shutko]

I'm an iPhone 4 user. Over the last six months, my data usage has ranged from 112MB (a low month with much of the time spent in the hospital welcoming my new son) to 600MB. I don't stream music or video, mostly email, web browsing, and forums with the Forumrunner app.

If you use pandora or tether, you will use up data fast.

My wife uses minimal email and web browsing and is usually around 30-40MB a month on an iPhone 3G.

Purchasing mp3s, ringtones, etc definitely count againt your usage on the iPhone. There may be carriers who have a captive store that do not charge for that data, but I don't know.

The carriers I know of (Sprint, AT&T and Verizon) do not apply most discounts to data plans. But you can decrease your phone bill that way.

Most smartphones will let you sync music and video to your phone. The mechanism differs. iPhones sync with iTunes. Blackberries, Android and Windows Phone devices use different software. The iPhone comes with 16 or 32GB of built-in storage and is not expandable. Other phones usually come with a small amount of internal storage and can use SD cards of some size to expand it. Often there are limitations on what can be put on the cards: some phones limit you from putting apps on there or make it more difficult.

Think about where your media is coming from. Music is pretty standard and any phone will play the common formats. But if you have a lot of DRMed music from the old days in the iTunes store, or from another store like Audible or maybe Zune, make sure the device you get supports them.

In my experience, the iPhone has probably the easiest to use media integration but other phones ship with more flexibility.

A big draw of smartphones are the apps. iPhone has the biggest selection of apps and you will find an app for almost anything. Android is next biggest and the selection is improving. You can also find some apps that are not allowed on the Apple App Store (notably emulators for old game systems). Windows Phone 7 has a small store but some good apps since MS courted big developers. Other smartphones are an app wasteland.

You want a phone with a capacitive touch screen. They may be slightly more expensive than some other models, but they are much more responsive and pleasant to use.

Ok, that's my attempt to give reasonably impartial info. Now for my opinion. I wouldn't buy anything but an iPhone. The UI is more polished and faster reacting, the apps are better, and the system as a whole works better for more users. Android is great if you like fiddling with your phone more than using it. If you want to spend your time reinstalling new and different ROMs on your phone, go Android. That's not me. I also think that Apple makes it easier for app writers to write good apps: between the support the frameworks give you and the review process help a lot. Comparing the work I had to do to write an iPhone app for my company and the work the Android folks did, mine seemed easier and ended up looking better because of platform support.

But hey, I'm a Mac head and all my media is in iTunes, so that influences my decision. YMMV.

 

[Fast Learner]

I use an iPhone 3GS and even though I don't stream much video over the data network, I do listen to Pandora, download podcasts now and then, keep up on Twitter and sometimes Facebook, use the Maps app a fair bit (which downloads map tiles and images as you pan and zoom), and do quite a bit of Googling and general web surfing. In 14 months I've never used less than 1Gb a month, though very rarely have used more than 2Gb.

I also favor the iPhone over the Android phones I've used, for dozens of reasons, but have no interest in getting into an argument about which is better and so will leave it at that.