If I couldn't use an iPhone...
I was at a bar the other night having a beer with friends, during which we talked about things guys talk about at bars. Would you rather have the power to see the future or to read someone's mind? Who's better, Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant? And, lastly, if you couldn't use an iPhone, which phone would you use?
The four of us sat there confused trying to answer the last question, and actually never got around to answering it.
The reason we never finished our answers was that it became more a question about how ingrained and integral the iPhone is in our lives than a feature-for-feature comparison of the iPhone against its competitors.
But if there was no such thing as an iPhone, which would you pick? Here at the virtual TUAW bar, we each have our own picks and reasons for them.
Give Me the iPhone or Give Me Nothing!
Surprisingly, many of us would rather go without a smartphone than to go without the iPhone. Erica Sadun, for instance, would opt for a cheap Motorola or Nokia. "If I can't play on my phone, I'd just buy the cheapest phone out there and play on my Mac." Likewise, Megan Lavey would stick with her trusty Motorola RAZR or something similar to that.
Mike Schramm shares a similar sentiment. He, too, would forgo a smartphone altogether. Unlike Erica, however, Mike sees no need for even a cell phone. Says Mike: "Considering I don't have a landline any more, I probably would have ditched the phone entirely and just gotten some kind of persistent connection on my MacBook, using Skype and Google Voice to deal with calls."
But If I Was Forced to Get Another Smartphone...
Yes, many of us would rather go without a smartphone than to use anything but the iPhone. But what if you were forced to get one? While Victor Agreda Jr. was perfectly happy with his Motorola RAZR and would be happy sticking with a company-paid BlackBerry, if in an alternate universe where the island of Cupertino had sunk into the ocean, he'd opt for an HTC EVO or Nexus One.
And most TUAW'ers, myself included, would choose an Android-based phone if were forced to pick something other than an iPhone.
As there are many choices in the Android-based hardware ecosystem, our picks reflect this diversity. Aron Trimble, for instance, does not like a slide-out hardware keyboard, so this rules out the Motorola Droid. Dave Caolo got to fiddle with his friend's HTC Incredible, and thought it was "pretty cool" while Mike Rose had a Droid Eris as his standby phone and was "pretty happy with it."
However, the HTC EVO got the most votes for "the smartphone I'd get if I couldn't buy an iPhone." From a hardware standpoint, the EVO, like the iPhone 4, also has both front and rear-facing cameras. And one thing that distinguishes the EVO from most smartphones is that it operates on a 4G network (on Sprint), albeit in very limited markets.
Sprint's 4G network is available in Kelly Guimont's neck of the woods, and that's one of the main reasons she chose the EVO. That, and also because, according to her, it looks "purrty."
At the end of the day, if not for the iPhone, it's likely that the smartphone market wouldn't be in its current form, and many of these offerings wouldn't even exist. The iPhone has forced those on both sides of the equation -- the hardware side and software side -- to rethink what a smartphone should be. However, it's this very divide that separates hardware and software makers that will continue to serve as a barrier to matching the user experience provided by the iPhone.
