What flavor is your smartphone OS?

Suzanne Choney • E-mail

When you buy a new computer, you may first think about its operating system — is it PC, Mac, Linux? Smartphones have those same operating systems and others. But the OS isn’t likely to be the No. 1 issue for many consumers even though it’s playing an increasingly important role.

Smartphones — which can handle e-mail, Web browsing as well as audio and video in many cases — have seen strong growth this year as more consumers opt to have their cell phones do double and triple duty.

Research In Motion’s line of BlackBerrys, Apple’s iPhone, Palm’s Treos and Centros, Samsung’s BlackJack and Motorola’s Q are all smartphones that have different operating systems, and are essentially, mini-computers.

“For many people, it doesn’t matter what OS they buy,” said Kevin Burden, ABI Research’s mobile devices research director. “In a lot of ways it comes down to the hardware. Do you like the way the phone works? Do you like the way it feels in your hands? Do you like what the phone says about you and your personality?”

The wireless carrier — be it Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint or T-Mobile — is usually the first decision for consumers, followed by the device itself, and the operating system “never,” said Avi Greengart, Current Analysis’ research director for mobile devices.

“There definitely are people who are well aware of a specific operating system, but even then it’s often subsumed by a brand — the iPhone, for example,” he said. “I’ve never had someone come to me and say, “I just bought a phone with OS X on it!’ ”

Touchscreen aspect
But operating systems can make a difference, especially with touchscreen smartphones, which are growing in popularity.

Apple’s iPhone, launched in 2007, and Google’s Android phone, available since fall, have operating systems designed to work fluidly with capacitive touchscreens, which don’t rely on a stylus or a physical keyboard for input, said Burden.

Windows Mobile, in contrast, “was never designed to be navigated with your fingers,” he said, although Microsoft is working to modernize its mobile operating system. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

Symbian, which is mainly on Nokia’s phones, is the most successful smartphone operating system worldwide, with nearly 50 percent of the market at the end of the third quarter this year, according to a recent report by Gartner, Inc.

“Nokia sells more smartphones than RIM and Apple combined; they just don’t sell that many in the United States,” said Greengart.

RIM’s operating system was second in market share, with 15.9 percent; Mac’s OS X third, with 12.9 percent; Windows Mobile had 11.1 percent; Linux represented 7.2 percent; and Palm had a 2.1 percent share. Gartner designated another 1 percent of the market as “others,” which also includes sales of the popular Sidekick, which uses the Danger platform.

Linux is an open-source operating system, which means that anyone can write programs for it. It’s the basis of Android, and is also expected to be the underpinnings of Palm’s new operating system, dubbed Nova, expected to debut next month.

Here’s a look at the key smartphone operating systems:

BlackBerry
“If you’re e-mail-centric, RIM still has the best overall mobile e-mail experience” of any smartphone, said Greengart. “And some of that is because of the keyboards on many of its products.” But it's also because of the BlackBerry operating system, which is considered solid, reliable and menu-driven, with almost all options and choices for where to go or what to do on the device packed away in Research In Motion’s extensive menus.

RIM is very focused on keeping its operating system relatively easy to use and has been aware that “when you build too many things into a device it becomes confusing,” said Burden of ABI Research. “Go back in time, when everyone was throwing in media players into their mobile phones, and RIM didn’t right away.”

In moving to its first all-touchscreen device, the Storm, RIM has made some major updates to its operating system, with more on the way, to make things work as smoothly on it as on its devices with physical QWERTY keyboards.

“If you’ve ever played with the Storm, you know there’s still a lot of bugs and quirks with it,” said Burden. “RIM has a lot more work to do around that OS. It’s been a tremendous undertaking for them. But it just shows the types of problems you can have when you have an operating system that wasn’t intended to be on a capacitive screen.”

Mac OS X
Apple’s iPhone is considered by some to have the best mobile Web browsing experience of any, in part because of its Safari Web browser, and also because of the iPhone’s high-quality 3.5-inch screen.

“Apple’s is a very easy and intuitive operating system,” said Burden.

The phone uses a version of Mac OS X that doesn’t have a cut-and-paste feature, an irritant to iPhone fans who otherwise swear by the device.

As part of OS X, there’s also iTunes, “which allows you to do things you simply can’t do on other phones,” said Greengart. “I’m not talking about buying individual songs, which you can do on many other phones. With iTunes, you can rent a movie on your iPhone.”

iTunes also serves as the synchronization engine so that you can “move all your calendars and contacts to your computer and very easily synchronize whatever video content and podcasts you have,” he said.

“iTunes, I think, is really Apple’s secret weapon,” said Greengart. “Even though the device’s user interface is extraordinary, if you made an iPhone clone that had the exact same user interface but didn’t have iTunes, you’d be missing a big chunk of what makes the iPhone special.”

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