A new cellphone – Choosing platform

Note: For the next few posts, I will cover my choice of a new mobile phone, what considerations I have made and what applications I am running through it.
 
I’ve been using my old mobile phone, a Nokia E65, for almost two years now, and I am pretty impressed with it. It has had to stand up to a lot of abuse, and still works pretty well. Even so, I have been feeling it’s time to choose a new one, and this time I not only wanted a phone, I wanted a gadget as well, something with which I could do a lot of different things. In a word, I wanted a smartphone.
 
Strictly speaking, the E65 almost falls into that bracket already, with its options for expansion on the software side. The problem is just that there aren’t a lot of apps for it, and the outlook for that to expand is bleak to say the least. Also, it just isn’t sexy. At all. And really, I wanted something sexy now.
 
The list of contenders was quickly pared down; I was happy with Nokia, but what I’d seen of their offering on the market (the N97) just didn’t impress me much. I also felt it was much too clunky. Blackberry never even came into consideration, for reasons I’m not about to cover here. Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG are all decent brands that I don’t like. This left me with two choices: Apple’s iPhone, or a phone running Android.
 
One of my major concerns was getting my list of contacts and my calendar up and running as quickly as possible. My employer uses DME Sync to sync Notes data to handheld units, but it’s not exactly as stable as I would like. On the other hand, I use Google Mail, Calendar and Contacts for most of my needs. DME Sync is available for the iPhone, but not Android. Google Sync is available for both platforms.
 
In the end, my choice came down to three things:
 

1. Android is an open platform, iPhone is proprietary and closed
2. Android phones are cheaper than iPhones
3. I am not planning to use it as my primary portal for entertainment on the go