As a response to one of our readers’ request, we are pitting the latest smartphones in the market against each other to see which one really stands out in this elite group. Actually, we are also quite curious ourselves to find out which is the best among the bunch as each one has a unique feature to offer that the others don’t have.

As you can see in the table, there isn’t one phone that clearly dominated in all the categories. Take for example the Nokia E71. It does win in the camera, size and weight divisions, but it has the smallest display in the group with the best one goint to the 3G iPhone. While the iPhone may also be considered a winner in terms of internal memory, all the others support memory expansion which makes their total memory flexible although I doubt there’s an SD card available now that’ll match the iPhone’s 16GB capacity. On the user interface side, QWERTY is still the most efficient way of entering long messages and composing e-mail, which makes the iPhone the blacksheep of the group albeit its highly advanced touchscreen. However, the Palm Treo Pro manages to incorporate both a touch screen interface and a QWERTY keypad into its design offering users a taste of both worlds.

As far as the OS is concerned, that is a matter of preference. While the Mac OS X mobile version is relatively new in the market, it is fast gaining popularity and many developers are now releasing apps for the iPhone. Both Windows Mobile and S60 have been around for sometime now and they have their own respective community of developers. The Blackberry, on the other hand, also has its share of software developers though they’re quite limited and not so visible as opposed to the others. Nonetheless, all of their respective mobile OS are equally capable and can get the job done at hand. It all boils down to how much you would like to expand its capabilities through 3rd party applications and additional software.  

Clearly, there’s no one way to call this competition and it will all rely on what you need. If it’s a simple internet mobile device, the 3G iPhone is what we would recommend simply because the mobile Safari is unmatched in terms of performance. If it’s a serious business phone you’re after, you can’t go wrong with the Blackberry Bold, but considering its limited availability worldwide, I’d say its better to get the Nokia E71 or Palm Treo Pro instead though the latter is yet to be released. If you want an all-around performing device, the Nokia E71 gets my vote. However, if availability is a major concern, you’ll narrow down the playing field to the iPhone and the Nokia E71 as both the BlackBerry Bold and Palm Treo Pro are not yet out in the local Philippine market.

 But hey, this is just my opinion, how about you guys; which one’s the best smartphone among the group for you?