Smartphone Palooza: 10 Hot Touchscreens Compared

Keeping tabs on the latest cell phone models can be a full-time job, especially given the number of cell phones announced by Apple, Palm, Nokia, and HTC (including, most recently, the BlackBerry-like T-Mobile Dash) over the past few months. But thanks to PC World, you don't have to hunt down and compare the various touchscreen smartphones yourself.

We pitted ten recently announced touchscreen handhelds against each other to see how they would match up. Then we compiled a series of three comparison charts to help you decide whether an HTC Hero with a 5-megapixel camera suits you better than, say, a Nokia N97 with a stereo FM receiver. (You'll see thumbnail images for the charts on the following pages, near the top and on the right; click on these thumbnails to see the full-size charts. They look like the image just below.)

Our charts provide quick answers to questions such as these: Which smartphones have on-screen keyboards and which have hardware keyboards? Which touchscreens are best at multimedia? How much does each one cost?

The first chart lists basic specs: manufacturer, carrier, platform, size, weight, type of keyboard, colors, price, availability, and carrier). The second chart identifies the phones' multimedia capabilities (screen resolution, camera image resolution, autofocus, flash, video recording, secondary camera, audio jack, and radio) and navigation smarts (GPS and geotagging). The third chart focuses on storage capacity (on-board and expandable), connectivity (3G, Bluetooth, USB, and Wi-Fi), and battery features (removability, standby time, and talk time).

The phones included in this roundup are Apple's iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G, the Palm Pre, two Symbian offerings (the Nokia N97 and the Nokia 5530), three devices running on Google Android (the HTC Hero, the T-Mobile myTouch 3G, and the Samsung Galaxy), and two Windows Mobile smartphones (the HTC Touch Pro2 and the Samsung Omnia II).

Next: Basic Specs