GORGEOUS screens and beefy specifications are the name of the game for handset manufacturers as they look for a niche that hasn't yet been exploited by Apple's high-profile iPhone.
Less than a week after SingTel launched the iPhone 3G here, HTC, Research In Motion (RIM) and Nokia launched flagship products on Tuesday aimed at delivering a triple knockout to the notion that a cutting-edge mobile phone needs to have a fruit logo on it in order to woo the market.
Nokia's N96 ($1,258 before carrier subsidies) is the new head of the company's N-series of handhelds, which are focused on multimedia. It takes off where the N95 8GB model left off, and focuses on video and an incredible amount of storage.
A solid 16GB of memory is built into the phone, which is the same as the top iPhone 3G model. But unlike the Apple, the N96 accepts micro-SD memory cards, and while only 8GB cards are officially supported at the moment, 16GB should work too, which would double the amount of storage on the phone. You could carry around quite a few videos with 32GB of storage in your pocket.
The biggest draw for TV addicts could be N96's support for Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld (DVB-H) mobile TV programmes. The technology is still in its trial stage in Singapore, but when things get up to speed, you could conceivably watch your favourite soap opera in the middle of Orchard Road, or the latest World Cup soccer match in the toilet. The prospect of never having to miss a single broadcasted game could be the single strongest reason for sports fans to buy an N96.
HTC's Touch Pro ($1,248) is the crowning glory of the company's Touch range of products. It's based on the excellent Touch Diamond phone, but adds an LED camera flash, TV-out connection, expandable micro-SD memory slot, and, most importantly, a full Qwerty keyboard.
A physical keyboard is the Touch Pro's main advantage over an iPhone, but the rest of the features add up to an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to the product. It has the most exhaustive feature set of the three phones we're looking at, and is a no-brainer for anyone looking for a well-designed Windows Mobile phone.
In terms of pure specifications, RIM's BlackBerry Bold (price unavailable) is the least impressive of this trio of flagship phones. However, that perspective would ignore the fact that RIM's approach is more like Apple's in terms of focusing on implementation rather than raw ability.
Like the iPhone 3G, the Bold is RIM's first high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) - also known as 3.5G - phone, which means fast mobile Internet access. But unlike Apple, its core expertise differs. The iPhone's primary strength is Web browsing. The Bold's forte is e-mail.
BlackBerry's prowess in this area remains untouchable. The Bold's 4.6 version of BlackBerry's operating system adds the ability to view HTML e-mail, which is long overdue, and no longer restricts BlackBerry users to only viewing text in e-mail.
But beyond that, even BlackBerrys, once little more than functional e-mail workhorses, have become as adept at handling multimedia as any smartphone.
'Even our hardcore corporate users have told us that they want their BlackBerrys to do more than just e-mail, so we've made the Bold work well outside the office in an attempt to help people achieve a better work-life balance,' says Gregory Wade, RIM's regional vice-president for the Asia Pacific.
In line with this goal, the Bold sports the brightest and clearest screen to ever grace a BlackBerry, which means you can even comfortably watch movies on it if you wish. And with RIM's Windows-only BlackBerry Media Sync application, you can easily transfer songs from your iTunes music library to your phone.
None of these three kings are revolutionary devices in the way the iPhone has turned out to be, but they up the ante sufficiently to show there's still plenty of room for innovation in the handheld market. However, in a market where the iPhone is the de facto benchmark, carrier discounts will probably have to be drastic to make the phones attractive when they all become available next month.
This story was first published in The Business Times on 28 August 2008.
