In just a year..

Its been almost a year since I lost my iphone and AT&T insisted that I pay the total price of the phone (without the contractual discount) to get a new one, when I gave in to my student budget. Now its been a year and I am almost ready to sign a new contract and get a new smartphone, and wonder how much has changed in the past year, it feels like multiple generations since then.

Lets see, Foursquare became a rage (my friends insist on checking in even in classrooms and among mountain ranges). Netflix is on iphone, though with the tiered bandwidth pricing, this does not seem like a reason to celebrate. More and more content is available online. Facebook crossed 500m users (of which 100m use facebook for mobile) and Twitter crossed 145m users (a growth of 62% in twitter on mobile users). Location based marketing experiments grew and more promising applications emerged. The lead users have more and more reasons to live off their smartphones.

Android phones came in - in brands and price ranges. I dont know any of my female friends going for ‘Droid does’ maybe the dudes do. HTC came out with the first 4G smartphone with Sprint. While the long term fate of Wimax is questionable in a mature mobile market as the US, it is going to be the only 4g phone for at least a year until the Verizon LTE phones arrive. The ipad entered the market and ushered in a new era of netbook e-reader market place. The new favorite made entertainment on demand a reality and provided a user friendly interface for the uninitiated onto the internet.

The list goes on...but my choice still remains the iphone. It gets smarter and better with each generation, with video conferencing, multiple applications running parallel and better battery utilization. In the categories of user interface, content availability and appearance, it is still the best. Yes, it does lie in a carefully designed walled garden of Apple, but so do the Droids (Android), N/ E series (Nokia Symbian), Blackberrys and the Windows mobiles of the world. So the choice really is still pretty simple. :)