Today’s desktops and laptops have become fast enough that we’ve stopped seeing huge performance increases from generation to generation. This year’s processors and graphics cards are faster than last year’s, but not by so much that it’s worth buying a new PC every year.
In smartphones, though, it’s a different story. We’re still seeing huge jumps in performance from one year to the next. The Apple A6 processor in the iPhone 5, for example, promised (and largely delivered) performance that doubled that of the iPhone 4S released only 11 months before. Qualcomm’s quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro, widely used in the high-end Android phones of late 2012, is quicker than the dual-core version of the S4 used in the high-end Android phones of early and mid-2012. And as these phones have become more powerful, our expectations of them have also increased. The modern smartphone began life as a capable Web browser and e-mail checker, but increased processing power has made them multitasking, media-playing, communication-facilitating, game-playing workhorses.
It’s the workhorse part of the equation we’ll be focusing on today in the fifth and final entry in our ultimate smartphone guide. We’ll be looking at the best way to get work done on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 8, evaluating both the capability of each operating system’s built-in apps as well as the best third-party apps for filling in functionality gaps.
As in the other articles in our guide, BlackBerry adherents will need to sit this one out—BlackBerry 10 is getting its big reveal on January 30 and we’ll be paying plenty of attention to RIM on and after that date. But for now, it doesn’t make much sense to focus on older BlackBerry handsets with such a radical rethinking of RIM’s smartphone strategy coming soon.
To keep this article manageable in size and scope, we’ll define “productivity” in terms of e-mail, calendars, word processors, and other related tasks. There are certainly other niches, but these are the ones that will be the most broadly applicable, whether you work in a corporate Exchange environment or you’re just trying to keep track of your own wheelings and dealings. When we talk about Android, we’ll also be using the stock operating system as found on the Nexus 4 to evaluate the operating system’s built-in apps—most of our observations should apply to any recent smartphone running Android 4.0 or 4.1, but the details may vary. The third-party apps should be identical on any supported Android phone, however.
Full Story: Be productive: The Ultimate Smartphone Guide, part V | Ars Technica.