newsonaut

Turning inner space into outer space

May 26, 2013

Which smartphone is the best for journalists?

The Internet is a weird place where otherwise civilized people can get themselves worked up into a lather about the most trivial and inconsequential subjects.

Take smartphone market share, for example. Several articles have been published recently insisting that we should care — or even worry about — how many iPhones are being sold versus how many Android-based phones are being sold. For some reason this is extremely important to some people — so much so that they have tied themselves up in knots with lengthy articles explaining the pros and cons of market share.

As a journalist, I prefer an iPhone because the hot new apps I want to use or review often come to iPhones first. For some reason, developers seem to prefer iOS (the system that runs Apple devices), possibly because iOS users tend to spend more money on apps.

This may change in the future, but even if it doesn’t there is no reason why an Android phone can’t work just as well if that’s what you prefer. So what you have to wait longer for an Android version of Vine? It will come eventually, and meanwhile there are other apps, such as Tout, that are just as good.

As far as market share goes, smartphones are considered by some to be a special case to think about because they belong to an emerging market and we don’t know yet how things will eventually shake out. Who will win? Who will dominate in the long run? These are interesting questions, but hardly worth losing sleep over.

I say let Apple, Google, BlackBerry and Microsoft worry about these things. There is nothing we mere mortals can do about it one way or another. The phone we choose to buy is a drop in the bucket for their overall profits or market share. And at a guess, the way things are going, we will at least have Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android to choose from for many years to come.