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Story: Calling time on smartphone reboots
My Nokia N76 smartphone is call-ready in 24 secs
David, I hope you'll look beyond Microsoft's co-opting of the word "smartphone" as a brand and try Nokia S60 smartphones, such as the Nokia N95 or N76 (nseries.com). Nokia actually calls them Multimedia Computers -- MCs -- because, as you noticed, they really are computers. And yes, that unfortunately comes with some of the headaches we all know from PCs and Macintoshes.
You could always go back to a basic phone that just makes calls, sends messages, has a phonebook, and maybe a game or two. Nokia sells a ton of them, and they're nice. They even have cameras and music players.
But I'm betting you want full Web, email, IM, podcasting, maps, office apps, and installable apps of any kind you can dream of. That richness & complexity doesn't come quite free. There's a real multitasking OS in there -- in S60's case, Symbian.
I work on browsing at Nokia, but this post is my personal opinion, not an official Nokia statement. In my experience Nokia is always working on reliability first, and we're pretty darn good. And on the rare occasion that my phone does freeze up, I'm back in action in under a half minute. That will get faster as hardware keeps following Moore's Law, doubling in speed every couple of years. But it also will happen less and less often as everything continues to mature.
S60 is far and away the leading smartphone in the world -- over 50% market share globally last time I checked. And finally coming on strong in the US.
See Tim Mather's comment on ZDNet, http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/articles/comment/0,1000002985,39289506,00.htm. He's talking about security, and Linux -- but S60 is also open to new apps and innovation (which might be why it's been slow to take off in the US? :)
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