The Best Smartphones of 2009: New Apple, BlackBerry, Palm and HTC Models Reviewed

What's the best smartphone to buy in 2009? We review the newest Apple, BlackBerry, HTC and Palm models to see how these top Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint phones stack up.

With a new crop of ever-faster, ever-smaller, ever-better smartphones launching seemingly every month, there has never been a more enticing time to buy a smartphone. Or a more confusing time for the prospective buyer. The same plethora of options that make today’s smartphones the most best ever made also make the marketplace a minefield to navigate.

We’ve all been there: Your best friend claims the iPhone is the only way to go, but your boss insists you need a BlackBerry, the engineer who lives next door claims you need to go with Google Android, your geeky dad still swears by Windows Mobile, and your coworkers are all trying to cajole you into the Palm Pre.

Despite what the best marketers will tell you, there is no best option for everybody. So step back, take a breath, discard your preconceptions, and prepare to make an intelligent decision based on what you actually want to do with the device that will call your pocket home for the next two years. We’ve selected the best-of-breed options from each mobile operating system, broken down the most important functions of any smartphone, and stacked them all up to see which excel, which falter, and which don’t even belong on the charts.

Meet the Contenders

Palm Pre, $150 on Sprint with two-year contract
Apple iPhone 3GS, $199 on AT&T with two-year contract
T-Mobile myTouch 3G, $200 on T-Mobile with two-year contract
BlackBerry Curve 8900, $150 on T-Mobile with two-year Contract
HTC Touch Pro2, $200 on Verizon with two-year contract

Internet Browsing

Of all the features a smartphone offers, 24/7 connectivity to the Internet must be far and above the most attractive. Whether you need to pull up a last-minute train schedule or a recipe, the ability to open a browser and get at what you’re looking for can make or break a potential smartphone.

Good news: All of our contenders offer full HTML browsers, which are leaps and bounds forward from what “the mobile Web” used to be a few years ago – special preformatted pages for mobile phones that rarely offered the same content the real page did. But even among a crew so vastly improved from what used to be, there are winners and losers.

The iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre immediately stand out as the Web addict’s phones of choice. Their multi-touch capabilities allow users to simply pinch to fluidly zoom or unzoom – a quick and intuitive way to move around on pages not designed for the tiny screen of a mobile phone. Rather frustratingly, the myTouch’s high-quality capacitive touch screen technically supports multi-touch gestures, but Google hasn’t enabled it in Android yet, making its browser extremely smooth and snappy, but still unable to compete with the leaders.

HTC TouchPro2 features the best screen for web browsing

The Touch Pro2’s extremely large 3.6-inch screen and high resolution (480 x 800) give it a definite leg up in this arena, where screen size and pixels make all the difference in readability. And to be fair, Web pages look better on this phone than on any other in our roundup. But the phone’s rather slow-to-respond touch capabilities just make navigation and scroll a bear. The BlackBerry suffers in this department as well: Without a touch screen, you need to use the pearl-like scroll ball to select links and navigate, which can be far clumsier and less intuitive than simply poking around on the screen with your fingers.

The BlackBerry also falls down on Internet speeds. While all the rest of the phone in our lineup offer 3G connectivity, the Curve 8900 only offers EDGE connectivity, which feels painfully slow in contrast. Those who value a speedy surfing experience wherever they go may even want to rule it out entirely on that demerit. Fortunately, solid Wi-fi capability helps make up it a bit by offering better speeds when connected at home and work.

Best of Show: Apple iPhone
Although almost toe-to-toe with the Pre, the slightly bigger screen on the iPhone just barely nudges it ahead.

Typing

Whether you’re always making dinner plans with a series of 27 back and forth text messages, making a grocery list, or need to square away lengthy business e-mails from your first class seat, being able to type on a smartphone is absolutely critical to making the most of it.

Three of our devices offer physical QWERTY keyboards: the HTC Touch Pro2, BlackBerry Curve 8900 and Palm Pre. Among them, the Touch Pro2 wins the trophy for best messaging device due to the sheer size of its massive slide-out keyboard, which makes it possible for fat-thumbed texters to operate easily. Even the most gorilla-fisted owners will be able to type on this thing.

The Curve's keyboard is a bit on the small side

The Curve 8900 and Pre come very close to each other in terms of size and usability. Their keyboards both tread toward the “too-small” end of the spectrum, but those with nimble fingers can still master them with enough patience. The Curve holds a slight edge over the Pre, if only because there’s no need to slide out the keyboard whenever it’s time to type.

We prefer anything with a hard keyboard to the iPhone or myTouch, which both use “soft” on-screen keyboards in their place. That said, it’s easy to become fairly competent with both rather quickly, and the capacitive touch screens used by both phones make them quite accurate. But there’s no denying the steep learning curve, lower confidence in accuracy, and slower maximum typing speed. Between the two, Apple’s looks more slickly animated, but the myTouch offers optional haptic feedback (it makes a little drum-like vibration every time you strike a key) which can help improve the experience of typing.

Best of Show: HTC Touch Pro2
The bigger, the better.