Shawnee Love   •  
June 11, 2010

I attended metabridge today and listened to Tim Bajarin of PCMag who has a cult following for his down to earth style and amazing breadth of knowledge. He has been around since the birth of the PC and talks about how the big wigs in the computer industry got started because he lived it.  He refers to the founders of Apple as “Steve” and “Woz” and peppers his presentation with stories of leaders who come to him for opinions and advice. Truly an amazing and interesting guy who I would love to spend a few days with let alone be a fly on the wall for some of his conversations.

At one point, he spoke about smartphones and how they are just another computer and are likely to follow the same patterns as all the other launches.  That is, at first there is the “wild west” when there are a bunch of players in the market offering up their wares. From there, a number of them shake out and a standard platform arises (or as he believes in the case of smartphones, a few platforms arise). Other companies begin to adopt those platforms further reinforcing the choice(s) and then you eventually get to the point where companies differentiate themselves on services rather than the original product (the phone) and it’s platform.

Tim is not a guy who shies away from making predictions and given his knowledge and experience, I am not sure if his predictions come true because everyone believes in him or if they come true because he’s so darn insightful. Either way, he made a prediction on the “best bets” for a smartphone which as some of you may know is a question I am mulling over.

In his (highly respected and widely sought after opinion), the smartphones most likely to succeed are:

• Apple’s iPhone
• Google’s Android
• RIM’s Blackberry

He followed those choices up with the possibility of the Microsoft and Palm versions also succeeding but I am sticking with his top 3.

For a quick synopsis of his top 5, check out this article in PCMag. For me, I think I have finally decided.  For these reasons:

• Easy set up and synchronization
• Excellent screen
• Variety of apps
• Awesome browsing power
• Great visibility of websites
• Ease of dialing phone numbers

I have chosen the iPhone. Now if I could only figure out what plan to sign up on….