recommend me a better phone than iPhone, android, blackberry and small

[runner-guy]

 

[itchyeyes]

So you want a good smartphone, but it can't be the first, second, or even third most popular platforms out there? You're not making this easy are you.

You're remaining options are basically Windows Phone 7, Palm's WebOS, and Nokia. Windows Phone 7 has promise. But it's hard to recommend right now as it's only just been released and there's no telling how strong developer support will be for the platform. Ideally, I'd suggest waiting at least 6 months before buying a Windows Phone 7 device.

As for Palm, the less said the better. They were dying with only 2 devices on the market when they sold the company to HP 6 months ago, and HP hasn't really done anything with it yet. If you live in France you can get a Palm Pre 2, which is just a Palm Pre with a faster CPU, but besides that the hardware is getting really dated. It's sad, because next to iOS, Palm's WebOS is probably the slickest platform on the market, but it has crap hardware, and thus little developer support. If you're really fixated on something small, you could check out the Palm Pixi. However, it had weak hardware when Palm launched it a year ago, and it's not exactly aging gracefully.

There are a lot of people, especially Europeans, who swear by Nokia. I'm not one of them. Personally I think they've got good hardware, but pretty awful software (kinda the opposite of Palm). They can't even decide which OS to use. Sometimes they use Symbian, sometimes they us Meego. Which is a large part of why developer support is so bad. If you live in the States, most of carriers won't support some of their better features either, such as video calling. Also, none of the major US carriers offer subsidies on any major Nokia smartphones.

If you have to have a smartphone today, and it absolutely can't be iPhone, Android, or Blackberry, I suppose I'd suggest getting either an LG Optimus 7, or a Samsung Omnia 7 if you live outside the US (The Win Phone 7 launch hardware for the US is decidedly less impressive). However, neither is really what I'd consider "small", nor would I consider them to be necessarily superior to something like the iPhone 4 or HTC Droid Incredible.