Let’s face it: with little more than a year gone by from the release of the iPhone, smartphone developers have become a bit obsessed with ending the reign started by the iPhone.

Countless companies such as Verizon, T-Mobile, Sony and Motorola have claimed to have designed the ultimate iPhone replacement, or ‘iPhone Killer.’ However, few have come close to Apple’s success.

Until recently, none of the smartphones had come close to the usability the iPhone achieved. In fact, many of them completely bombed off the market.

Dare I say the LG Dare? One of the many brick-like phones that claimed to be an iPhone replacement, but all it ended up doing was enforcing iPhone envy.

A few weeks ago, both T-Mobile and Blackberry announced two new smartphones that may in fact ‘kill’ the iPhone; Blackberry has announced the Blackberry Storm 9500 model, an interesting phone to say the least, and T-Mobile releases the G1 Wednesday.

At first look, many may be a bit skeptical of the Storm because of its size. It reminds us why people still holster their phones like a large handgun – because it’s anything but small. It’s not much bigger than the iPhone, 0.55 inches vs. 0.46 inches, and you can slide it in your pocket, but there wouldn’t be much room for anything else.

The big kicker is its touch screen and navigation design.

The developers decided to stick with a navigate/select/execute style design similar to the scroll ball to which previous blackberry users conformed. This means you flick the screen like the iPhone to navigate through pages, touch the screen to select an application or e-mail, and then you need to physically click the screen to activate it.

Yes, ‘click’.

The entire screen is on a floating clicking mechanism, which allows users to physically press on the screen instead of only touching it. This provides the perfect amount of feedback old-school phone users appreciate, while still making touch-screen typing fast and easy.

Besides the revolutionary click-touch-screen, the Blackberry Storm has all the basic features you could want in a phone. Camera, beautiful 3.25 inch screen, extremely loud built-in speaker for blasting your music, a high-speed broadband Internet connection, a decent 5.5 hours of talk time for all those late-night drunk dials you make, but sadly, no WiFi.

Even more recently, T-Mobile, HTC and Google (yeah, they’re taking over the world, we know) joined in on the smartphone game with the highly anticipated Android OS based phone dubbed the G1.

The G1 is the first phone to tote the Android Mobile Operating System.

Google developed Android. It’s based off the Linux operating system to be managed by developers and coders in a Java-like code using Google’s stored Java program libraries. But it doesn’t support applications programmed in native Java.

I know that’s a lot to take in, but basically it’s designed to work seamlessly with Google and its own Java-based programs. Can you say monopoly? I know Google can.

This bad boy is big.

It’s a whopping 0.62 inches thick and 4.6 inches tall.

It has a nice 3.2-inch touch-sensitive screen, and a full-size hard-button QWERTY keyboard (standard U.S. key arrangement) underneath the screen, which slides up to allow access.

At the bottom of the phone, where the microphone is located, are six hard navigation buttons; Call, end/power, a scroll ball like the old blackberries, home, back and menu.

Again the G1 has got pretty much what you’d expect from a smartphone: a 3.2 megapixel camera, an external storage slot (up to 16 GB), more than five hours of chat time and, yes, a speakerphone. Although not as loud as the Storm’s, it still gets the job done.

That said, the G1 is clearly Google’s first phone attempt. It works like a first, looks like a first and feels like a first.

Its touch capabilities are mediocre at best, and when the screen goes up to allow access to the keyboard, it feels flimsy and weak.

In place of a headphone jack is a mini-USB connection that requires yet another adapter, which we all know you’ll lose. If you want to listen to music off it, and if you want to watch videos, you’ll have to download a video player separately.

Compared to the iPhone and its update, the 3G, the G1 and the Storm both fall short in their sleek-form factors.

The Storm makes up for this in innovation.

Its click-touch-screen makes typing by touch much more responsive and acceptable to those who like the feel of the buttons beneath their fingers.

The G1’s most notable feature is Google’s home-brewed operating system, Android.

Other than that, it’s still just another attempt to kill off this iPhone craze.

I’m sure you’re all still asking one key question, the one that always is the kicker in the end: How much?

Well the iPhone, as you all know, is now $199 after the recent price cuts. But how deep will you have to go for one of these new guys?

Not too deep, actually.

Only $179 for the G1 when it’s released Wednesday and a rumored $199 match to the iPhone for Storm.

So will you join the craze and be a Mac, or will you submit to the growing empire and sell your soul to Google to save $20?

Or maybe corporate America is calling you, and when you answer you’d like to whip out that Storm from the holster and battle all those electric bills?

Me? I’m sticking with Morse code … no dropped calls.

Published on October 20, 2008 at 12:00 pm