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How smart does your phone need to be?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 20 Nov 08, 12:50 GMT

If you're a mobile phone user - and we in the UK have more than one phone each - prepare for a marketing blizzard over the coming weeks. Christmas has become a vital period for the mobile operators and retailers, and it's often a chance for them to give a bit of welly to something new.

This year, among the new handsets jostling for attention, are two very different products which tell us something about the way the mobile market is going. I've had a play with both the Blackberry Storm and the INQ1 over the last few days - but I'm not entirely convinced that either handset will deliver what its makers are hoping for. Because both are made by firms convinced that we want something different from what they've offered us so far.

The Storm is the first touch-screen Blackberry and the latest, most serious attempt by its makers RIM to break out of the business market - which has been a pretty happy hunting ground for the Canadian company and make its way into every consumer's pocket.

On the plus side, it's got just about the shiniest, most vivid screen I've seen on a phone. Watching a movie on it would be a pleasure, and it has all the multimedia capabilities that you would expect on a high-end handset. But for a phone aimed at the consumer, who may not have the corporate back-up that many existing Blackberry users enjoy, it's extraordinarily complicated to set up and I spent a long time trying and failing to synchronise with my desktop computer.

Of course, it's the touch screen which is the key selling-point of the Storm. It's described as "funky" by Vodafone, which has got an exclusive deal to sell the phone, and it clicks in an interesting way when you press on it. But both I and my colleague Dan Simmons found it difficult to use, not very responsive, and generally rather frustrating.

What a Blackberry has always been brilliant at is e-mail - and it's simply harder to write and receive an e-mail on a touchscreen Storm than to hammer away with your thumbs on the keyboard of an old steam-driven model. So business users may be reluctant to switch to a Storm, and, in a depressed market, RIM and Vodafone may struggle to find consumers who think it's worth paying around £40 a month to own such a smartphone.

The mobile operator Three is coming at the market from the opposite end with its cheap and cheerful INQ1 phone. Three spent billions on a 3g network and then tried to persuade us that we wanted to make video calls and download music - which the firm now admits was a complete waste of time. It's now convinced that there's a huge section of the mobile population which wants to use its fast data network to surf the web and chat on social networks - but doesn't want to pay for a smartphone. Hence the INQ1 - or, as it's been dubbed, the Facebook phone.

It's an unremarkable handset - nothing like as cool as the Blackberry Storm - which you wouldn't want to use to watch video or download music. The makers says the INQ1 isn't a smartphone, but a social phone so it has Facebook, instant messenger services, and Skype right there on the tiny screen. Three has decided the killer app for the mobile phone of the future is - wait for it - communication.

Now I didn't find the phone particularly easy to use - for my ageing eyes it was almost impossible to read the screen while updating my Facebook status - but I don't think the INQ1 is aimed at me. As someone on a contract with plenty of call minutes thrown in, I'm not sure why you'd want to make a Skype call from your phone. However, the INQ1 contracts offer very sparse minutes but plenty of data, and for the kind of young user who relies on texts and instant messages, rather than calls, it could be attractive.

So two very different views of what we want from a mobile phone - a shiny, all-singing, all-dancing fashion object which can do just about everything you'd expect from a small computer and a utilitarian communications device which you might not want to wave under your friend's nose. Which of the two will perform better at Christmas? The result of that contest will tell us something about our economic well-being, as well as our tastes in technology.

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