Mark Lyn­der­say

Last week, two ma­jor man­u­fac­tur­ers of pop­u­lar smart­phones launched the newest ver­sions of their flag­ship de­vices in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Black­ber­ry, the com­pa­ny for­mer­ly known as RIM, in­tro­duced their new touch­screen de­vice, the Z10 on Wednes­day, and Sam­sung of­fered the fourth it­er­a­tion of their pre­mi­um "S" se­ries smart­phones the day be­fore.

Add in the iPhone 5 and Win­dows Phone and the ques­tion that in­evitably aris­es, nor­mal­ly while I'm con­tem­plat­ing corn­flakes brands at the gro­cery, is "Which phone should I buy?"

Cu­ri­ous­ly, what needs to be con­sid­ered has very lit­tle to do with what peo­ple nor­mal­ly use phones for, which is mak­ing calls. You can do that for far less with cheap­er de­vices, and the con­sid­er­a­tions in­volved in choos­ing have more to do with com­put­ing than with talk­ing and tex­ting.

It will sur­prise no­body that the cur­rent mar­ket is a straight fight be­tween the iPhone and Sam­sung's de­vices, which is to say it's a choice be­tween iOS and An­droid, the op­er­at­ing sys­tems un­der­ly­ing these phones.

In the US (http://ow.ly/ktDfS), iOS grabbed 53 per cent of the mar­ket with An­droid run­ning a strong sec­ond with 41.9 per cent of smart­phone sales. In Eu­rope that in­verts to 61 per cent for An­droid and 25 per cent for iOS.

I've used both for some time and while I've been us­ing an S3 for the last eight months, I al­so han­dle the IT chores on the house­hold man­age­ment's iPad and iPhone.

An­droid may be com­ing on strong as an op­er­at­ing sys­tem and de­vel­op­er plat­form, but it re­mains in the shad­ow of iOS, which de­liv­ers bet­ter look­ing apps across a wider range of dis­ci­plines.

For most users, the most im­por­tant apps are not on­ly avail­able on both plat­forms, they are al­most iden­ti­cal in func­tion. If you jump be­tween brows­ing, e-mail, Face­book and Twit­ter, ei­ther iOS and An­droid will serve you equal­ly well.

Where they dif­fer though, is in end-user ex­pe­ri­ence. Get­ting apps from Ap­ple is an easy, flu­id ex­pe­ri­ence, but even af­ter sig­nif­i­cant work on im­prov­ing its in­ter­face, Google's Play Store still feels like a fron­tier town.

You'd think that this would mean that iOS is a bet­ter op­tion, but some in­ter­est­ing Ap­ple fa­tigue is set­ting in late­ly. The com­pa­ny's iPhones, which work well and are quite ex­ten­si­ble, are now seen by the hip and thrillseek­ing as dull. It's the bore­dom of seam­less func­tion­al­i­ty that reached its zenith in the work of Di­eter Rams.

An­droid, in con­trast, is seen as ex­cit­ing, ad­ven­tur­ous and in­no­v­a­tive, the phones, more fea­ture rich.

But what's re­al­ly hap­pen­ing here?

On Tues­day, Sam­sung ex­ec­u­tives at Prime were keen to show off all the new fea­tures of the S4, but al­most every­thing that was fea­tured was im­ple­ment­ed through soft­ware de­vel­oped by the com­pa­ny to dis­tin­guish the new de­vice.

It's grow­ing hard­er to sep­a­rate phones on the ba­sis of hard­ware. Fast proces­sors, pix­el-rich screens and oth­er fea­tures tend to be repli­cate quick­ly in this com­pet­i­tive en­vi­ron­ment and it will even­tu­al­ly come down to what a phone can do for its user.

Ap­ple's iPhone, out of the box, is pret­ty ba­sic. It's on­ly when users be­gin to add apps and kit their phone out that it be­comes a tru­ly per­son­al com­put­ing de­vice. Just imag­ine what might hap­pen if Ap­ple dis­cov­ered that the world doesn't, in fact, end at the Flori­da Keys.

Black­ber­ry and Mi­crosoft, once the lead­ers in smart­phones and com­put­ing soft­ware re­spec­tive­ly, are the mar­gin­al play­ers in this fast grow­ing sec­tor and need to de­cide fast which mod­el they plan to align with.

Smart­phone cus­tomers haven't be­gun to fac­tor this new re­al­i­ty of soft­ware cus­tomi­sa­tion in­to their pur­chas­es, but it's go­ing to be the next dis­tin­guish­ing fac­tor in the mar­ket­ing of de­vices to in­creas­ing­ly savvy users.

Read an ex­pand­ed ver­sion of this col­umn here: http://ow.ly/adAll