Smart phone OS showdown: iPhone vs Android vs Palm Pre

Palm is out at the first hurdle here. It does have a developer programme and a perfectly decent app store. At the time of writing though, it has just 100 or so apps. None of which seems to be especially marvellous. The available Twitter apps are usable, but not especially likeable.

The iPhone has a superb app store, which is integrated with iTunes. It has the most apps of everyone, and most people agree that this is one of the strongest points about the phone. Apple vets every app too, so you've got some measure of guarantee that it works as advertised. Despite the large number of apps, however, we couldn't help but feel demoralised by the annoying phone-based interface. Applications over 10MB can't be downloaded over 3G and that accounts for a large number of them. What's more, it's really hard to search for free applications, especially on the phone.

The winner here, on nearly all counts, is Android. The Android on-phone market is top-notch -- easy to search and well categorised. Android doesn't have half as many apps as the iPhone, but that doesn't actually appear to be a problem in day-to-day use. We were easily able to get all the apps we needed to do everything we wanted.

Take, for example, Twitter apps -- on Android there are two exceptionally strong programs, Twidroid and Swift. Both are free -- although Twidroid has a pro version -- and both do the job as well as any application on the iPhone.

The flipside of the Apple approval process is that apps are often rejected from its store, sometimes for the most spurious of reasons. In particular, Apple doesn't like third parties replicating functionality found within Apple's own apps. The only time Google will refuse an application listing in the store is if it's malicious or in some way endangers handsets. 

While the iPhone has a very good selection, many of the apps require payment of some sort. We don't have a problem with that -- they're generally very polished and professional, and has an amazing variety of games, in particular. But most of the same functionality is available for free on Android, if a little more rough around the edges.