Have Some Smartphones Become More Equal Than Others?

From George Orwell’s book The Animal Farm (1945) we get this often quoted phrase "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" which is a phrase that pretty much applies to the current status of most phones in the Smartphone industry today with some Smartphones being considered – and rightly so – ‘more equal than others’. Like in the book where all the animals might have started off as equals, some of the animals (the pigs) – endowed with the intellect, ingenuity, charisma and noisemaking abilities (Squealer) – managed to pull ahead of the others and ‘designate’ themselves as the leaders of the rest and thus becoming ‘more equal.’ 

In the beginning, there was just either the cellphone - limited to sending and receiving voice communications and SMSs (Short Messaging Service) - or the Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) the portable electronic organizers or day planners that were so popular with executives who carried them along with the cellphone.    

There followed an integration of the two and the birth of what we now know as the Smartphone, apparently there was some debate as to whether to call them PDA Phones but we know who won that battle. With the Smartphone, one could make and receive calls, store and manage personal  information such as contacts, appointments, to-do lists, connect to internet,  email, locate via GPS, take pictures, store and play media files all in one portable unit.  

The general consensus on what is considered a smartphone includes features like an Operating System  i.e. Android,  iOS or Blackberry OS; Internet access, a QWERTY keyboard or a touch screen, messaging ability that goes beyond the simple SMS to include, email, Instant messages and MMS and so forth. But there are additional features and capabilities in hardware and software that phone makers have put into their devices that have helped propel the ‘more equal’ devices and their mother companies to the helm of the industry, distinguishing them as market leaders. 

Features like Wi-fi connectivity, Near Field Connection (NFC), finger print sensors, accelerometers, proximity and gesture sensors, speech recognition tools, and even Retina scanners.  iOS, Android, and Windows phone are all battling it out in this categories but so far Android (whose latest device is Samsung S5) and iOS (whose latest device is iPhone 5s) seem to be leading in most of those categories by a great margin.   
 

Other features such as the phone’s utilities, security features and applications available for a particular OS also help the advancement of any device in the industry.  Thus the ease with which you can access and get basic tasks done; the ability to find the device in case it is lost or stolen and protection of sensitive data; and the number of applications available for a particular OS, here  the latest numbers seem to favor Android and iOS with both having over a million apps in there stores.  

It is hard to predict what the future holds for the Smartphone as new technology and new players come on board but one thing that is guaranteed for users to be impressed.