Selecting an Android Phone and Wireless Carrier

Jay Levinsohn, Ph.D., BreathEasy Technical Lead, RTI International

The process of selecting an Android phone for the BreathEasy project was interesting.  After selecting the Android platform as the operating system for the project, the choice of the actual device to use as the handset remained. 

The Android market is on fire right now.  Phone and tablet makers, telecom carriers and third-party resellers are hard at work competing for a share of this rapidly expanding worldwide market.  In the United States, the selection process is complicated by the fact that most telecom carriers lock their phones to their systems. Many carriers offer nearly identical phone models. Once you select a phone from a particular carrier, however, then that phone is tied to that carrier for the life of your contract.  Additionally, the phone configuration varies slightly from carrier to carrier even for the exact same phone.  Beyond the differences between carriers, rapid changes have been unfolding in the Android operating system throughout the course of the last year (e.g., at least three changes in the last 12 months) and changes in the available phone hardware have been unfolding even more quickly. 

Despite the carrier complexity and rapid changes involved when considering devices that run on Android, the good news for our team as we looked at devices was that almost all of the new phones we considered were capable of executing the tasks required for our project.  They all have:

• Fast processors
• Excellent screen displays (4” or larger) and multi-touch screens
• Adequate internal memory and internal memory cards (8 GB or more)
• Android 2.1 or later operating system

Because so many of the phones met or exceeded our requirements, our choice really boiled down to choosing a carrier and phone plan. In order to compare vendors, we looked at several carriers, including several third party vendors who resell network capacity. We found that with the exception of the resellers, they all offered capable new phones that meet our specifications.  Therefore, we ultimately spent less time considering differences between individual phones and more time evaluating differences between vendors (e.g., voice plan price, data plan price, required contract length, cancelation fee, billing and management tools offered, vendor reputation and quality of network coverage).  These are the variables that really effect costs. 

AT&T offered us the best price on a capable new phone, the Samsung Captivate (Model SGH-I897 Galaxy S).  Additionally, for our purposes, their phone management options and voice and data plan prices best fulfilled our needs and budget.

Comments

[How To Deal With Jealousy]

It is very exciting to see that you're using Android as the platform of choice. The operating system is really growing (in users/devices), and it looks as if it will be the most dominating operating system for most consumer devices.

The consumer devices are also changing, with many users migrating over to tablets where Android is one of the most dominating OS.