Tech Talk: Help with choosing the best mobile

Often, the questioner is poised on the brink of buying an Apple iPhone, on the not entirely unsound notion that if so many other people have chosen one they can’t be all bad.

iPhones are actually very good, though the logic hasn’t always worked where technology is concerned. A whole generation, for instance, bought Microsoft Windows for their home computers knowing full well it would drive them round the bend. The problem there was that nothing else had the same marketing clout.

Today’s mobile phone market has too much marketing and too much choice, if that’s possible. There are Blackberrys, Androids, Windows Mobiles and one or two others jostling for shelf space. Each comes with a bewildering range of models and tariffs.

So my advice is to narrow your options to these two: Apple and Android – the latter most often made by Samsung, Sony and HTC. If it’s simplicity you want, buy an iPhone by all means. But the principal factor separating them is the degree to which they are “locked down” by their manufacturers. Apple does this rather successfully, looking on each phone as a cash till to be carried around in your pocket until you feel the need to purchase something with it.

Android, on the other hand, is in part an “open source” system, which means it’s less tailored to the commercial imperative of a single company. It also means you can personalise it to a much greater extent – most visibly by adding functional mini-programmes or “widgets” to your home screens. So whereas the iPhone screen displays only shortcuts to apps, Android users can browse emails, texts, Facebook or Twitter posts and much else without opening a single application.

You can, for instance, have a seven-day weather forecast and a stack of coloured Post-It notes on your home screen, arranged to your liking. It’s also possible to drag mini-controls for your music player on there.

If you already have an Android phone, here are two home screen add-ons to try today... Beautiful Widgets embellishes your phone with gorgeous indicators for the weather and your network settings. It’s as if David Hockney had given your mobile a makeover.

And Google Currents puts the day’s news on your desktop as a series of flip cards from your choice of sources that you shuffle through until you find a story you like.

Search the Google Play store for more. After these, you’ll never settle for a plain home screen again.