Do You Need a Smart Phone?

R. Scott Cameron, president of Cameron Real Estate Services Inc. in Naples, says he was finally persuaded to go with a smart phone when Apple’s iPhone was launched. I believe he initially bought it because it was a cool gadget, but he soon found it to be an indispensable tool. In fact, he says the iPhone has completely changed the way he does business.

For those of you who haven’t already made the switch to a smart phone, I thought it might be helpful to go over some key considerations that might influence your decision.

First, a definition: A smart phone is, basically, the melding of a traditional cell phone’s capabilities with those of a PDA (personal digital assistant), which functions as a mini-computer.

What it can do: Store and retrieve contacts’ information, use e-mail, surf the Web (which is great when you need current stock quotes, weather or even travel information), and download documents directly to your phone.

GPS has been added to most smart phones, as has Bluetooth capability. If you have to talk on the phone while you are driving, the Bluetooth feature gets the phone out of your hand and allows the phone to synchronize to a Bluetooth headset or a Bluetooth-enabled car.

Picture mail is also an interesting feature of most smart phones. You can use it to send a picture of yourself playing golf to your office associates while they are working. A real estate agent might use it to send pictures of a prospective home to an out-of-town client.

Which model to choose: The new Motorola Q 9c, which almost sounds like a James Bond gadget, is my personal choice for a smart phone. This model was Sprint’s "latest and greatest" phone offering at the time that had all the features of my old Motorola Q but with a better battery life and operating system, so it didn’t freeze up.

The Apple iPhone goes a step further than most smart phones. It incorporates their MP3 functionality into the phone, in addition to all the features I mentioned above, thus allowing the user to download music and movies directly to the phone.

None does corporate e-mail to the phone better than the BlackBerry, whose newly launched BlackBerry Bold 9000 has GPS, WiFi and 3G for speed to the Internet. "The iPhone is not far behind the BlackBerry to try to recruit the corporate user," a CNBC contributor pointed out recently, "but they have to get the security issues worked out when it comes to corporate email."

The Palm Centro is also a great all-around, inexpensive smart phone.

What’s next for smart phones: Some uses in the next generation of smart phones in the United States might include the ability to process transactions directly through your smart phone, since it would have the capability, for example, to store and maintain your current banking information. PowerPoint and Excel presentations could be loaded into your phone, which could then be plugged into a projector or HDTV to greatly simplify travel and meeting logistics.

With endless software ideas being developed for the smart phone, along with the advances in memory storage and processing power, it appears likely that the smart phone will one day overtake the laptop computer as the preferred business tool for professionals—similar to what the laptop did to the desktop computer not that long ago.

Peter Seif is president of Synergy Networks.