Customization - What phone can you change the most?

This week I will be investigating what types of customizations you can do to each of the three phones, that is, what physical hardware components of the phone can be changed as well as its screen layouts and functionality. Each company that created the three phones that I have been testing allow for users to change their phones in a variety of different ways.

To begin, we will start with analyzing storage space. Of the three phones the iPhone offers the least amount of customization to take place in this category. Firstly, you have no way to change the amount of storage space on the iPhone. This is because Apple does not allow for removable SD cards to be implemented into the phone. What this means is that whatever iPhone you decide to buy, the amount of storage that is comes with will be all that you can ever have in it. However, the Samsung phone and Windows phone offer customers the ability to put any storage-sized microSD card into the phone, granting them the ability to upgrade to more space if they are running low. This is something I defiantly look for before purchasing a phone, because nothing is worse than running out of storage space long before your next phone upgrade.

Next, I will be looking at the device home screens and pages in order to see how the operate and flow. Once again the iPhone offers the least amount of customization to take place in this category. Users are only able to choose four apps that will stay at the bottom of every page on the home screen, offering quicker shortcuts to the top four apps you use the most. Above the four apps at the bottom of the screen are the rest of the apps that fluctuate depending on what page you are on. These apps are arranged in a 4x6 grid, and users can only change the location of each app in that grid pattern, allowing the users almost no real customization in home screen appearance. 

Next, the HTC phone displays its home screen in a much different way. The home screen on this one has many of the devices built in apps, such as messaging and calling, arranged side by side at the bottom of the screen extending in both directions, allowing users to scroll between them. As they scroll through the apps, the appearance changes on the rest of the screen to features that pertain to that app. For example if I were to scroll to the calling app the rest of the screen changes to a keypad, allowing the user to start the process of making a phone call. One of the apps in the scroll list however, pertains to the true home screen of the device. Here is where users can install widgets, which are basically live feed apps that take up more than one slot in the "grid" of the screen. Widgets are cool because you can have a variety of different ones that do different things. Currently the widget installed on the home screen is a large clock that shows the weather for the day, complete with graphical representation of the weather too. 

Lastly, the Samsung Charge offers a mix of both. To start, it has the same main layout as the iPhone, offering four main apps that stay the same at the bottom of all the screens, and then a grid of 4x4 above it for the rest of the apps. Unlike the iPhone however, it offers the ability to use widgets, exactly like the ones seen on the HTC. These widgets can be placed on any of the screens home pages, which you can actually pick the number of. The Samsung phone basically just takes the positives of each and combines them into one.

Another interesting thing I noticed will conducting this research is that with both the Samsung and HTC phones not all the apps need to be directly displayed on the home screen, instead many of the are located in another "app" of sorts (I call it an app but its really just a shortcut to view all the apps on the phone). The iPhone forces all the apps to be on one of the many home screens. However, one could argue that the ability to place multiple apps inside a folder on the home screen of the iPhone is the same things as the "app" shortcut of the other two phones.

In my personal opinion all three phones offer pretty similar features but also have some major different ones. Based on the findings of my research I have personally decided that the Samsung Droid Charge offers the user the most amount of ability to customize the phone. If you are one that does not care how the apps look on the screen then any of the choices are good, but if you are one that wants the ability to alter the device's storage space as well as to have the ability to customize more, then the Samsung is your best option.