The good news for those who haven’t adopted the iPhone yet is that the rest of the market is scrambling to keep up and deliver new handsets to challenge the quickly growing dominance of Apple’s wonder handset. The bad news is that now you’ll have to actually decide which one to buy!

First off, if you’re looking for some sort of comprehensive hardware review, you’re looking in the wrong place. Certainly, hardware plays a large roll in how handsets perform and in what they deliver, but I’d prefer we take a look at the end result — how the perform and stand up to each other.

As these handset manufacturers must have forgotten to ship my courtesy test units out to me in a timely fashion, we’ll have to go off what others in the industry have seen. First up we have the HTC Touch Diamond, the sexy new handset not yet released in the U.S. Unlike its rather unattractive predecessor, the HTC Touch, the Touch Diamond is just pretty to look at, and pretty to use, it would seem.

The Touch Diamond, like its two competitors, has no keyboard, and runs the Windows Mobile 6.1 interface. Though I’m not the biggest fan of Windows Mobile, the Touch Diamond runs HTC’s unique TouchFlo 3D GUI, which is about as sexy as they come. Though the iPhone’s GUI is smooth and sexy, TouchFlo 3D doesn’t look to copy it — if you are interested in seeing it in action, here’s a video.

The Touch Diamond is powerful, has a sexy interface, and is thankfully not one of the handsets looking to replicate the iPhone to the T.

Next up is the Samsung Instinct, a handset that’s selling like hotcakes on the Sprint network. Unlike the Touch Diamond, the Instinct does look to replicate the success of the iPhone with a very similar GUI and operating system. However, that doesn’t mean the Instinct doesn’t have merit.

To the contrary, the Instinct takes advantage of many of the iPhone’s strengths like visual voicemail and take it a step further. Where the iPhone has no video recording, the Instinct does. The Instinct does streaming TV — the iPhone doesn’t. The Instinct allows for horizontal text messaging, where the iPhone requires you to type on a squeezed vertical keyboard. The Instinct is smaller than the iPhone. The Instinct also has GPS, a selling point for the iPhone 3G. If you’re looking for a video of the interface, it is your lucky day.

Another strong advantage to the Instinct is that it runs on Sprint’s CDMA network. CDMA generally has more consistent reception around the U.S. than many GSM networks (like the iPhone’s AT&T network).

Last, but certainly not least, is the forthcoming iPhone 3G. For those who don’t know what the iPhone offers, what rock have you been living under, and why did you emerge to read this article? However, the iPhone 3G does offer some new functionality, mainly a new fleet of downloadable applications and GPS. Perhaps most significantly, the iPhone 3G will run on AT&T’s 3G data network (surprise surprise). Beyond that, the iPhone 3G now has business “push” technology that was keeping many businesses from switching to the handset from the business-popular Blackberry.

It is quite a statement that the other two handsets are competitors’ responses to Apple’s iPhone, so you should know right off the bat that the iPhone is the industry standard for excellence in touch-screen cellular technology. However, many consider the iPhone’s only major drawback is that it is exclusively offered by AT&T. Though AT&T does have one of the largest customer bases, those customers were acquired through acquisitions, not necessarily by having stellar quality.

Furthermore, AT&T is notorious for having call issues. Many are upset that Verizon didn’t jump on the opportunity to host the iPhone, as AT&T has a lockdown on the handset for quite some time.

Still, the iPhone 3G, coming in at $199 for the base handset, might be enough to convince those who can’t stand to wait for the it to become available on other networks.

And that is where other touch handsets like the HTC Touch Diamond, Samsung Instinct and others come in. Though many were afraid that iPhone knockoffs were going to be just that, the fact of the matter is that competitors like the Touch Diamond and the Instinct bring innovation to the market where the iPhone 3G fails to capitalize on continued success. For those who can’t live with being on the AT&T network, don’t worry. There are viable alternatives at good prices, and soon enough, the entire industry will be delivering what Apple birthed.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 4:02 pm under Opinion.

Read more entries by Triston McIntyre.
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