Shadowex3

Picking a smartphone needs a couple decisions. I'd advise you on carrier as well but calgary is in canada iirc so we're talking strictly phones.

Now the world is split in two on smartphones basically on whether or not you want an iphone. Supporters will go on about it's touch screen, apple, the app market, and trendyness and decriers will go on about oppenness, big brother death grips on what you can install and when, walled gardens, and apple's "famous" parts quality. Both sides usually wind up insulting each other. Since I'm firmly a mac hater I'm not even going to pretend I can discuss an iphone fairly so I wont bother trying.

That leaves blackberries and droids. Blackberries were originally designed for businesses. They handle email incredibly well andtend to be quite robust: i've dropped mine onto cement and tile quite a few times. It pops open and the battery flies out but it's undamaged except for the paint. There are a lot of apps for them, and RIM just started running their "app world" but the consumer apps really arent as good as the more "professional" ones. Blackberries also tend to be a little less good in areas other than what you'd expect a CEO or Secretary to be doing, but again that stems from them being designed originally (and still) for business use.

Droid phones differ widely except for all being reasonably sized touch screens. Some have QWERTY as well (like the Samsung Moment I'm planning to get), others don't. Google supports them quite well, its up to your carrier to decide whether to keep compiling and pushing OS updates. There are apps easily rivalling apple in quantity only the difference is that a droid is basically after the spirit of linux to mac's traditional approach. It will try not to hold you back... but also that includes hurting yourself. You CAN screw up a droid phone by running a billion things at once, or installing whatever you want whenever you want however poorly it's been coded. The bright sides are that they are incredibly customisable, integrate very well with google's stuff, and will basically let you do whatever you want whenever you want. They're basically an "open" competitor to the iphone, designed for consumer use and with trendiness in mind.

TLDR flowchart: Do you want a touchscreen, do you want apps/sms/video or email, do you want business or consumer apps, do you need a phone designed so even an idiot CEO can't break it (physically or otherwise), and do you want an open semi or closed system?

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