Smartphones vs netbooks vs tablets - which is best for you?

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Five years ago, there was little technology around to aid you working outside the office. Smartphones were in their first stages, but mobile internet speeds weren’t fast enough to give broadband on the move.

A couple of years later and smartphones began to be described as mobile computers. This was quickly followed by netbooks and booklets, such as Nokia’s Booklet 3G with an integrated data card for full web browsing on the move.

Tablet PCs have been around since 2001, when the first was announced by Microsoft, but they’ve always been hanging around in the background, behind notebooks and netbooks.

Since CES, and the iPad’s launch, the world has gone tablet mad, with Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus and Archos all signaling a new trend in tablets.

So which of these devices is better for working away from the office?

Size and form factor

The obvious advantage of a phone is that it’s small and although smartphones are generally larger than regular phones, they will simply slip into your pocket.

Tablets can take a range of different guises. The iPad doesn’t feature a keyboard at all, unless you opt to purchase the dock with integrated keyboard. On the other hand, Acer’s Eee PC T-91M does include a keyboard, but it also features a touch screen and operates on Windows 7, swivelling to expose its hardware keys.

There are a whole host of devices that attempt to bridge the smartphone/tablet gap, such as the Nokia N900 that operates on the Linux-based Maemo OS and its predecessor, the N900 Tablet. Both of these include a full QWERTY keyboard, although tote a much smaller screen, and until the Maemo OS is more developed, such a device will struggle to compete against the more advanced tablet PCs.

Operating system

With the dawn of the applications boom, it’s also simple - and normally cheap - to download applications for almost everything onto your phone, whether you have a BlackBerry, Windows, iPhone or Symbian device. Even WebOS' app store is growing for Palm users.

However, smartphone screens are small and many popular applications such as Pocket Excel only allow you to read documents rather than create them on the move.

Tablets rarely integrate the sort of OS you’d expect on a netbook. Although some, like the bulky Lenovo ThinkPad X200 Tablet, utilise the touch screen features of Windows 7, others use a slimmed-down version of the most popular operating systems.

Samsung’s NP-Q1U runs on Windows XP tablet edition, the Archos 9 PCTablet on Windows 7 Starter Edition, and some more recent introductions to the tablet game have been built around Android, such as Dell’s Concept tablet, which was revealed at CES 2010.

Battery life

Battery life is another issue when using a smartphone. More often than not, manufacturers implement batteries designed for making and taking calls, receiving emails and powering an always-on data connection.

They are not particularly designed for running multiple applications, while swapping between Wi-Fi and a data network for long periods of time.

The battery lives of netbooks and tablets are comparable – often providing up to 10 hours battery life. Of course, with a tablet, there’s a touch screen to power, but this doesn’t have to affect battery life as the HP TouchSmart tm2t series shows.

Multitasking

Multitasking is another issue. Although many smartphones are excellent at multitasking - including BlackBerrys, Android devices and any handset running Windows Mobile - they still don’t have the processing power of netbooks.

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