Be productive: The Ultimate Smartphone Guide, part V

Be productive: The Ultimate Smartphone Guide, part V:

Aurich Lawson

Today's desktops and laptops have become fast enough that we've stopped seeing huge performance increases from generation to generation. This year's processors and graphics cards are faster than last year's, but not by so much that it's worth buying a new PC every year.
In smartphones, though, it's a different story. We're still seeing huge jumps in performance from one year to the next. The Apple A6 processor in the iPhone 5, for example, promised (and largely delivered) performance that doubled that of the iPhone 4S released only 11 months before. Qualcomm's quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro, widely used in the high-end Android phones of late 2012, is quicker than the dual-core version of the S4 used in the high-end Android phones of early and mid-2012. And as these phones have become more powerful, our expectations of them have also increased. The modern smartphone began life as a capable Web browser and e-mail checker, but increased processing power has made them multitasking, media-playing, communication-facilitating, game-playing workhorses.
It's the workhorse part of the equation we'll be focusing on today in the fifth and final entry in our ultimate smartphone guide. We'll be looking at the best way to get work done on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 8, evaluating both the capability of each operating system's built-in apps as well as the best third-party apps for filling in functionality gaps.

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