BlackberryWPThe battle to be king of the business phones (with a nice slice of fun thrown in) is on with Blackberry and Windows Phone 7 putting up a strong fight. We’ve pitted the two against each other to see which comes out on top.

If you’re torn between O2’s juicy selection of Blackberry devices and the growing Windows Phone 7 army, we’re here to help. Read on to see the two challengers sized up.

Hardware heroes*

Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 keeps one foot in the business world where its predecessor Windows Mobile played so well but it’s also aiming to be a place for gaming and more fun apps. The current kings of Windows Phone 7 are Samsung and HTC but Nokia is now going to be making Windows Phone 7 devices with Microsoft giving it extra love.

Blackberry

The strength of Blackberry is still in its QWERTY keyboard deployment. If you pound out emails all day long and love to have precision in your pronouncements, a Blackberry is still one of the best options, especially when connected to your company’s email system. The Blackberry Bold 9780 is a great do-it-all device while the Blackberry Pearl 3G is a svelter, sexier beast.

Social smarts

Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 is a brand spanking new mobile OS and it comes with the kind of social networking integration you’d expect from something fresh out of the labs. Microsoft’s take is to pull together your friends, contacts and social networking sites into the People Hub. It aggregates all your messages and contacts across three screens – All, Recent and What’s New. You can also create a Live Tile that will show you realtime updates from friends you most want to keep up with.

Blackberry

With Blackberry OS 6, RIM introduced Social Feeds which pull together live updates from your Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry Messenger contacts in one place. From that one location you can post to one or all of your social networking sites with a single tap.

Surfing skills

Windows Phone 7

Unsurprisingly, Windows Phone 7 devices ship with the mobile incarnation of Internet Explorer. If you’re used to using the browser on your desktop it’ll be very familiar and it is slickly employed.

Blackberry

The Blackberry Browser is based on Webkit (the same architecture that sits underneath the iPhone’s Safari browser) and is very speedy with pinch-to-zoom smarts and tabbed browsing baked in there.

Apps-olutely fab or apps-olutely atrocious?

Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 has over 5,000 apps available to grab with most of the big names there or coming soon. You won’t struggle to get a good Twitter app and Angry Birds Windows Phone 7 is on the cards.

Blackberry

Blackberry App World has been open for business for a lot longer than Windows Phone 7 with over 20,000 apps in its store.

So which should you buy?

If you’re someone who craves reliability and plenty of well-known apps to feast on then Blackberry may be the one for you. If you’re a heavy emailer, Blackberry remains the road warrior’s friend. But if you’re an early adopter and love beautiful interfaces, Windows Phone 7 is the one for you. It’ll also serve you well if you love QWERTY with plenty of devices with slide out keyboards.

Here are a couple of videos to help you with your decision making.

 
 

Let us know which one you’d prefer in the comments below.

 

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