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The use of smartphones is growing at an unprecedented rate and is projected to soon pass laptops as consumers' mobile platform of choice. The proliferation of these devices has created new opportunities for mobile researchers; however, when faced with hundreds of devices across nearly a dozen development platforms, selecting the ideal platform is often met with unanswered questions. In this paper I consider desirable characteristics of mobile platforms necessary for mobile networks research. Based on these characteristics, I assess five smartphone platforms: Android (Linux), BlackBerry, iPhone (Mac OS X), Symbian, and Windows Mobile. This survey is current as of December 2008. A living version of this survey is available at: http://blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/eaoliver/platforms/.
Earl Oliver (Fri,) studied this question.