Your three choices, IMO, come down to:

- iPhone
- Android-based phone (and there are many, and some are much better than others)
- Blackberry Z-10

The iPhone is solid, but some people don't like the price. That's a valid complaint.

Android-based phones are all over the map in terms of quality, battery life and features. They're often much cheaper than the iPhone, but you should also be aware that many of them come stuffed with bloatware that you can't delete unless you root the phone. The speed of OS upgrades on the Androids depends on both your carrier and your phone vendor, and in my experience with an Android phone, I found out that my phone was quietly depricated by Motorola and Verizon when I had the nerve to inquire "Hey, the next OS upgrade has been out awhile, when can I expect these memory leak issues to be fixed?" of Verizon. "Oh, you'll have to buy a more recent Droid phone to get the new version of Android."

Gee, thanks.

Then there's the new old dog on the block, the Blackberry Z10. Blackberry was just about on death's doorstep, when they finally turned their engineers loose and came out with a very credible smartphone without any keyboard. When I get to the point where I'm ready to upgrade again in a couple years, I'll look very carefully at the state of the Z10 product vs. the iPhone. I worked in the past with the QNX Neutrino OS that is now the basis for the Z10, and I was very favorably impressed with that OS. Very solid, very robust, very sleek, very much an embedded OS for people who care about their end product.

I'll never go back to an Android phone due to the bloatware, the bugs and the way I was treated by Verizon and Motorola about software upgrades to fix my problems including, but not limited to, random melt-downs of my phone where it would discharge the battery in less than 10 minutes, causing the phone to become almost too hot to handle. I would have to pull the battery out of the phone to get it to cool down, then recharge it. As more and more applications pushed updates to my phone, the problem became worse and worse. In the Android world, everyone points at everyone else for problem resolution. The hardware vendors tell you to talk to your carrier, your carrier tells you that it's all fixed in the next software upgrade, and Google doesn't want to talk about software issues, they only want to push adverts to your phone at your expense.

The issue that finally pushed me over the edge to the iPhone was the cavalier attitude by Google towards malware on Android platforms. Google needs to get on top of this situation, and they're not showing any signs of dealing with the problem in a serious way.