Sony - well, they make average quality TVs if you ask me (although my friend insists on buying sony everything)and charge well over the mark for them too. The ps3's store and online services pale in comparison to those of the xbox, although it's not really fair to hold the two together as you have to pay to use microsoft's services. That said, the playstation3 homescreen and menu is one of the drabbest UIs that I've ever used, I can see that they were going for simplicity and sophistication but they've actually just landed on boring. I truly believe that if Sony made the menu more vibrant then they would have a much more attractive system, as it stands I barely use my PS3.
Microsoft - I think that it is disgraceful how much they charge for a copy of windows.
I sold my iphone 4 recently and bought a windows phone 7 handset. I thought I'd give it a try as I only have to wait until December before I get a new phone on my contract. Well, I find it is pretty dreadful.
The interface is reasonably nice, but they made the bizarre decision to completely lock the phone down. For instance, although most of them have an sd card inside, it is locked in, you can't actually change it without wiping the phone and voiding your warranty.
Also, you have to use zune to transfer music and pictures to and from the device, which is better than itunes but still far from ideal.
The store is woefully lacking in good quality apps and games, and what they do have is disgustingly over priced (the general minimum price being £2.50 vs apple's 59p). I know it's early days yet but they're aiming down itunes pee hole and they knew that they were facing a giant torrent of steaming hot app laden wee, and this is microsoft - they really should have gotten a large base of quality games ready for launch day.
It doesn't support flash.
The browser is quite nice to use, but it takes far too long to render a page even on wifi, and the address bar also vanishes in landscape mode, why? It's locked to having to use bing to search, forcing you to either manually go to google or download a google search app which needs to be accessed separately to the browser, very poor show.
No multitasking. If you're writing an email or a text and want to check something in the middle of it, well you can forget it because that message will be gone when you come back.
Forced to use bing maps, which is dire. No satnav.
No custom ring tones or messages - apple are bellends for imposing this as it stands, there really is no excuse for ms to have adopted this bizarre limitation.
Basically Microsoft have decided that they want a piece of the apple pie (ho ho ho) and have put on their doppleganger underpants. They've decided that people want a closed apple style os, and that must be the secret to apples success. The problem for them is that they've stepped into the arena with all of the arrogance of apple, but with absolutely none of the backing or content. The Nokia deal is supposed to beef this up but apparently we won't be seeing anything from them for about two years, by which time I think this os will be utterly obscure.
I love me xbox though - pew pew pew!
Apple - The iphone is a fantastic device, it really does have some viable games too. You can say what you will about it but there's no denying that the iphone just works, it does pretty much everything that you would need it to and it's all wrapped up in a nice contained little package. My problem though is that it has had the exact same user interface since day one, and it has become extremely boring to look at. What good is releasing a new hardware design when you haven't touched the look of the os, ot even allow customisation?
Also as I've said, itunes is a vile and cruel punishment.
