Wednesday December 2, 2009 4:43 AM AEST
PC Authority > Group Tests > Smarter Smartphones: 12 high-end mobile handsets tested and reviewed
Smarter Smartphones: 12 high-end mobile handsets tested and reviewed
Jonathan Bray and Alex Bradner put 12 high-end handsets through our gruelling tests to find the best one for you.
It’s been a busy year for the mobile phone industry. In the 18 months since the watershed US launch of Apple’s first iPhone, we’ve seen countless copies, a new version of Windows Mobile, and a whole raft of exciting handsets appearing on the market.
In fact, there’s now such a wide variety of smartphones on offer that we couldn’t possibly squeeze all of the contenders into this month’s Labs. Instead, we’ve chosen a selection of the most interesting and powerful phones from each of the major manufacturers.
They’re all at the cutting edge of smartphone design. Look at the feature table on page 74 and you’ll see that every one now has GPS and HSDPA, and all bar one are endowed with Wi-Fi connectivity.
Despite the similarities, however, there are some interesting trends developing, and not every manufacturer is following the same path.
Apple has led the way for ease of use, but now other manufacturers are redoubling their efforts. To make up for the fiddly, stylus-based front-end of Windows Mobile, HTC, Samsung and Sony Ericsson have all attempted to make their devices finger friendly – with mixed success.
Elsewhere, screen resolutions continue to rise, with two handsets sporting VGA resolutions and another pair boasting 480 x 800 screens. Browsing the web has improved vastly, too.
And, last but not least, we’ve devised our first ever real-world battery life tests for phones, with some interesting findings. To discover which phone deserves your cash, read on; you may be surprised at the results.
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How we test
Plus, how we how work the ratings
Choosing a smartphone is a complicated business. Not every phone is suitable for all situations, and that’s more apparent now than at any time in the past. Most of the phones in this test have similar core features, but the way they’re packaged is the key.
Traditional benchmark procedures and timed performance tests aren’t helpful, and you can’t simply compare features and decide that way, either. You have to get a feel for what a phone can do before you can properly assess it.
We’ve tried to encapsulate this as best we could in our testing procedures, subjecting the phones to real-world tests and factoring in subjective assessments to find which offer the best experience.
Ease of Use
The ease with which email can now be picked up, and the huge amounts of data a smartphone can process, demand an efficient way of entering text.
The phones on test each approach the problem in different ways. Some plump for hardware keyboards, while others have a variety of screen-based touch keyboard layouts to choose from. Whichever a phone uses, though, it’s critical that text entry is straightforward.
It’s equally crucial, with all that message data to plough through, that other aspects are up to scratch. We assess how intuitive each phone’s user interface is, how good the screen is at accommodating such information, and how other hardware aids contribute to the overall experience.
Points were also awarded for how responsive each phone felt in general use. We loaded each phone with hundreds of contacts and a month’s worth of email to see how quickly each performed in its tasks of locating phone numbers and searching messages.
We also tested each phone with a suite of standard file types, ranging from zip files to Word documents, audio and PDF files, to see how many each would open, and whether files could be edited.
Features & Design
Modern smartphones have a bewildering array of capabilities and features so, in this Labs, we’ve only given points to phones that stand out from the crowd.
We also awarded points to phones with a decent selection of software, a good web browser, a camera with flash, plus decent storage and memory expandability.
We also think that the use of proprietary cables for synchronisation and charging should be long gone, so phones that can be charged and synchronised using standard USB connections were awarded extra points.
Portability is a crucial aspect of design, so we’ve taken into account the size and weight of each device, and how easy each one is to slip into a pocket.
Battery Life
Just as important is battery life. We set up a test to simulate real-world light use. In an area with a strong HSDPA signal, we first made a half-hour call then downloaded 50MB of email attachments.
Finally, we turned off push email (where possible) then left the phone in standby, but checking email on a POP3 email account once every 30 minutes until the battery ran flat (see graph).
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| Want to see how the phones measure up? How they are, to scale, side by side, shortest to tallest. |
Value for Money
Since most of the phones are available free or at a discount on a monthly contract, calculating value for money is tricky. We don’t think it’s fair to criticise a phone for its high cost if it can be had for nothing on a reasonable monthly tariff.
So, instead of simply evaluating the SIM-free cost of each phone we decided on a hybrid approach, evaluating the typical cost to own over 24 months.
For phones that aren’t available on contract, where possible we found an independent supplier offering a contract bundle and used that to calculate the cost-to-own figure. This was then combined in a weighted average with the Ease of Use and Features & Design scores.
Overall
The Overall score is calculated using the mean of the Ease of Use, Features & Design, and Value for Money scores.
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| Feature table: click on image to enlarge. |
This article appeared in the March 2009 issue of PC Authority.
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