Best Smartphone in 2011-2012? The Beginner's Guide.
By Will Apse
Many future gazers expect mobile devices to be selling faster than desktops for the first time in 2012.
What does this mean for smart-phones? It means they will become more and more powerful as software is scaled to them. It will mean eventually that everyone will have one- except for the guys in the tinfoil hats.
If you love smartphones - or think you might - you are living in interesting times.
Hot Brands in 2012
Samsung: The Samsung Galaxy S2 was widely reckoned to be the top selling handset of 2011, beating the iPhone 4s into second place . The Galaxy Nexus was the first smartphone with the latest Android operating system (Ice-cream Sandwich). The soon to be available S3 is the most eagerly awaited Android smartphone of 2012.
Samsung are on a roll.
Apple iPhone: The iPhone 5 has still not materialized but nothing holds back Apple. The iPhone is still the biggest smartphone in the US where carriers subsidize prices. Outside the US, pricing makes Apple a harder sell.
Overall
According to Strategy Analytics. Samsung now have 31% of the world market in smartphones and Apple have 23%. That leaves everyone else sharing less than half of all sales. Nokia, long time number 1 fallen sharply and currently have only 6 percent of the market.
The Cloud
In 2011, the big software developers will be shifting a lot of their attention to providing applications for mobile computing. Central to this is expected to be the Cloud- programs and applications you access and use on the internet, not your phone or PC.
The fewer programs you load onto your mobile the more space there is for data, movies and games. This is expected to appeal to business users most, initially, but gamers too will benefit with massive games consigned more and more to storage online not their mobile devices.
The biggest winners look like being Android and Blackberry devices.
How to Choose a Smartphone
One element in any choice has to be hardware. How big is the screen? How good is the camera and video? How fast is the processor?
Just as important is the issue of what the phone can do. This means what applications are available. You may want great business software, you might want great games or movie apps.
Most of the best apps are supplied by independent developers rather then the phone manufacturer. To get the phone that is right for you, you need to check out what apps will work with which phones.
Smartphones with a Qwerty Keyboard
Touchscreens are pretty much the standard nowadays but phones with physical keyboards have something to offer.Texting with a virtual keyboard is still a slow process even with helpful word suggestion software.
Blackberry style physical keyboards are excellent for entering data or texting fast. You just need a couple of good thumbs!
Sliders like the Motorola Droid 3 will never be super slim but if texting is a big thing for you, that big, responsive keyboard is a bonus.
Smartphones as WiFi Hotspots
Many 3G or 4G phones can act as a WiFi hotspot and hook up to any WIFi device. This means you can use your phone to stream music to music players, video to TVs, documents to printers and so on.
Listening to Internet radio with a WiFi music player is the most popular application.
Phone Operating Systems for Beginners
Operating systems don't sound too exciting but if you don't have some idea of which phone has what OS, you shouldn't be shopping for a smartphone on your own.
The OS of a phone determines what apps a phone can offer you.
iPhone uses Apple's iOS and has more applications available via its Store than any other OS in the world- around 600,000.
The Android Operating System is used by top smartphones like HTC Hero and Samsung Vibrant. It was developed by Google and, while Android has far fewer apps than Apple, Android is close to catching up with around 500.000. Android is big for business as well as fun. The latest OS is Android 4 which incorporates the best of the Tablet OS, Honeycomb.
Blackberry OS has some of the best business apps available. It covers the bases on social networking and recreation too but don't exspect apps for things like carp fishing, snowboarding or casting love spells.
Windows Phones: Microsoft created a completely new OS for the Windows 7 mobile and when it was launched mid-2010. it caused a stir. Mango, (Windows 7.5), ironed out many irritating features and gave it some devoted fans. Windows 8, debuting in 2012, is set to deliver at least two great smartphones, the HTC Titan and Nokia Lumia 900. There are around 40,000 apps currently available.
Older Nokia phones use the Symbian OS. Nokia is the number one seller of phones world wide but lost its way in the US market several years ago. Symbian offers far fewer apps than its rivals but Nokia hardware is top quality and affordable. Symbian will soon be replaced by Windows OS on all Nokia Phones.
Locked, Unlocked or Jailbroken?
Most phones sold in the US are locked. This means you buy a phone at a low price from a company like AT&T which provides the cell phone service. You are obliged to sign a contract usually for 2 years and cannot get out of it. This suits most people, the upfront cost of an iPhone, for example, is usually less than a hundred dollars. A 2 gigabyte per month data plan costs around $25,
The problem comes if you don't like the cell service provider- maybe it is slow in your area. Maybe you just want out of the payments. Buying an unlocked phone is the alternative but top phones are around five to eight hundred dollars.
Jailbreaking a phone drives providers crazy and is illegal- though nobody has ever been prosecuted. You hack into the phone's security system with readily available software and free it up to use any provider and any third party apps.
Android Phones Versus the iPhone
The rest of this page looks in more detail at the top phones in the smartphone market in 2011- the iPhone and Android-based phones.
There is a glance at some of the very affordable Blackberry and Nokia phones at the bottom of the page.
Movies App
Android
What Sort of Apps Does Android OS Offer?
If you have never browsed the Android Market it is certainly worth a visit: android.com/market/
These are some of the favorite apps available and they tell you a lot about what an Android can do:
- Easy Facebook and Twitter Apps
- Foursquare- explore your town and keep up with where friends are
- Google Voice- caller id etc
- Meebo IM- instant chat
- Movies; this is also available on Apple phones and lets you check movie start times, read reviews and more
- Pandora internet radio- play this through earphones or Bluetooth speakers
- Yellow pages
- USA Today and many other newspapers
The most popular downloads are games, of course, like Angry Birds or Pocket Empires but you can explore these yourself at the Marketplace.
A few of the Weirder Apps
- Car Matey- mark where you park your car on the map so you don't lose it. This is Ideal for low attention span individuals (like me on a high pressure day!). It talks like a pirate so you don't feel it is making fun of you.
- Tricorder- it tracks solar flares and satellites to reassure you nothing big will fall on your head.
- Bic Concert lighter- getting into the feeling at a schmaltzy concert and need a lighter to wave? This app will fake it for you.
Business Apps
Organizers, antivirus, order processing, remote for media presentations- the Android has plenty for the business user Top Android-Business-Apps.htm
Best Android Phones
Samsung Galaxy Nexus
Any smartphone with the name 'Nexus' is worth looking forward to. Nexus phones always come with important Android updates and set a standard for other manufacturers to live up to.
Samsung and Google co operated closely on the development of 'icecream sandwich' and the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus will also be the official launch of Android 4.
Samsung's role means that every other manufacturer will find it hard to get as much from the new OS for quite a while. Samsung have always known where Android 4 was headed. So that huge raft of improvements that Android 4 offers will be fully implemented in the new Nexus.
What about the hardware? Is it as good or perhaps even better than the Galaxy S2?
- dual-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A9 CPU,
- 1 GB of RAM
- 4.65-inch high-definition Super AMOLED display,
- 16 or 32 GB of internal memory,
- 4G LTE support,
- 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with 1080p video capture,
- 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera
- size 135.5 x 67.94 x 8.94 mm and weighs 135 grams
The hardware is very similar to the Galaxy S2 mentioned below. Screen resolution is excellent and you will keep the details of the new resizable widgets and Roboto keyboard from Android 4.The AMOLED screen also means high contrast and strong color even in sunlight.
What the S2 cannot offer is all those extra features courtesy of 'Icecream Sandwich'.
On the downside, the Nexus is bigger than the S2 and less slender, which will count against it with some users.
 | Amazon Price: $469.99 List Price: $602.00 |
Samsung Galaxy S2
Smartphones don't come much thinner than the Galaxy S2. If you take out the battery, there seems to almost nothing left. Even with the battery inserted the whole thing weighs a mere 116 grams.
What is certainly big, though, is the screen- at 4.3 inches it is way bigger than the 3.5 inch iPhone 4. It is also very, very bright. Even in sunlight the super amoled display burns bright enough to watch your movies with ease.
The Tegra 2 processor is fast. Android 2.3 gives you all your favorite apps. The camera is a capable 8 MP.
What is there not to like? Well, it is not the cheapest smartphone around with the 16GB version weighing in at around $600 on Amazon, contract-free.
That has not stopped it being the most popular Android phone of 2011.
Best QWERTY Keyboard Smartphone in 2012?
Last year, the Droid 3 was probably the best slider with a physical QWERTY keyboard. This year it is hard to think that anything will outdo the Droid 4. Motorola made this niche market their own with previous Droids..
The Droid 4 is available for Verizon customers at around $200.
It offers:
- slide-out QWERTY keyboard with pressure-sensitive keys feeding direct to the phone motherboard.
- FIPS 140-2 encryption (more or less unbreakable).
- an 8MP camera with 1080p HD video capture,
The OS is Android 2.3 with promises of an upgrade to Android 4.0 soon.
Motorola Atrix 2
Like the original Atrix, the Atrix 2 has a dual core processor and plenty of RAM. It will integrate with a PC or HDTV via a multimedia dock and (with a keyboard) makes an acceptable replacement for a laptop.
The Atrix 2 is not the big leap forward that the original Atrix was- the original was the most powerful phone around, at launch. The Atrix 2 does offer some useful upgrades, though, and helps to keep Motorola in the game with Samsung and HTC.
The rear camera is upgraded from 5MP stills and 720p HD video to 8MP stills and 1080p HD video.
The screen is a little bigger at 4.3 inches (compared to 4 inches). The processor is improved by around 20 per cent.
4G is available (in some areas) from AT&T.
The softened, rounded out design makes the new Atrix looks less Motorola than some fans will like but it is still a great phone.
The HTC Vivid
The HTC Vivid is upgradable to Android 4.0 right now, according to HTC's Facebook page..
HTC have given this phone above-average attention and the sharp-edged design is a striking departure from the standard HTC aesthetic.
It is also HTC's first stab at AT&T's LTE 4G network. Early signs are that is delivering very fast downloads.
Get a fuller review here:slashgear.com/htc-vivid-review
iPhone 4 on Verizon.
After the much-publicized problems users have been having with AT&T over the last year, Apple recently announced (February) a new iPhone 4 on Verizon. Many people who had switched to Android are now buying out old data plans and returning to the iPhone but with Verizon as the carrier.
The iPhone 4 and i4s
Apple only sell one phone at a time- with some basic twists- and so far, have not slipped up. Every iPhone, from the original to the iPhone 4s, has been snapped up by a hungry fan base with good reason. The iPhone satisfies expectations. It is also a magnet for software developers and the apps are outstanding.
The i4s is not the huge leap forward some people had hoped for from Apple this year. The beta version of Siri- the voice operated virtual assistant- is an exciting development, though, The other upgrades keep it in line with the best specs of rivals.
The new 8MP camera in the i4s deserves a special mention. It is better than many point and shoot cameras you will pay a hundred dollars for.
Why People Love the iPhone
A glance at some of the top apps for the iPhone is a good way to gauge what it can do and why people love it.
- Facebook app- simplest facebook access on any phone
- Gorillacam- camera app with timer, multi-shot, spirit-level, on-screen grid, 'press anywhere' capture features. This makes the already excellent camera, a pleasure to use.
- Runkeeper- jogging app with route, mapping, pace recorder and calories burned calculator.
- Stanza- eBook app
- Movies: a cinema listings app
- Newsfeeds- plenty of these from top names.
- Tonepad- compose epic pop with your thumbs!
These are just a few of the apps available. Browse more here:http://mashable.com/2010/01/03/iphone-apps-2010/
Some of the Stranger Apps
- Hello Cow- yearning for a simpler life? This app gives you a cute looking cow. Stroke it and it moos at you. Treat it badly and it moos at you. Ignore it and it moos at you. Unconditional love does not come any better.
- Voodoo- get a picture of your enemy. Stick pins in your enemy. Wait for your enemy to die in terrible agony. This requires patience.
- Paranormal State EMF Meter: this will measure the paranormal energy in your vicinity. It is a great way to vet potential soul-mates for vampireness,
Business Apps
The iPhone is trying to be more business friendly with some useful apps. 3G is also more secure these days and inspires more confidence that data won't be intercepted:
msnbc.msn.com/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/
The 4s and Siri
Apple are hoping that Siri will give it the edge as competition with other makers intensifies.
Siri is well beyond other speech recognition software and its superior AI allows it to make sense of natural instructions 'like find me a page on hotels in LA' or 'send an email to John and Mary'.
Siri also has style. Ask 'her' if 'she' will kill someone for you and 'she' will recommend some local mental health agencies (for your kind attention).
iPhone 4s Performance
High definition video, quality camera, fast processor- the iPhone 4 is noted for its hardware as well as its design and unbeatable collection of apps. A special mention, too, for its great video calls.
For the full specification, check out: http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html
Customer Satisfaction Survey 2011
J.D. Power and Associates are respected for their research into consumers likes and dislikes. This year they found that, once again, Apple were the company that phone users most liked.
People were asked to score their phones for ease of use, performance, features and design.
The scores (out of a thousand) were:
- Apple 838
- HTC 801.
- Samsung 718
- LG 717
- Sanyo 716
- Sony Ericsson 709
People love their iPhones. But the pack is not so far behind!
j-d-power-customer-satisfaction-survey
Comments
I like the Andriod based Motorola handset. I think Android and blackberry will be the best platforms
I find these models very exciting and want to try one of them.
Not a huge issue for most iPhone owners, but I believe the iPhone 4 has a Skype-like capability that allows you to use free Wifi to communicate with another iPhone 4 user anywhere on the planet. Which would make for great telephone bill savings when backpacking through Europe or Asia, aye? :-) SK
This is a really good job.
I have an iPhone 4 and I love it!
Very well done. I'm ready for an upgrade (Moto Droid), so I definitely have a lot to choose from this year. Really excited about the upcoming HTC Thunderbolt (pretty much an improved EVO 4G on Verizon's network).
Great Site. Professional and very helpful to see firsthand of what these have to offer.
Great site to make informed decision
This is a great article. I just bought the iphone a few days ago. It's not the latest iphone 4 but I'm enjoying the apps on it.
A wonderful job u are doing.i learnt alot.
Great job! Very useful. Thanks!
the samsung galaxy s2, best specs ever
HTC EVO 4G..good..^_^
I did have an iPhone 4... big mistake.
Not because of its superior apps or screen resolution etc. No, what let it down was its inability to pick up a signal!
I live a large city in southern England, and currently use the Vodaphone network. My ip4 at best had no more than 2 bars, at worst nothing. I dug out an old smartphone to check and got full reception on the same network.
In addition, the awful bumper they give you to put round the ip4 is ugly and pretty much ineffective.
For me this version is a total let-down. Its ill thought out and flawed in a way which is staggering considering the resources they spend designing these phones.
Don't get me wrong, I loved everything else about it, but what use is an amazing phone without a signal that allows you to go about your business.
I will add that the phone was replaced, twice, and resulted in the same flaw!
I will look at the ip5 when it eventually comes out, but for now I’ve switched to a Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II which is truly an amazing phone… and has full signal!
Nobody likes that bumper, Aaron.
I'm surprised about the reception issue, though. I reckon that particular phone is defective.
galaxy s2 is the best.
You are probably right, mbpurna.
The problem with the S2 being such a good phone is that Apple is now running scared. They have been buying up patents and using patent laws to hobble Android device manufacturers recently.
The better Android gets the harder Apple will try to sink it.
Some people say Apple is trying to gain control of all the important features of a smartphone. If they succeed, it means rivals will need to pay Apple a lot of money to make smartphones at all- or get out of the business.
cool
i have an ip4. one time i was in an open area when my ip4 just lost signal for 2 long hours. i thought i pressed something that made my ip4 signal less. i checked my friend's samsung galaxy coz we both have the same subscriber, his phone was on full bar. damn i thought im goin to buy another ip4.
Android OS is freeware. that's the biggest value and for that, unstoppable. Let Apple do their best
Excellent Information! Thank you, Ive got some good options now!
Ip4s- it's great, however it's the 2nd I've owned by apple. Don't know what the others are like
fools look for iphone, real people who knows what is called the smartphone always know its only NOkia...
I just got the htc amaze and i unlocked it and it works great on att network I had the iPhone 4 before and I sold it out I'm loving the htc amaze nice design and very fast in everyway u can think..
how about galaxy note?
The Galaxy Note is a fine device but is it really a phone?
my 'xperia arc s' is the best phone i ever used but i'm gonna buy 4s tomorrow to observe and check everything myself.
Hve a Blackberry bold and looking for a replacement . as swerving to HTC but now have Galaxy in mind. Abit confused!!!!!
I've never heard of issues with signal with the iphone before reading comments here. I currently have an htc sensation with t-mobile. I have had other android phones as well. They are nice except that they are glitchy. I'm probably leaving t-mobile for at&t to get the ip4s. My attraction to the iphone and apple in general is that their products run smoothly and don't slow down like windows and google products. Apple is just designed better and with more care.
I noticed that Apple is suing Samsung again for alleged patent infringements with the Galaxy Nexus. One of the reasons Apple lawyers gave for the legal action is that the Nexus is a serious threat to to the iPhone and could supersede it.
I was a little surprised by this admission...
samsung galaxy sII is the best smartphone in the world
Galaxy gs2 awarded the!best smart phone sorry little iphone User ha ha i love my gs2 lets give a round of applause
The galaxy nexus is by far tge best smartphone I've had, recently switched my htc evo 4g for it and I do not regret it even though both are great phones
how about sony xperia s, i think this is a classic smartphone ever know...
i have an iphone 4, and its hopeless at getting a signal too, both phone network and wifi. its a known fault and all should of been replaced. its the first and last apple phone i'll have
eimproveit 15 months ago
Wow this is a really nice hub. Great information.