How to choose when they all look the same

In this special Value for Money, Conor Popeworks out just which is the best smartphone on the market

SAMSUNG GALAXY S €479.99 *

The first thing we liked about this was its lightness. At just 118g it weighs considerably less than the iPhone 4. Its removable battery gives a more complete ownership of the device. If the battery fails, you can replace it at a relatively low cost and you can buy and recharge a spare one. The reception was good and given that this phone is in bed with Google and all its applications, the two are beautifully in synch so you can access the search monster’s mail and search engine faster than on any of the other phones we tested. It is also fairly intuitive.

While the Android platform which this phone uses has fewer apps than the iPhone, it still has 100,000 of them and more are being added daily. You can use most music formats, the camera is very good, surfing the web is a pleasure and page load times are super fast. The screen is bright and clear and we were also very impressed with the micro SD slot which allowed us to turn this into a 48gb phone by adding an extra storage card. While its lightness is to its credit it also gives the phone a slightly flimsy and plastiky feel but that may be a cosmetic problem. The onscreen keyboard is clunky and the predictive text is infuriatingly useless and predicted what we wanted to say with the uncanny accuracy of Mystic Meg on an off day.

Verdict: Nearly there

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IPHONE4 €589

For the sake of full and frank disclosure, Pricewatch should declare that it has been using an iPhone 3 for quite some time and as a result was far more comfortable with this upgraded device than might otherwise have been the case.

Even for a total novice, however, we reckon the iPhone is very easy to get up and running. Anyone with an iPod and an iTunes account will find that it fits seamlessly into their lives and makes buying and transferring music already bought through iTunes effortless. There are more apps available for this phone than any other currently on the market – although that is rapidly changing. The camera has been improved, although try turning it on in a hurry and see how you get on – if you’re anything like us, the answer will be badly. There is a well-documented issue with calls being dropped depending on how the device is held and the battery life is not great. There is also the whole faddy nature of the device and we are not entirely pleased with the total control Apple insists on having over you once you buy into this product. All the music bought via iTunes cannot be played easily on other devices. Having said all that, and at the risk of sounding like we’ve totally drunk the Kool Aid, we think this phone is brilliant.

Verdict: Awesome

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LG OPTIMUS 7 €399.99

This slate-grey, über sleek phone runs Windows software so is fairly intuitive, and all the Microsoft software comes as standard. It also had a Twitter app preinstalled which pleased us greatly. It comes with a 9.65 cms screen and a 5 megapixel camera with a LED flash which is accessible through a button on the side of the handset. This means capturing those Kodak moments in an instant is a whole lot easier than on some of the competition. We also liked the camera’s panorama mode and its intelligent shot function which made us look like better photographers than we actually are. This phone also records video in high definition. The touch screen, although smaller than some of its rivals, is very responsive. While some of the phones we tested allow us to bulk up the storage capacity, this phone does not so you have to stick with your 16mb and, as with the HTC Windows phone, the music store is a gaudily dressed, poor relation of the other more well-established stores at the smartphone party.

Verdict: A solid option

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NOKIA N8 €419.99

This phone is very new and very sleek and is Nokia’s attempt to regain momentum in the smartphone market. While the company remains the major player in the regular handset business, it has lost a lot of ground when it comes to high-end phones.

This is absolutely miles ahead of the competition on so many levels. The 12 megapixel camera takes photographs of genuinely astonishing clarity and it can record high definition video very easily. We loved that it can connect directly to your TV with a HDMI cable so you can download movies and music videos from the web and watch them instantly on your HD telly. Nokia’s Ovi store is more developed than some of the competition – we’re looking at you Microsoft – and is easy to navigate and a bit cheaper than its main iTunes rival. The hardware is pretty awesome but, while the business software is good, we found some of the applications to be just a little counter-intuitive and we fear that someone unfamiliar with how Nokia’s high-spec phones operate may struggle to get the best out of this device. It is probably worth putting the effort in but we’re not convinced many people will agree.

Verdict: Powerful but complicated

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SONY ERICSSON XPERIA X8 €119.99

This phone is shorter but thicker than the competition and harks back to the days when size really mattered in the mobile phone market and small was always better. It comes with two case covers, one white, one pink, which reflects its target market – cheap and cheerful young folk. Like the Samsung Galaxy, it uses the increasingly dominant Android operating system and is fairly simple to get up and running. We found it to be just a little too small and the fiddly nature of the keyboard on the 8.13 cms touch screen left us fuming on more than one occasion when we were sending texts. The casing makes it look a little cheap which, to be fair, it is. The on-screen buttons are not lined up in a row and the main function buttons are in the corners which took us a while to get used to, although they are customisable and you can pick your top four apps for ease of access. The 3.2 megapixel camera is fine without being standout although we liked the camera button on the right side which makes the camera instantly accessible and easy to use. The radio is a plus and, unsurprisingly for a Sony product, the music player is top notch. The battery was still powered up after two days of fairly hefty use.

Verdict: The starter smartphone

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HTC HD7 WINDOWS PHONE €479

This has just come on stream and is Microsoft’s latest and most determined attempt to capture a slice of the increasingly lucrative smartphone market – a move it needs to make as handsets are fast morphing into all-purpose computers. The screen is awesome. It is crystal clear and at 10.92 cms, bigger than any of its rivals. It responds very well to touch commands and reading web pages is a pleasing experience. The iPhone apart, it is the most instantly intuitive and comfortable phone we tried and we had its main functions – and some of the more obscure ones – up and running within minutes of taking it out of the box. And that was without looking at the manual. Slim and lightweight, the applications synch with Microsoft products very well. It was also nice to have the main MS software – Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The home screen interface is a bit blocky and not that attractive while the range of available apps is nowhere near as good as those on the Apple or Android operating systems. While the music store is probably in the early stages of development, it is a bit naff. It is linked up to the Xbox Live games site making game play and downloads easier.

Verdict: Nice 'n' easy

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