There has never been a better time to buy a smart phone. The Smartphone market has jumped leaps and bounds in the last 3-4 years. we have jumped from the once King of the mountain Nokia Symbian series 3, with a 300 Mhz processor and 3 inch LCDs, to modern dual core giants, with OS to rival windows XP(not exactly, but you get the point), and a multimedia feature list which performs on par with your Digital camera, your Portable media Player, your netbook, your iPod, and your internet devices, all that in the palm of your hand, in a single device, you couldn’t ask for anything better. But thats not all. With advanced office document editors, 3D Games, amazing audio, HD video playback, bluetooth 3.0, Wifi, internet tethering, 3G, and now even LTE, it’s hard to think of anything these devices cannot do.
Unless you have been living under a rock, or trapped in a bat-cave, you would be familiar with Android, the OS by the all mighty Google. Face it, Android is here to stay, and take over our lives. From cheap mobiles to Flagship Smart phones, Android is the OS of choice to power each and everything. With the launch of gingerbread 2.3 and above, the OS is now at a point of fair maturity which means stability, reliability, and compatibility with almost every hardware and technology available.
The hardware manufacturers are also in love with android too it seems. From small unknown Chinese companies to Mobile giants, like HTC, Samsung, LG, Motorola etc, not a month goes by when these companies are not launching newer and newer updated phones for us to drool on. With so many options, it can get a little hard to pick out the best from the rest.
Following are five of the most powerful Android smart-phones in the market (or soon to be launched).
1 – Samsung Galaxy S II
Samsung Galaxy S2 is a powerful and beautiful Smartphone with a gorgeous Super AMOLED Plus capacitive 480×800 pixels, 4.3 inches display, lightning-fast dual core 1.2ghz processor and a powerful 8MP camera with LED flash and comes pre-loaded with Android 2.3 Gingerbread. It is one of the slimmest and lightest smart phones with hundreds of new features. With 16GB/32GB storage and 1 GB RAM, people will be hard pressed to find faults with the storage capabilities. Having sold and broken previous sales records for such an expensive mobile surely speaks volumes of this device.
The main competition for Samsung SII in the market is none other than the iPhone 4, which is powered by a single-core 1GHz processor. Although both are top notch devices, it’s hard to compare one with another, as they are based on different OS.
The phone runs Android, 2.3.4 Gingerbread with Samsung’s TouchWiz extensions. There’s also a bunch of useful add-on apps, including Kies Air, Media Hub, photo and video editors and Social Hub which is a combination of Facebook/Twitter. Of course, the Galaxy S II also can download and run anything from the Android Market, which has over 200,000 apps. Despite the plastic body, it’s sturdy and well built and doesn’t feel flimsy at all. The Samsung Galaxy SII is a premium Phone with a magnificent huge screen, and is a joy to use and hold, highly recommended for anybody looking for a powerful Android smart-phone.
2 – XPERIA PLAY
Promoted as a Portable Playstation mobile, the Xperia PLAY is touted to be a Gamer-on-the-Go’s dream come true. It is one of the best gaming supported android mobile which runs on Android v2.3 Gingerbread OS with 1GHz scorpion processor and Adreno GPU supporting it. For those who don’t know, the Adreno 205 GPU has proven itself to be an outstanding gaming chip, and the demos by Sony back it up. It has 4? LED backlit LCD with 480 x 854px touch screen. The 512MB RAM although not as much as the 1GB being offered by some other mobiles helps to speed up the mobile. However the 400MB internal memory for data storage is a shame. Touting dual cameras, the rear camera is 5MP with autofocus and LED flash while the front camera is VGA. Connectivity options include 3G, Wi-fi, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot and GPS. The best part about this mobile is that is sports slide out PSP like gaming console with buttons and speakers around.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play 4G is an excellent phone for gaming, and a solid phone in its own right due to Android. But maybe you should wait a while to make sure it has the games library of your choice.
3 – Motorola Droid Bionic
The Motorola Droid Bionic is an Android Internet beast. If you’re looking for lightning-fast Internet browsing and unique features, this is your phone. As is the industry trend, something better will always be coming around the corner. But for now, the dual-core, LTE power of the Droid Bionic is unmatched.
The 960-by-540 resolution 4.3-inch is massive. You can practically read anything on it comfortably, as the text is always sharp and clear without any strain on the eyes. However Motorolla’s choice of a PenTile LCD screen is a bit of a downer. The pixel arrangement makes colored lines look fuzzy. In comparison, the Galaxy SII Super AMOLED Plus screen looks sharper and brighter, with more-saturated colors and deep blacks.
The Droid uses a Dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, with a Tegra 2 AP20H chipset, which powers the Android Gingerbread 2.3.4 with Moto’s social networking widgets. In real life, that translates into better gaming frame rates, higher-resolution video streams and about 20-percent-faster Web page loads than on a single-core LTE phone like the Droid Charge. The combination of LTE and dual-core makes this one of the fastest Web phones right now. The Motorola Droid Bionic gives you the full Web with no waiting, thanks to its powerful processor and speedy LTE modem.
4 – Motorola Atrix 4G
This is a powerful mobile phone that transforms into a laptop or a desktop PC with the mobile dock. Because of these features, this phone can very well be the leader of future mobile computing. At launch, some of these enhanced features had bugs and some rough edges with the 2.3 Android, however Motorola addressed almost all of them as of July 2011 with the Gingerbread 2.3.4 update.
One of the first dual-core smartphone to hit the U.S., the Atrix now runs an updated Android 2.3.4 on the Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset. Tegra 2 has dual ARM Cortex-A9 cores running at 1GHz each, thus making the Atrix on par and sometimes even beating its competition with other top-of-the-line, dual-core Smart-phones. Graphics and gaming benchmarks were on par with dual-core phones. This Nvidia processor is extremely fast, and can take anything Android can throw at it from its android market apps.
The Gingerbread update has refined the look of the home screens, smoothed out how you switch between them. The Atrix was one of the first few phones that could handle 1080p HD videos. This becomes very handy when you hook the phone up to an HDTV with the laptop dock.
The phone comes with about 10GB of storage space built in, and you can add a MicroSD card up to 32GB. With a 540 x 960 pixels, 4.0 inches gorilla glass screen the phone is almost comfortable to handle in day to day use and movies and internet is just lovely to view on its beautiful rich color display. There is also a 5MP LED flash camera which takes decent photos.
5 – HTC Sensation XE
Coming soon to a shop or Carrier near you, the Sensation XE is the teenager or a hardcore Android user’s dream device. It is actually an update to the already impressive HTC Sensation, with a speed bump from 1.2 GHz dual core to 1.5GHz dual core the sensation is a monster of a Smartphone. The phone boasts a spec sheet of 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, Adreno 220 GPU, Qualcomm MSM 8260 Snapdragon which is quite scary to be honest. It runs an android 2.3.4 gingerbread version and comes updated with the Sense UI 3.5 which is smoother and faster than the previous Sense 3.0.
In initial testing and reviews, the sensation XE trumps every cell-phone, even its predecessor, the original Sensation by quite a margin. Applications load in a snap, operations are smooth, scrolling is fluid, and the scratch resistant Gorilla glass 4.3 inch screen is fabulous. The phone comes with just 1gb of usable storage, however it comes with a supplied microSD card and can be upgraded to 32GB easily.
If you already own a Sensation, you may not find anything new with this XE except for the Beats Audio. If however you are upgrading from a previous generation, it is highly recommended that you hold on a bit for this mega blaster to launch, rest assured, you wouldn’t be disappointed.