Mobile Choice have announced the winners of the Mobile Choice Awards 2014. Every year they hold an open online vote on what and who you feel have been the best performers in a variety of categories. Personally I find the results of these awards to be a very useful indicator of popular opinion as they show how all levels of users feel about the mobile industry as opposed to the few opinionated tech journalists who have the most influence. I’m going to break down my thoughts on the winners, and please remember that these are my thoughts and not the thoughts of Droid Horizon as a whole.
As an EE customer I can 100% understand this. They have now won this award twice in a row taking the title from Vodafone. I get 4G most places I go, which admittedly is mostly in the south of England, and the speed is always amazing. Texts always send and the call quality is always crystal clear. When calling an EE user it’s so clear and clean but when calling other networks it can be choppy and just doesn’t sound as vibrant. I know calls aren’t important to a lot of mobile phone users nowadays but to me its still a nice touch.
As I primarily make use of CEX for my phone recycling I’ve no personal experience with Envirofone, though I have used one of the other nominees topdollarmobile. As such I had to do a bit of digging to see why they won and I had a quick look on their site. A quick glance showed that I can’t sell my Moto X or my Nvidia Shield Tablet to them and they would only offer £9.99 for my Nexus 7 2014. Maybe they only offer money for iPhones and Samsungs as several of these companies seem to do. I’m at a loss to explain why they won but good on them.
As a business customer who gets O2 on over 10 devices I cannot fault the service they offer, replacements next day no questions asked. They never have very long queues on the helpdesks and are always friendly and willing to do as much as possible for you. If the customer side is a tenth of what the business side is then they deserved to win this award hands down.
I have never heard of BuyMobiles.net let alone used them so as with Envirofone I had a quick look on their site and checked prices against my go to site www.clove.co.uk. To be honest I wasn’t overly impressed: they had the Sony Z1 Compact for more than Clove had the Sony Z3 Compact and the contract deals didn’t even beat what what was EE’s own website. Maybe the site holds a few gems but I can’t say I’ll be going back to it to find out.
Easy win for Spotify here in the UK. A few Google fanboys (myself included) use Google Play Music all access, but we’re few and far between. The only reason I haven’t moved is due to still getting the lower introductory price, but if that ever stops I’ll become a Spotify user for sure.
In all seriousness, who are the competition? Phones4U went under so they must have been doing something wrong and network specific stores for obvious reasons cannot offer the choice that Carphone Warehouse can. They even get special colours of devices to sell that networks don’t. I can go into Carphone Warehouse and pick what phone I want and then what network I want on it. If I was to go into a network store I would only get to pick what phones they offer. Carphone Warehouse and even Phones4U are needed in the marketplace to make sure networks just don’t push the same 4 phones onto users.
Well at some point Three had to win an award considering the amount of love it gets on Google Plus. So Three customers seem to really like going into the stores – maybe they give them funky water so they will love the network? I’m really not sure.
*Disclaimer: I don’t like Three at all, I think they have the worst customer service and their backup networks are a joke. I know Droid Horizon has Three users and this is just my opinion. Please direct all hate mail to me not Droid Horizon*
Before anyone says anything, they didn’t win this on just a sim only deal as 2GB of data from them is only £0.99p cheaper than 2GB of 4G data from EE. The real value becomes apparent when you go full Virgin as if you have both your TV and internet with them they pretty much give you free sim cards with data. If you want a phone as well it costs a bit extra but bringing the family into the loop can save money even further.
Full out 100% no questions asked do not agree with this Award being given to this tablet. I had to look up this tablet as anyone who can keep up with the sheer volumes of crap that Samsung push on the market should get an award themselves. While the Tablet can be snapped up at £139.00 at Argos and John Lewis it is not worth even half of that. 170PPI screen, 1GB of RAM, tiny dual core 1.2GHz CPU running touchwiz Jellybean – no thank you. The Tesco Hudl was released at about the same time and is a relatively pure Android experience combined with better hardware. If it was down to me (it isn’t) I would have said buy a second hand Nexus 7 (2012) or spend the bit extra to get the new Nexus 7(2013). Whoever voted for this tablet, assuming it wasn’t a bunch of Samsung employees spam clicking refresh on the voting page, needs to get out and play with some other tablets. There are so many better ones out there.
I’ll be totally honest here, I voted for this phone knowing full well it wasn’t. That title should have been held by the Nokia Lumia 1020 with its 41 MP Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash with PureView technology. I’ve seen photos from the Lumia and they truly are amazing. But it’s WP8 so ultimately who cares. In my defence the Sony Z2 does have a 20.7MP beast on the back with lots of extras packed in to give some of the best mobile photos around. Also as a plus you can take underwater photos of your washing up or how a glass of beer sees you. Don’t laugh, that’s totally what it’s for.
While I personally like the Moto X a lot more than the Z1 Compact the Moto X is far from a rocket. Sony did what no one else could manage to do and made a Mini/Compact version of a flag ship with the same specs. The Z1C had all the same insides just a smaller case and smaller screen. By comparison the Samsung S4 mini and HTC One mini are just insults to their big brothers, so as far as I’m concerned the Sony Z1 Compact had no real competition in claiming this award.
Even though Apple has just invented the Phablet, Samsung have been hard at work getting the foundations laid for them for years. The Samsung Note phones are really the only Phablets worth talking about, although Android on a large screen really is just Android on a large screen. Samsung have put a lot of working into split screen working modes, floating apps and understand that with a big screen you need a pen. Partnering with Wacom was a great move as any Note user will tell you. If I had to use a phone larger than 4.7” it would be a Note. Well done Samsung.
When you have a design so good that Apple
steal
use it, you know you got something right. Full Metal Jacket hasn’t been this popular since 1987. The unibody brush metal design was a massive hit and with it being slightly curved it felt great in your hand. With front facing speakers so your music and films are heard by you rather than whoever is standing opposite you was also a great idea and is being adopted by more than a few manufacturers now. The M8 is also just a great looking device that would have been even better without that black bar at the bottom of the screen informing you who the manufacturer is.
Holy crap they stuck the buttons on the back of the phone rather than the side! Okay I’m not really too sure why the G3 won this award as the G2 had buttons on the back as well. Maybe it was for the laser auto focus system on the camera, but that doesn’t seem like enough to me. Don’t get me wrong it’s a great device but for me it was just an improvement on the G2 and not a truly innovative device in it’s own right. The LG Flex got my vote as it was a great idea and I can see LG moving in that direction. On the plus side, LG taking market share from Samsung is never a bad thing.
It would seem it’s not hip to be square – the 360s almost round display was bound to win this. When I first saw it I wanted one even though I had no idea what I would use it for. Maybe once I understand wearable tech I shall splash out the £200 they cost.
I’m astonished, 15 awards down and we only just get to Apple. The iPad Air has a 264 PPI screen over 9.7” and up to 128GB internal storage. It’s also lightweight and has an Apple logo on the back. For some reason developers are still releasing things like Hearthstone and Bastion only on IOS, so yes with it’s nice design and larger number of high end game titles it can have tablet of the year.
Design and phone of the year in one go – well done HTC. Having an amazing design with the Snapdragon 801/Adreno 330 that almost all of the current flagships have is a great way to win this award. Also supports 128GB SD cards, has built in FM radio and a 1080p 5” screen means there’s nothing to complain about at all really. It was also sold as a GPE phone so you could flash your normal M8 with pure Android to truly get one of the best devices ever made.
Well they release the most devices so they win. Math, right? If you just look at the flagship devices they are a great manufacturer even if they could still tone down touchwiz but keep some of its features. They make the best Phablet and the hardware in the Galaxy Tab Pro is very impressive, just a shame about the UX. The Galaxy S5 is a great device with waterproofing and features designed to track your health, though again it’s a shame about the home key and the cheap feel of the device. The alpha is a good sign that Samsung are finally thinking about using better materials. Personally though, for me to start liking Samsung Mobile they really need to stop flooding the market with crap. When you look at Samsung on GSMarena it’s scary how many devices they have released, 48 this year alone. Last year they released 54 devices. To put that into perspective that’s more than 1 a week.
What are your views? Who did you vote for? Any stand out incorrect decisions in the list? Or perhaps you want to throw your weight of support behind one of the winners. In any case I’d love to hear your thoughts on the Mobile Choice Award winners from 2014.
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