Your call
Every?Pocket-lint awards?event is a gadget spectacular but, this year, things promise to be even more jam-packed than ever. Smartphones in particular had us wearing our fingers down to the bone, typing out all the latest news for you to enjoy.
Hopefully you should have a rough idea of your favourite piece of mobile kit this year, so you can vote in our awards, but if you don’t, why not take a gander at the below. We have put together a list of every mobile that put a smile on our face this year.
Android
What a year it was for Android. Google announced that it was activating a million devices daily and we figured out that if you tapped the Jelly Bean icon in Android 4.2’s settings the screen would do something special. They say great minds think alike.
Samsung naturally went big on the mobile front in 2012. The Galaxy S III became one of the must-have smartphones of the year, with a big and vibrant screen and lightning quick processor. It also had some clever UI tweaks that separated it from the crowd, even shipping with the Siri-style S-voice. Read our Samsung Galaxy S III review
Also from Samsung was the Galaxy Nexus, which came with one of the first 720p screens to ship on a smartphone. It looked great, was slim and speedy, thanks to Ice Cream Sandwich (and now Jelly Bean). Read our Galaxy Nexus review
Finally came the Note 2, which had class-leading specs, a huge screen and came with Android Jelly Bean out of the box. It might be big, but after a week's use, we barely noticed.
Motorola kept our lives ticking over with the Razr Maxx’s awesome battery life. Now updated to run on Ice Cream Sandwich, here is a handset that will keep going until the end of the day. Add in a rather nice design, including some carbon fibre on show, and you have a real workhorse of an Android phone. Read our Motorola Razr Maxx review
Fighting the value corner was the Huawei Ascend G300. At only ?100, it is an absolute corker in the money saving-stakes. Shipping with a decent screen, a speedy enough processor and better than average call quality, this handset came as a real surprise. Read our Huawei Ascend G300 review
HTC, at first had the One X, but then went and made it better, with the One X+. The real talking point of this handset was its LCD screen, which is still arguably one of the prettiest on smartphones right now. It also had a powerful quad-core processor, with lots of RAM and memory. Battery still needs improving though.?
Sony had two decent offerings in 2012, the Xperia S and the Xperia T. The latter we found to be a bit of a misnomer, with the Xperia S really being our favourite phone from Sony Mobile this year. It had a great screen, was quick enough and was put together well. Read our Sony Xperia S review
Windows Phone
HTC's 8X phone certainly made a few angry over at Nokia HQ. Set to be the company’s Windows flagship on release, it is as colourful as it is feature packed. Bright and bold, exactly how a Windows phone should be, this could very well be the WP8 handset to have. Read our HTC 8X hands-on
Then came Nokia which, despite the controversy over the Lumia 920’s camera, still managed to kick out a brilliant-looking WP8 phone. The 920 has a great screen, speedy processor, top-quality camera and all the joys of the new version of Windows Phone. Read our Nokia Lumia 920 hands-on
iOS and the rest
So what if you weren’t after something Android or WP8 flavoured in 2012? Well rather unsurprisingly, Apple had something rather shiny, or actually scrap that, matte, in store for you.
The iPhone 5 managed to throw the iPhone 4’s design concept out the window and do something different, while looking almost the same. Bigger, badder and faster was the message here, with iOS 6. Despite the maps issues, this was still a good phone from the big A. Read our iPhone 5 review
There was also the Nokia 808 PureView. Okay, we know it ran on Symbian, but so what, it had a 41-megapixel camera sitting on the back. Game-changing photo technology from Nokia and a phone that everyone wanted to have a play with, but very few actually bought. Read our Nokia 808 review
Tags:
Phones Mobile phones Sony Sony Mobile Nokia Samsung Apple HTC Motorola
Best phone 2012: 9th Pocket-lint awards contenders originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Tue, 30 Oct 2012 11:08:00 +0000