Smartphones - The Best Of The Best

Symbian, Windows Mobile and WebOS. Three top operating systems. But which can lay claim to being the best phone? Let's find out!

Sony Ericsson Satio

There's no doubting the sheer power of the Sony Ericsson Satio. First and foremost on its list of awesome features is its key selling point: the Sony Ericsson Satio is the first phone announced for the UK to have a 12 megapixel camera. It also features technology culled from the Cyber-Shot range of phones, so, quite simply, the Sony Ericsson Satio is the single best camera phone in existence. However, it also has true smartphone credentials, as it features the new Symbian S60 Touch OS, giving it a sleek interface, bags of power, and the option to add on loads of third party software. It is, frankly, an astounding phone!

HTC HD2

Windows Mobile is an incredibly powerful beast, and it's run in some of the most powerful phones on the planet. However, when you get down to it, some of the icons and menus can be a little bit, well, fiddly. In taking over the Windows design ethos to mobile phones, Microsoft carried over things like scrollbars, which, when translated to a smaller screen, are pretty much only realistically usable with a stylus. That's why so many phones are coming out with their own interface on top of Windows, and why phones with bigger screens are the best option.

If you're talking big screens, there's no way you can avoid the HTC HD2, as for a few months, it held the record for the biggest screen seen on a mobile phone. At a huge 4.3 inches, it is truly vast, and the high, 800x480 resolution makes it genuinely easy to use things like scrollbars in menus. However, the HTC HD2 actually does a very good job of making it so you don't have to go into standard Windows menus that often, as on top of the operating system, the interface is HTC's patented TouchFLO 3D setup, where everything is achieved through various finger swipes and sweeping gestures. It is truly intuitive, and it (along with the truly awesome 1GHz Snapdragon processor) is the reason why the HTC HD2 is such an unmitigated joy to use. Of course, it's not all about being pretty, a phone needs to have decent features and the HTC HD2 has them in spades, from the 5 megapixel camera, through GPS, to incredibly fast HSDPA internet access (not to mention the superb Opera Mobile web browser). To a lot of people, the HTC HD2 is the ultimate Windows Mobile- no, the ultimate phone ever made...

Palm Pre

So, the Sony Ericsson Satio offers that awesome camera, and the HTC HD2 offers the best screen and processor in the business. And since Palm have been around for years, one must ask: what does the Palm Pre offer that's different? Well, one could talk about the WebOS interface it uses, as it's unique in the annals of phone history. And indeed, there's one feature of WebOS, directly related to the keyboard, that makes the Palm Pre so cool. Universal search. Now, many phones do that, but the Palm Pre does it so much more cleverly. Just start typing what you want to know about, from the front screen, and the Palm Pre will search your contacts, apps, music, pictures, and even the internet, to interpret and find what you're looking for. That really is a cool feature, and it may well make the Palm Pre the coolest QWERTY phone out there. But, in the end, there can only be one winner, and it's the HTC HD2, quite simply the best phone ever made!