Flagship fight: which Android phone wins in 2014?
My my my, what an interesting year this has been for phones.
This year, Apple really does have its work cut out for it when it
comes to making a product that can beat what’s out this year. But what
if you want something from the slate of Android phones out now: what’s
the best Android for your money?
We’ve reviewed them all, and then some, spending time with them in
our lives and used them as a real phone, so let’s see just which is
better from our point of view, working this out not just in different
areas, but really getting down to the nitty gritty for those of you who
just aren’t sure yet.
Design and build
We’ll start with the most obvious one for all these handsets: the
look, and then the feel, and they all have something different to offer
here.
Samsung, for instance, has taken an approach closer to what it offers
in its tablets, with a plastic body, shiny faux metal trim, and a
dimpled back to give the feeling that you’re holding a fabric or
leather-bound handset that won’t slip out of the hands.
It’s comfortable, that’s for sure, but well built it isn’t, feeling
more like plastic and less like a strengthened material like metal or
aluminium.
LG has taken a similar approach, adopting plastic in the design but
painting it to look metal. That’s a slightly better approach, and the G3
feels a touch stronger than the S5 and just as comfortable, but it’s
still plastic.
HTC and Sony are thinking along the same lines, however, making their phones out of premium materials.
In the case of HTC’s One M8, it’s mostly made out of aluminium, and
we’re not kidding on that, with a brushed aluminium making up around 90
percent of the handset’s design, with glass the rest thanks to the
screen. It’s certainly schmick, and it feels fantastic and solid in the
hands, too.
Sony’s Xperia Z2 has a similar approach, taking aluminium for the
sides and encasing the rest of the handset in glass, making it feel very
premium, similar to what Apple did with the iPhone 4 and LG with its
Optimus G, the first in the G series handset.
Our only quibble with the Xperia Z2 design is that it’s so angular that it can ruin pants and jeans, as we found out when we carried it around for an extended amount of time.
Ruggedisation
Making a phone water and dust proof is now a thing, because you’re
going to take it out of the office, so why not make it as durable as
humanly possible?
In this year’s four flagship fighters, only two are slightly
ruggedised, with water and dust resistance applied to the Sony Xperia Z2
and Samsung’s Galaxy S5. You can probably get the HTC One and LG G3 a
little bit wet, but don’t expect them to perform like what Sony and
Samsung have provided.
Both have protection against water and dust, but to different limits,
and keep in mind, if you want these to keep resisting these elements
and not succumb to a watery grave or die a dusty death, you need to
leave their little plug ports closed when the particles or droplets hit.
For those unaware of IP ratings, it stands for “Ingress Protection”
and is an international rating to determine levels of resistance to
elements that don’t normally agree with electrical components. We’ve
seen it in devices before, but up until 2013, they were generally very
bulky, so its introduction in slim-line phones is a pretty serious
development.
In IP ratings, the first number relates to dust or “solid particle” protection, while the second is about liquids.
Samsung’s S5 relies on an IP67 rating, and when you break that down,
that means it is protected against all dust (6) making it dust tight,
while the 7 means the Galaxy S5 can survive contact with water for an
immersion of up to a metre.
Sony’s Z2 has an IP58 rating, which cuts back on the dust protection a
bit, bringing it to mostly dust protected though some might get in,
while the 8 in the IP rating means the Xperia Z2 can go beyond one metre
in depth, though usually only to a maximum of three metres.
The time you spend with that phone under water will probably be
small-ish, with around 15 to 30 minutes the most you’ll want to use it
for at one time, but it’s still a pretty decent amount of time with a
phone underwater, so that’s something.
Screen
The people have spoken, and big screens are in, with customers — and
manufacturers — preferring big screens to surf the web, take photos, and
generally have at their disposal, making smartphones and tablets closer
than ever.
We’ve met lots of people who are ditching tablets for big screens,
and in the flagships this year, there’s a minimum of 5 inches of screen
real estate to work with, finding 5 inches on the HTC One, 5.1 on the
Samsung S5, 5.2 on Sony’s Xperia Z2, and 5.5 on the LG G3.
All of these have at least Full HD resolution (1920×1080), with the
LG G3 moving beyond that — the only phone in Australia to do so at
present — featuring 2560×1440 or Quad HD (QHD), with all four supporting
a pixel clarity greater — yes, greater — than Apple’s Retina-grade
iPhone 5S, with each packing in at least 100 pixels more per inch.
There’s an argument, mind you, that says all of this is moot past 300
pixels per inch, with our eyes being the bottleneck, but you’ll have to
let your eyes be the judge there.
Sufficed to say, all four of these phones have excellent screens, but
we’d have to give the award on this one to LG’s G3 because nothing
comes close to the quality offered from this one.
Performance
This is one area that should be identical, or close to it, between
all the handsets, because in essence they all run on the same basic
setup in this country.
As such, you can expect a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 quad-core processor
with varying speeds (all over 2GHz, and generally between 2.3 and 2.6),
the Adreno 330 graphics chip, at least 2GB RAM, and Google’s Android
4.4 also known as “KitKat.”
That’s the basic spec all the manufacturers have gone with this year,
and you’ll also find a microSD slot for all of the flagships in this
article, with the Samsung Galaxy S5, HTC One M8, LG G3, and Sony Xperia
Z2 all support upgradeable storage on top of the 16 and 32GBs the
various variants will come with.
As such, they all boast excellent performance with only a spot of lag
on some of them, but not enough to cry over, so chances are that you’ll
be very happy.
Connectivity
Just like how all the phones have similar specs and equally similar
performance, they all pretty much have the same connection options, with
the exception of one or two things.
For instance, all of these phones support 4G LTE in Category 4,
meaning if you have a telco that supports Category 4 connectivity, you
could see speeds of up to 150Mbps coming down and 50Mbps up. If you just
have a Category 3 connection — and that’s Telstra in Sydney at the time
our reviews and this article was written — you’ll only see speeds of up
to 100Mbps down.
Neither are anything to sneeze at, and in our tests, all four
performed excellently, with speeds ranging between 20 and 90Mbps for
each of the handsets.
Samsung's performance in 4G speeds is just like the others: excellent.
All support 3G as well, with phone calls still possible, too, so
areas without the lovely speed boost that is 4G won’t be left with
nothing.
Wireless networks is, of course, included across all of the models,
with 802.11ac here, as well as backwards compatibility for the older
809.11b/g/n networks many still use in Australia.
Bluetooth 4.0 is also provided with support for the Low Energy/Smart
options, as is Near-Field Communication, GPS, A-GPS, and there’s
infrared in every phone except for the Z2.
The top of the HTC One houses an infrared port.
Why would you want infrared?
If you’re in the mood for some TV, feel like changing the volume on
your amp or want to fiddle with the temperature on your air conditioner,
an IR transmitter lets you use your phone as a remote, which is
something the Samsung Galaxy S5, HTC One M8, and LG G3 all offer, but
Sony’s phone does not.
MicroUSB is offered across all, as well, though Samsung’s Galaxy S5 does come with microUSB 3, which should be faster.
Battery life and charging
Battery life is one of those hard areas where it can be totally different for every person.
In our tests, the HTC One and Sony Xperia Z2 seem to lead the
competition, making it to almost two days of life, while the LG G3
barely grabs a day, and the Samsung Galaxy S5 often loses out to just
under a day.
To Samsung’s credit, however, it does come with an ultra low power
saving mode that makes it possible to get a full 24 hours of life in
those times when you have very little life to work with.
When it goes to this mode, some neat things happen, such as the
disabling of connections, push and synchronisation, and even the screen
going black and white, which we’ve proven doesn’t do as much as Samsung
indicates, except to dissuade you from using your handset.
Charging all of the phones from these brands is handled through a
microUSB port, with HTC and LG leaving theirs exposed, while Sony and
Samsung have port covers thanks to the ingress protection for dust and
water resistance.
LG and Sony, though, have other charging options.
For instance, the Sony Xperia Z2 has a proprietary magnetic port on
the side to support its own dock format for charging, making it more
convenient for bedside charging than relying on a simple microUSB port.
LG goes even further and includes the wireless Qi charging we saw on
the Google Nexus 5 (made by LG) and some of Nokia’s handsets, making it
possible to charge your phone just be leaving it on an induction pad.
Without a doubt, this is our favourite charging option, and if your
phone supports this, you get high marks from us. All charging should be
as effortless as this.
Camera
If you had the choice of carrying just your smartphone and its camera
or a smartphone and a dedicated camera, most people will probably
choose the former, and it’s a fact camera makers are being forced to
face.
Compact cameras are going the way of the dodo — poor dodo — and
smartphone cameras are replacing them, because unless you’ve been living
in a cave and don’t have access to any smartphone, all of the devices
out there that cost over $500 have decent cameras that can rival your
regular compact, provided you don’t mind having any zoom.
The flagship models we’re looking at certainly come with decent cameras, and they’re all very capable and yet very decent.
We won’t go into the nitty gritty of each — we have reviews for that, so check the last page of this guide — but there are some things to focus on.
HTC’s is likely the first that will grab attention, technically
including two cameras with different lenses for some very impressive
effects. Change the focus distance after the fact, work with combined
colour filters across different planes, and take high quality
front-facing pictures with a 5 megapixel camera.
These are just some of the things HTC is offering in the new One, and
if it wasn’t for the fact that the Ultrapixel camera on the back was
only technically 4 megapixels, we’d be highly impressed.
Separating foreground from background means effects can occur on a different layer.
But it’s only a 4 megapixel camera, and that’s not a great thing to have around.
Oh sure, in low light, it’s quite nice, and the technology means you
can do some really creative things, but just be weary images can’t be
resized all that much on the One M8.
The same cannot be said for the others, as the LG G3 features a 13
megapixel shooter, the Samsung Galaxy S5 goes for a 16 megapixel camera,
and Sony’s packs in a 20 megapixel module that can either shoot in the
full resolution or pack the image with pixels back down to 8 megapixels.
An image from the Galaxy S5's camera
All three of them are great cameras, and all three offer Ultra HD
capturing, perfect for those 4K TVs and monitors starting to come out,
which is another feature the HTC misses out on, with only Full HD
offered there.
They all have different features on top of the great cameras, mind you, and we’re particularly happy with:
LG’s laser-based autofocus, which provides speedy contrast-detection focus times relying on a small laser
Samsung’s playful image modes, many of which do similar things to the camera in the HTC One M8, and
Sony’s software for the Z2, and how it lets you flex
creative muscle thanks to the sheer number of artistic effects on offer
(we had way too much fun with the mosaic one, which made photos look
like 8-bit video games).
Basically, all the cameras are excellent, but we’d have to say that
Sony and LG felt like the best for us throughout our testing.
Shot from the Sony Xperia Z2 smartphone
One awesome extra feature
Outside of the performance, connectivity, battery, and camera, each
phone has their star features that make them excellent, and while our
reviews list them in greater detail, we’re also going to cover our
favourite extra feature of each here, because they’re worth knowing
about even in short (we’re doing this in alphabetical order, not in
preference, so don’t go confusing that).
HTC One M8
Aside for the build and camera, the feature you need to know about is
the BoomSound speakers, which are two very loud front-facing speakers.
These were present in last year’s One, and this year they’re louder
and better, making them ideal for music, movies and the spot of YouTube
you love when you’re doing nothing.
We wish all phone speakers were this good.
LG G3
LG seems to pack more extra pizzazz in its phone than anyone else,
and in this handset, our favourite is support for high-res audio.
If you’re sick of streaming music services and prefer high-end sound,
LG’s G3 is the only smartphone of this bunch to support 192kHz 24-bit
FLAC, playing back the high-end format in severaly impressive quality if
you have some equally impressive headphones nearby.
With credit to LG, this existed on the LG G2, but that phone had
fixed memory, making this mostly useless, especially since an hour of
audio can be over a gigabyte in size. Now with expandable memory, this
is a serious reason to use this phone, and really makes you wonder why
you’d bother with Sony’s dedicated portable high-res audio player.
Support for high res audio (HRA)? Yes please!
Samsung Galaxy S5
We’re going to cheat a little with Samsung and include two features
here, because one is useful and the other is useless, but both are
missing in action on the other handsets and are both based on the human
body. Confused yet?
The useful one is the fingerprint reader, which is built into the
home button and allows you to tie your fingerprint to unlocking your
phone and paying for things with PayPal. That last one is especially
important, and we’re keen to see it used in more apps later on down the
track, as it will be harder to break than your regular PIN code.
Over in the useless category is the heart rate checker, which is a
neat gimmick to tell you how elevated your heart is, but we’ll probably
never use it, and honestly, it doesn’t seem overly accurate, anyway.
Heart rate monitor? The S5 has it. Whether we'll use it or not, well, that has yet to be decided.
Sony Xperia Z2
Sony seems to pack in less “wow” features than anyone else, but the one we really like is the inclusion of a camera button.
It seems so minor, but that camera button on the side lets you go
from standby to the camera mode in no time at all, making it more useful
as a quick shooter than any of the smartphone cameras it competes
against. Pair this with the abundance of camera modes and you have a
fantastic little extra.
Value
With all of this technology inside these devices, you have to wonder
how much they cost, and being flagship products, the natural assumption
is that they’re not cheap.
Oh sure, they’re all available on plans, and when you pay for
something over the course of a year or two, that helps to spread that
value, but if you decide to do it in one lump — which is how we judge
value — which one is worth it most of all?
From our tests, LG’s G3 may turn out the best value altogether,
packing in more technology across the board and strong performance for a
recommended retail price of $799, just forty bucks more than what Sony
asks for, with the Xperia Z2 fetching $759 for what it includes, while
HTC makes you pay almost $900 for the privilege, fetching an RRP of
$899.
Samsung does manage to push over that $900 price, and if you want to grab one of these outright, expect to pay $929. Ouch.
Cases
If you can’t accessorize your phone, what’s the point?
A
highly resistant screen protector from Neon on the left and two Belkin
cases on the right, all three for Samsung's Galaxy S5 handset.
We’re not huge fans of cases, but lots of people are, as they protect
your purchase from the traumas of your pocket, handbag, backpack, and
anything else, especially if the worst happens — heaven forbid — and
they take a tumble.
In this department, Samsung seems to have the most push, with
companies such as Belkin, Incipio, Otterbox, and Samsung providing a few
options out there, and other brands no doubt chiming in that we’ve
missed (apologies there).
The other manufacturers don’t quite have as much to work with, as
LG’s G3 can be cased up thanks to LG’s own windowed cases, HTC’s One M8
has a really neat pixelating case you can use the phone through, while
the Sony cases that we’ve seen are your basic wraparound or edge
protectors.
HTC's One M8 case (left) and LG's G3 circle window case (right)
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that all of the products this year have impressive
bones, and while their marketing budgets are also likely to help sway
you, it would be hard to end up on a poor product, it really would.
Each one is excellent, it truly is, and if you’re looking for a new phone, you’ll be happy this year with either.
For our money, though, we’d choose Sony’s Xperia Z2 first, and here’s
why: while LG’s G3 beats it in screen quality and overall features, the
Z2 pack in a better build, a just as excellent camera with better
software, and IP67 ruggedisation that lets us wash it off if it ever
gets dirty.
In this writer’s opinion, those two are the best of the best this
year, but regardless of what you choose, you’ll likely be satisfied.
The best test, mind you, once you’ve read our reviews and worked out
which has the feature set you want is and has always been to go in store
and put the phone in your hand. We can always tell you the good and the
bad, but how it feels in your hands, your pockets, and what it feels
like when you hold it up to your head will ultimately decide it, so read
our reviews and then take those opinions into a store, because we can’t
tell you how to feel when it comes to that whole physical side of
things.
Now, in the order of what we think…
Sony Xperia Z2
Price: $759 outright; Available on plans from Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone;
It might seem strange that we’re awarding the Z2 our top marks, but
it comes from the mixture of everything, with a solid body, some of that
awesome dust and water resistance, a fantastic camera, and a speedy
operating system thanks to 3GB RAM being more than what is generally
included (2GB is Android’s sweet spot).
Our only major complaints with Sony’s Z2 extend from it destroying a pair of pants and from the Bluetooth feeling weaker in our tests than the other handsets, but that’s minor.
LG G3
Price: $799 outright; Available on plans from Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone;
You know what they say about “three times being the charm,” because
that certainly applies here: LG’s third G series phone to hit Australia
is a winner, and even though it could still do with a better material
for the chassis, it has been designed well, includes a great camera,
upgradeable storage, a speedy version of Android, and the best screen
available in Australia today.
In fairness, this one is so new that we haven’t spent as much time
with it, so in time, it could prove just as much of a favourite, but
right now, our one wish for LG would have been a better chassis
material, because that alone would have pushed this right to the top for
us.
HTC One 2014 (M8)
Price: $899 outright; Available on plans from Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone;
Without a doubt, HTC’s One is the best built of the lot, with an
aluminium block taking up most of the casing and a build that is so much
better than the rest of the competition. HTC’s screen is also very
nice, and we’re delighted to see microSD upgradeable storage, something
the old One didn’t address.
While the Ultrapixel camera is very creative, we’re not in agreement
with HTC in that 4 megapixels is enough, especially since Instagram can
poke holes in that number, but otherwise, it’s a fantastic phone,
especially with those two front-facing speakers.
Samsung Galaxy S5
Price: $929 outright; Available on plans from Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone;
While the S5 doesn’t quite have the oomph of last year’s model, it’s
still an excellent product, packing in water and dust resistance, a
decent camera with UHD video support, and a heart-rate monitor for those
who find that sort of thing useful.
Since our review, Samsung has even unlocked that shortcut dock — how
nice of them to restore the functionality everyone else has — so it’s a
wee bit better than in our review. We wish the battery life was better
and that it wasn’t made of such a cheap feeling material, but we’ll give
credit where it’s due: it’s a comfy phone to hold.
Now it’s your turn, so tell us in the comments below:
which phone do you rate the best and why?
