Android phones - the cheap, the sleek and the powerful

As Android has evolved, it has gone on to appear in more or less every market segment one could imagine, from entry-level to the top-end. Let's take a gander at the best Android handsets on the market in each sector.

Sony Ericsson X10 Mini

Let's start with a mobile for users who want to get a smartphone, but hate the idea of a big smartphone or a phone that costs the earth: the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini. As you can tell from the handset's name, the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini is a smaller-sized version of the Xperia X10. Sony Ericsson have taken the good stuff the X10, and compressed those features down to fit into a new frame which makes the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini, especially since it is a smartphone, ludicrously little. Thus, for users who would like a smartphone which is little enough to fit in the most restricted pockets, the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini is the one to choose.

HTC Wildfire

Android is trying to dominate the mid-range, too, and its new home is the beautiful HTC Wildfire. The Wildfire comes with all of the cool features that made its older sibling (the HTC Desire) brilliant, but puts all those good bits in a more compact, cheaper frame, which remains both sleek and sexy. Needless to say, having been put in that mid-range frame means that the HTC Wildfire doesn't have the 1GHz chipset of the Desire, but it is still fast and responsive. It also has the Sense UI, installed on top of Android in the HTC Wildfire, which is also similar to its larger predecessor. Based around that logic, if you need a handset that is close to the Desire in terms of specs, but which won't cost the earth, then the HTC Wildfire is absolutely perfect.

Samsung Galaxy S

In conclusion, then, there is the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini which has a super-small frame, and then there is the HTC Wildfire, the mid-range successor to the HTC Desire. And finally you've got the the uber-powerful beast, the Samsung Galaxy S, which also has the largest display on this list. Coming in at a whopping 4 inches, it is quite frankly gargantuan, and the WVGA, 800x480 resolution makes it genuinely easy to use things such as scrollbars in menus. Sitting atop the underlying operating system, the front end interface is built around Samsung's TouchWiz UI. It is beautifully intuitive, and while it isn't as powerful as HTC's Sense UI, it (as well as the unbelievably fast 1GHz Hummingbird CPU) is the big reason why the Samsung Galaxy S is such a wonderful phone to use. But then, it's never been only about raw processing speed, a phone needs to have compelling features and the Samsung Galaxy S has a bevy of cool functionalities, from the 5MP camera, through GPS, to super quick HSDPA data access (with Google's excellent WebKit browser), which is why many customers say that this is one of the most impressive handsets they've ever seen.