January 2010 - smartphone roundup

This year has already seen a selection astonishingly jaw-dropping smartphones hit the market, and now it's time for the best of the best. Let's take a look at the main contenders for greatest phone of January, 2009.

Nokia N900

We start by looking at the best smartphone in Finnish manufacturer Nokia's range. Their latest smartphone is the first of a new breed; it's the first mobile phone in history to use the brilliant Maemo OS (which was previously to be seen in the Finnish manufacturer's internet tablet range). Give a warm welcome to the Nokia N900. This Maemo OS provides the Nokia N900 with a touch friendly interface, and on top of that, the device has an integrated QWERTY keypad, meaning that it's got more methods of interacting with the phone than just the touchscreen. It's not just about the UI, though, because the Nokia N900 is packed to the gills with high-end features. A 5 megapixel camera makes for beautiful photos, the media player is stunning, and best of all, the Nokia N900 has a web browser, based on the world famous Firefox browser, which even supports Flash.

Palm Pre

On the other hand, if you're talking about the phone's interface, one phone beats both of the phones on this list, without a doubt: the unique Palm Pre. The reason for this is simple: the Palm Pre is designed on an entirely bespoke operating system called WebOS, that is definitely the slickest, most user-friendly operating system that's ever been released. Along with simple gesture controls and finger sweeps for EVERY action on the phone, the Palm Pre also gives you tight integration between its apps. Book a ticket for the movies on one app, and the Palm Pre immediately updates the calendar with the show time. Multitask many powerful apps, and watch the Palm Pre scream along without slowing down at all. In the world of the user interface, essentially, the Palm Pre can't be topped!

HTC HD2

So, there's the Nokia N900 with that Maemo interface, and then we have the Palm Pre, which sports WebOS. And then you have the HTC HD2; it holds the record for the largest screen ever, on any mobile phone. Coming in at a whopping 4.3 inches, it is truly vast, and the high, 800x480 resolution makes it genuinely easy to interact with things such as scrollbars and drop-down menus. However, the HTC HD2 actually does a very good job of making it so you don't need to go into the normal Windows menus very often, since on top of the operating system, the operating system is HTC's brilliant Sense UI, where you do everything through various finger swipes and sweeping motions. It is truly intuitive, and it (along with the truly awesome 1GHz Snapdragon chip) is what makes the HTC HD2 such a pleasure to use. Of course, it's not all about being raw processing power, a phone needs to have compelling 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), which is why many people see it as the best mobile phone EVER.