The best Android phone, whatever your price range

Ever since Android was released, the OS has turned up in more or less every market segment imaginable, from entry-level all the way up to high-spec superphones. Let's take a gander at the coolest Android mobiles that you can currently buy in each sector.

Sony Ericsson X10 Mini

Let us start by taking a look at a mobile for customers who want to get a smartphone, but who hate the idea of a big smartphone or a phone that costs the earth: the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini. As you can guess from the phone's name, the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini is a smaller-sized version of the original X10. They have taken what was good about the X10, and compressed those features down to fit into a new frame designed to make the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini, especially since it is a smartphone, ludicrously tiny. Thus, for people who need a smartphone that is small enough to squeeze into the tightest pockets, the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini is the handset to buy.

HTC Wildfire

Android is trying to dominate the mid-range, too, and its new home is the gorgeous HTC Wildfire. This phone has all the cool stuff which made its older brother (the HTC Desire) brilliant, but puts all that good stuff in a more compact, cheaper frame, that manages to remain both slick and sexy. Needless to say, being put in that mid-range frame means that the HTC Wildfire has not got the 1GHz chipset of the Desire, but it still performs beautifully. It also comes with the Sense UI, built into the HTC Wildfire, once more like its larger predecessor. Based around those reasons, if you need a smartphone that isn't far off the Desire in terms of specs, but which won't cost as much, then the HTC Wildfire is the right choice.

Samsung Galaxy S

In conclusion, then, there's the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini which has a super-small body, and then there's the HTC Wildfire, the mid-range sibling to the HTC Desire. And finally you've got the the powerhouse, the Samsung Galaxy S, which has also got the most impressive display of any of the phones on this list. Coming in at a massive 4 inches, it is just vast, and the WVGA, 800x480 resolution makes it incredibly easy to use things such as scrollbars in menus. Sitting atop the operating system, the front end interface is built around Samsung's TouchWiz UI. It is truly simple to use, and whilst it isn't as powerful as HTC's Sense UI, it (as well as the unbelievably fast 1GHz Hummingbird chip) is the big reason why the Samsung Galaxy S is such a wonderful phone to use as your everyday phone. However, it's never been just about raw processor grunt, a handset must have exciting features and the Samsung Galaxy S has a bevy of cool functionalities, from the 5 megapixel camera, through GPS, to lightning quick HSDPA web access (with Google's excellent WebKit browser), which is why a large number of customers say that this is one of the greatest mobile phones that has ever been made.