Labs

Smartphones

Choosing a smartphone isn't a straightforward task. You can't simply shop by the numbers as you can with PCs and laptops, comparing processor speed, RAM and hard disk capacity. You have to get a feel for what a phone can do before you can properly assess its worth, its ergonomics and how easy it is to use.

Not every phone is suitable for all situations. While one phone may have every feature under the sun, it might be too bulky to double as a personal and business phone. And, while another may be easy to use with an excellent keyboard, it may not be the best for document manipulation or web browsing.

We've tried to encapsulate this as best we can in our testing procedures, subjecting the phones to real-world tests, investigating their capabilities and, at the same time, factoring in subjective panel-based assessments to find which offer the best all-round smartphone experience.

Ease of Use

The ease with which email can now be picked up and answered on the move, and the huge amounts of data processed by the modern smartphone, demands an efficient way of entering text.

Unless you're an absolute whizz with handwriting recognition, the most reliable way to do this is with a built-in keyboard. This is why we decided to restrict the test to phones with some kind of hardware keyboard, and why a large part of the Ease of Use score comes from a subjective assessment of how easy a device is to type on.

It's equally crucial, however, with all that message data to plough through, that other aspects are up to scratch. We assess how intuitive each phone's user interface is, how good the screen is at accommodating such information comfortably, and how other hardware aids, such as D-pads and scroll wheels, contribute to the overall experience.

Points were also awarded for how responsive each phone felt in general use. We loaded each phone with more than 400 contacts and a couple of weeks worth of email to see how quickly each performed in its core tasks of locating phone numbers and collating messages.

We also tested each phone with a suite of standard file types, ranging from zip files to Word documents and PDF files, to see how many each would open, and whether the files could be edited. Finally, we awarded a score to call quality.

Features & Design

Modern smartphones have a bewildering array of capabilities and features so, in this Labs, we've taken an absolutely ruthless approach and only given points to phones that stand out from the crowd.

We've awarded points, for example, to phones with 3G and HSDPA, Wi-Fi adaptors and premium extras such as GPS receivers. We also think that, in this day and age, the use of proprietary cables for synchronisation and charging should be long gone, so phones using standard USB connections were awarded extra points, too.

Portability is a crucial aspect of smartphone design, so we've taken into account not only the size and weight of each device, but also how easy each one is to slip into a pocket.

Value for Money

Since most of the phones on test are available free or at a discount on a monthly contract, calculating value for money is a tricky proposition. We don't think it's fair, or practical, to criticise a phone for its high cost if it can be had for nothing on a reasonable monthly tariff.

So, instead of simply evaluating the sim-free cost of each phone, which can be prohibitively high, we decided on a hybrid approach, evaluating the cost-to-own rather than cost-to-purchase figure.

First, we looked through all the deals on offer from each of the major UK mobile phone networks to find the cheapest cost of ownership package.

Next, we added the total cost over the full term of the contract to the purchase cost (if any) of the phone. Invariably, we found that the cheapest tariff offers the cheapest overall way of owning a phone, even if there's a hefty upfront cost.

In the case of phones that aren't available on contract, we found an independent supplier offering a contract bundle (Expansys, for example) and used that to calculate the cost-to-own figure. This was then combined in a weighted average with the Ease of Use and Features & Design scores to achieve the final Value for Money score.

Overall

The Overall score is calculated using the mean of the Ease of Use, Features & Design, and Value for Money scores.