Want to know what the best Android phone shortlist of Mobile World Congress is? The show might be over for another year, but we’ve still got these amazing Google fuelled smartphones to look forward to in the coming months. Read on and find out which impressed us, the grizzled, wizened gadget hounds of Electricpig, the most.
Last year, the best Android phones of Mobile World Congress were the best phones full stop: Nokia and Microsoft were all talk and no handsets, and Palm was on a downward spiral before being scooped up by HP. This year though, with Windows Phone 7 multitasking announced and HP’s new webOS wonders, the overall list looked a bit different – but for all you Google heads, here’s the five we think are the best Android phones of the show.
Best Android apps of all time: Top 100
The HTC ChaCha was far from the highest specced smartphone HTC had to show this year (A tie between the HTC Incredible S and HTC Desire S) but we loved the premise. Its affordable hardware, QWERTY keyboard and Facebook integration all amount to networking Nirvana for online social butterflies: this will be the best Android phone for young BlackBerry converts yet, we reckon.
HTC ChCha: Meet the social networking super phone
The INQ Cloud Touch, like the HTC ChaCha, brings Facebook to the fore on Android, but it does it with even more flair, hooking into Facey B’s social graph to show you updates from the people you really care about, and deep linking to essential services like Facebook Chat from the homescreen. It’s also stuffed full of other clever touches, from a friendly Wi-Fi manager to a TouchType powered keyboard.
Check out our Best Android phone Top 5 now
OK, so hardware is still a little bit important, especially when it looks like the Samsung Galaxy S 2. It’s sporting an even larger 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen than its predecessor, disgustingly thin and fuelled by a dual core 1GHz processor. Unfortunately, it’s draped in Samsung’s TouchWiz software skin, but on the plus side, sterling media support is a shoe in. The best Android phone of the show for manic media obsessives.
Best Android apps of all time: Top 100
OK, so the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play’s launch last Sunday wasn’t exactly a surprise after several leaks so large they were practically haemorrhages. But still, have a play on it and after a few minutes, you’ll be hooked: you’re no longer playing a game on a phone, you’re just playing a game. The buttons work a treat, games purr along on Android 2.3 and the titles with touchpad controls work a treat too. The best Android phone for gamers? No doubt.
You might not have heard of ZTE but trust us, this is an Android phone to watch out for: ZTE were the folks behind the Orange San Francisco, as voted number one in our best Android phone: budget Top 5 of 2010. Its successor, the ZTE Skate is packing an impressive 4.3-inch WVGA screen, and a respectable 800MHz CPU. Can anyone say super cheap HTC Desire HD rival? Orange wouldn’t confirm to us if it would be picking it up or not, but the networks would be mad to ignore this.
