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20th December 2009
Our
traditional line-up of the best, worst and ugliest mobile phones
continues this year, although in a market where failure can mean
oblivion, it is obvious that many manufacturers have put in an extra
effort to succeed.
The list is utterly subjective, you may not agree..
and that's fine by us. You can see last year's list here.
The Good..
Honourable mentions
Palm bounced back with the Palm
Pre (in CDMA
and GSM
versions) but Palm's chances of succeeding in an exceptionally crowded
market are slim. The Motorola
CLIQ or DEXT (depending on market) also demonstrated that
sometimes companies that you had written off can come back with
something surprising. Samsung had a whole range of impressive black
slabby smartphones, we liked the Samsung
Omnia II I8000 the most although they had other strong contenders
as well. HTC showed increasingly that they can stamp their
own unique style on smartphones with the excellent HTC
Hero. And although it was originally announced last year,
we had to wait until 2009 to see the extremely popular Nokia
5800 XpressMusic in action. LG also had a very cool touchscreen
device with the LG
ARENA.
A much more conventional handset is the Nokia
6700 Classic, and this demonstrates that sober and traditional
handset design still has its followers. Possibly the most fun phone
of 2009 was the Samsung
B2100 which actually works under water. And one phone that
was completely unique in terms of design was the interesting LG
GD900 Crystal.
 Runners
up: Hello again Moto, the Motorola DROID and MILESTONE
Known as the Motorola
DROID on Verizon in the US and the Motorola
MILESTONE elsewhere, Motorola managed to surpass even the
rather cool DEXT
/ CLIQ Android smartphone with an exceptionally high-end
Android 2.0 device that has won praise even from Motorola sceptics.
Remember, Motorola is a company that has made enormous
losses over the past few years when it comes to its mobile phone
business. Many people had written the company off, but it could
well be that the MILESTONE and DROID will make a huge difference
to the company's fortunes.
The fast processor, enormous screen and improved
software make the MILESTONE and DROID handsets stand out from most
of the competition. They're let down slightly by a poor camera and
uninspired looks, but the DROID / MILESTONE represents one of only
a few devices that can really challenge Apple in the high-end
smartphone market.
 It's
a Nokia, but not as we know it - the Nokia N900
Nokia's "skunkworks"
OS project called Maemo has been going on for several years, starting
with the Nokia 770.
Until now, Maemo has been for standalone Internet tablets only -
but the Nokia
N900 changes all that, and it represents an entirely new
mobile phone platform for Nokia.
Nokia's traditional smartphone platform is Symbian
S60, but that is showing it's age - even the impressive 5800
struggles with Symbian in a modern device. Maemo allows Nokia to
build a more contemporary operating platform for high-end smartphones,
and we know that we will see a lot more of this during 2010.
And guess what.. it seems that the Nokia N900 works
pretty well and manages to look stylish enough to appeal to people
who care about that sort of thing. If 2010 sees room for one more
operating system, then Maemo will probably be it.
 Best
phone of 2009: Apple iPhone 3G S
We have to confess that we weren't keen on the iPhone
when it first
came out, and the Apple
iPhone 3G S is not without it's flaws. Chief amongst these
is that fact that the iPhone can't multitask, a remarkable achievement
when you consider that its heritage goes all the way back to Unix,
a multitasking operating system that is also the ancestor to Android
and Linux.
Other problems include a relatively low-resolution
display, a camera that can't match the megapixel count of rivals
(although it does take excellent pictures) and a battery that is
not user replaceable.
So, why do we think that the Apple iPhone 3G S is
the best handset of 2009? It's not so much about hardware, it's
more about Apple's App
Store which provides thousands of applications that cover just
about every possible need, including dozens of fart
apps. At the moment there are reported to be over 100,000 different
apps available, which is a mind boggling selection. And Apple's
slogan of "There's an App For That" appears to be turning
into a meme.
It doesn't hurt that the iPhone looks really cool
and has an elegant user interface. But Apple have demonstrated that
there's a lot more to a mobile phone than just hardware, so we are
confident that when you take the whole package into account.. the iPhone
3G S is the best handset launched during 2009.
..the Bad..
 Runner
up: Not quite ready, the Nokia N97
On paper, the Nokia
N97 looked like a useful upgrade to the Nokia
5800 XpressMusic - but people hoping for something that could
compete with the iPhone were disappointed.
Hardware considerations were one thing - the N97
is a damned big phone with a truly horrible approximation of a QWERTY
keyboard attached.
But the software lacked polish, seemed to have many
bugs and it was prone to crashes and reboots, leading to many outspoken
campaigns against the handset. Some users who have put the N97
alongside the N900
have come to the conclusion that the N97 pushes Symbian as far as
it can go, and that the N900's Maemo platform is the future.
Nokia did fix a lot of software issues with the
Nokia N97
Mini which also shrank the phone a little to make it more pocket-friendly,
and since the new software is also available for the oroginal N97,
then things do seem to be improving.
 Lost
and found: the Garmin-Asus nüvifone
G60
Hitting the market more than a year later than planned,
the Garmin-Asus nüvifone
G60 seemed to be an exercise in grim determination
rather than business sense.
The G60 looked interesting when it was first
announced back in February 2008, but by the time it hit the shops
in October 2009 it was largely irrelevant.
Lateness wasn't the only problem with the G60 -
the main one was that this appears to be a satellite navigation
device that can also make phone calls, rather than a smartphone
that can also do navigation. A poor user interface and lacklustre
applications have led to a panning by reviewers, and high prices
have meant that the G60 has been a massive sales flop.
 Worst
phone of 2009: Sony Ericsson W705
Sony Ericsson have had a miserable year of collapsing
sales and ballooning losses. And in our view, this is not at all
surprising.
We could have mentioned a number of Sony Ericsson
devices as being contenders for the worst phone of 2009, for example
the C903,
W395
and W995
are riddled with faults and reliability issues.
But the worst of them all is (we feel) the Sony
Ericsson W705. Announced at the end of November 2008 and
hitting the market in 2009, the W705 shows up all of Sony Ericsson's
worst faults.
The W705 was Sony Ericsson's twenty-eighth
"Walkman" branded phone.. but can you name more that a
handful of the rest? By the time the last
Walkman phone was announced, Sony Ericsson had managed to pretty
much destroy all the added value of the "Walkman" name.
And there was nothing really special about this phone at all - most
of the components were lifted straight out of the Sony Ericsson
parts bin and were stuffed into a shiny case without a hint of innovation.
Perhaps as an attempt to make the W705 interesting,
Sony Ericsson also made it to be incredibly unreliable. Faults included
dead screens, loss of connectivity, system freezes, vanishing data and
battery failures.
Recently, Sony Ericsson seems to have addressed
many of the faults in design and reliability that the W705 had with
a range of improved devices, but many consumers will never want
to own a Sony Ericsson again.
So, for all of these reasons, we feel that the Sony
Ericsson W705 deserves the title of "The Worst Handset of
2009".
..and the Ugly.
Notable mentions
The Nokia
5330 XpressMusic is easily one of the ugliest phones announced
during 2009, but Nokia still haven't launched it which makes us
think that it has been cancelled, and the upcoming Nokia
5330 Mobile TV Edition takes the original 5330 and gives it
a very pleasing makeover. The Motorola
W7 is thankfully a pretty rare phone, mostly selling in
Asia. The Samsung
B7620 rather pointlessly slaps Armani branding on what is
actually a rather good smartphone.
For some reason, the US market seems to have more
than it's fair share of ugly looking devices, including the Motorola
Karma QA1, Samsung
Comeback, Motorola
VA76r Tundra and Nokia
Surge (also sold in Europe as the 6760
Slide).
 Ugly:
Samsung B3310
A dinky little messaging phone, the Samsung
B3310 comes with a useful slide-out QWERTY keyboard
that can be used for texting or on social networking sites.
But the odd thing about the B3310 is the weird set
of number keys along one edge, leaving the whole design lopsided
when closed.. and in an arrangement that's almost completely useless.
To be fair, other manufacturers have tried messing
around with keypad designs before.. but do you see any of them about?
No? There's a good reason for that!
 Uglier:
Nokia 6700 Classic Gold Edition
One of the best looking phones ever made (in our
opinion) was the Nokia
6300, and over the years Nokia have tried to make a handset
that would be a worthy successor.
With the Nokia
6700 Classic, they succeeded. Here was a handset that picked
up the styling from the 6300 and applied it to an up-to-date midmarket
phone that managed to combine understated good looks with a useful
set of features that almost everyone could live with. A little bit
upmarket while still being tasteful, the Nokia 6700 Classic is a
successful phone, and deservedly so.
So, what do you do with a handset that manages to
get that difficult combination of elegance and features just
right? Well, apparently Nokia thought that covering the whole
thing in gold was going to make it a more attractive handset. We
think that they really missed the point. Too vulgar to be classy,
and too cheap to be blingy the Nokia
6700 Classic Gold Edition all seems a rather pointless and
tacky exercise.
 Ugliest:
Telstra T165i
"Ugly" doesn't necessarily mean "bad",
and although the Telstra
T165i looks absurd, it looks the way it does for a very
good reason.
The Telstra T165i targets a very particular market
- Australian 3G users who live away from main urban areas. To this
end, the T165i has an extendable antenna, something very rarely
found in 3G phones these days. If that's not enough, it can also
be mounted to an external antenna either in a fixed location or
a vehicle.
Despite the ridiculous retro looks, the T165i comes
with 3.5G support, GPS, expandable memory, 2 megapixel camera, Bluetooth
and an FM radio. It's also a fairly rugged device and it comes with
a anti sun glare display, meaning that it should adapt to life well
on your sheep station or wherever you are using it.
There's something very Australian about this phone,
it looks like the sort of handset that you could beat off a
crocodile with and then upload the photos so that your mates could
see them. In our view, the Telstra T165i may be the ugliest phone
we've seen in 2009, but we like it!
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