Best Android smartphones 2017
Picking an Android phone can be difficult, but we’re here to help. We round up the top models of 2017
Choosing a new Android phone isn’t easy. The Android universe is teeming with options, from super-expensive flagship models, to affordable handsets that make a few calculated compromises, to phones expressly designed for, say, great photography.
Chances are that whichever phone you buy, you’ll keep it for at least two years. So choosing the best
Android phone for you isn’t a decision you should take lightly. But we can make things easier. Everyone has different priorities and needs, so we’ve made some picks for the best Android phone in several categories. At the bottom of this article, we reveal our top 10 Android phones reviews—in case you have your eye on a model that doesn’t make our cut.
Best overall phone
Samsung’s flagship phones are usually quite good, but the Galaxy S8 really pulls out all the stops and deliver a phone that is more polished, usable, and technically impressive than ever before. Inside and out, this phone is a masterpiece.
The gorgeous design is built around a big, tall 18.5:9 aspect ratio AMOLED display that delivers the best brightness, contrast, and colour we’ve ever seen. The new form factor isn’t just good looking, it’s more comfortable and usable, too.
Inside you’ll find the first phone with a 10nm Snapdragon 835 chip, which gives it top-tier performance and excellent power efficiency. In fact, these phones performed just great in our battery benchmarks (roughly nine hours), with real-world use easily taking us through a busy day.
There are so many features it’s hard to list them all. Bluetooth 5, support for future gigabit LTE, wireless charging (Qi and PMA), iris scanner, Samsung Pay and Android Pay support, USB-C, headphone jack, IP68 water proofing and microSD card support. For such a smooth, slim, attractive phone, it sure packs in a ton of ‘stuff’.
Samsung’s software is better than ever, too. You still have to contend with far too much bloatware and from Samsung and carriers, and the fingerprint sensor is placed in a terrible location. But these sore spots are relatively minor distractions from a phone that does more, looks better, and is more delightful to use than anything else on the market.
Best phone for photographers
You really can’t go wrong with the Google Pixel or the Galaxy S8 if you just want to take your phone out of your pocket, snap the shutter, and then put it away knowing you got a great shot. But if you’re a dedicated smartphone photographer, the LG G6 is the phone you’ll want. It features a dual-camera setup with one standard and one wide-angle lens, both of which use the same Sony IMX258 sensor (13Mp with 1.12 micron pixels). The main camera has optical image stabilization and an f/1.8 aperture, while the secondary lens has an f/2.4 aperture and no OIS.
But the dual-camera system isn’t for wide-aperture portrait shots (in fact, there isn’t an option for that in the app). Rather, LG’s second camera lets you shoot wider angle shots than any other phone. And even if you just take the G6 out of your pocket and start shooting, you’re bound to get photos as good if not better than the Pixel, which is high praise.
The real killer feature of the LG G6 may be its camera app, which is stacked with manual controls – unlike the bare-bones approach of the Pixel. What’s more, the G6’s 18:9 screen can be divided into two perfect squares, and LG takes full advantage of the unique proportions. Enter Snap Shot mode, and you can see your latest shot alongside the viewfinder window. Or check out Match Shot to snap images with the front and rear cameras simultaneously.
The G6 doesn’t beat the Pixel of Galaxy S8 in all photo scenarios, but it’s an extremely close contest. And you’ll definitely have more fun with the G6 than with any other camera phone.
Best phablet (over 5.5 inches)
Every bit as good as the Galaxy S8, and probably better, the Galaxy S8+ simply bumps up the screen size to 6.2 inches and increases the battery size from 3,000- to 3,500mAh.
In our battery benchmarks, the bigger screen offset the larger battery size, and the two delivered similar results. But that’s with the screen on all the time. In practice, the bigger phone should have longer screen off time thanks to the larger battery, and will probably have a little more gas in the tank at the end of the day.
Don’t be worried by that 6.2in screen size, either. Thanks to the 18.5:9 aspect ratio, it’s not hard to hold. It’s probably best to think of this as a ‘5.in screen, only taller’. Couple that with Samsung’s impressively slim bezels and 83 percent screen-to-body ratio, and you’ve got a giant display that is remarkably easy to hold and use.
All the benefits, and quirks, of the Galaxy S8 apply to the big version. Which should you get? It’s a matter of personal preference, but we recommend seeing them in person first, if you can. You might be surprised at how usable, and pocket-able, this big phone is.
Oh, and it’s expensive, too. £779 or so, making it more than £90 pricier than the regular S8.
Best budget phone (£300 or less)
There was a time when the words ‘budget’ and ‘Android’ conjured images of disposable, plastic phones with small screens.
The Moto G5 (pictured) punches way above its weight with a quality 5.2in 1080p display, metal body, fingerprint sensor, and a very decent camera for its price. For £169 (from tinyurl.com/ybhwzz5q) you get 32GB of storage and 2GB of RAM with a Snapdragon 625 processor, or for £179 (from tinyurl.com/ybxgkq5h) you can bump that up to 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage.
The phone has its drawbacks, including Micro-USB instead of USB-C and a lack of NFC, not to mention that
the camera is adequate but doesn’t hold up against top-end phones. As a complete package, though, the build quality, specs, performance, battery life, and software experience here is way better than we’re used to seeing in the £150 to £200 price range.
Best value for money
While most of the Android phones that reach carrier shelves are either premium (£650 or more) or budget (£200 or less), there are still various unlocked phones that fill the gap in between. And the leader of the pack is the OnePlus 5 (see page 4).
OnePlus phones seem custom-designed to own this mid-range market segment, and the OnePlus 5 delivers like other OnePlus models before it. Inside it’s got the best smartphone silicon money can buy: a Snapdragon 835 processor, 64GB or 128GB of UFS 2.1 storage, 6GB or 8GB of RAM, Bluetooth 5, and a 3,300mAh battery. OnePlus hasn’t done anything to upgrade its predecessor’s screen, but it’s still a respectable 1920x1080 Full HD AMOLED display. And all the usual trimmings are here, including a super-fast fingerprint scanner/home button, USB-C port, alert slider, and headphone jack.
The OnePlus 5 also includes a new dual-camera system that pairs a custom Sony IMX398 16Mp sensor with a 20Mp telephoto sensor. Furthermore, OxygenOS has been updated to Nougat 7.1.1, and it’s as clean and bloat-free as it’s ever been.
The OnePlus 5 costs either £449 or £499 (from tinyurl.com/ybk58nn5) depending on how much storage and memory you want, pushing the phone
awfully close to premium territory. But for the performance and battery life the OnePlus 5 delivers, you won’t be able to find a better value for money.
How we test Android phones
First and foremost, we spend at least several days with the phone under review, treating it as if it were our one and only. No number of lab tests or benchmarks will tell you as much about a phone as living with it for awhile. We’re concerned with realworld performance, stability, interface usability, camera quality, and whether proprietary features are useful or cumbersome. We use social media, check email, play games, take photos and videos in a variety of conditions, navigate around town, and do all the things most people do with their phones. Of course, we also run extensive benchmarks: AnTuTu, Geekbench, GFXBench and JetStream. We run all our tests with the phone set up the way it would be out of the box, without disabling any preinstalled apps or services. We do, however, make efforts to make sure benchmarks are not interrupted by notifications and that background downloads aren’t taking place. We may not report results from all of these tests (realworld everyday performance is far more important than benchmarks), but we do share the most interesting results.
Before running each benchmark, we make sure the phone is charged to 100 percent, plugged in, and left to cool off. Phones can sometimes run slower as their batteries get low, and charging the phone can make it hot and cause the SoC to slow down. So we do our best to make sure every test starts with the phone topped off and at room temperature.
When we run our battery benchmark test (Geekbench), we calibrate the display to 200 nits and disable all auto-brightness and screen-dimming features. Display brightness plays a major role in draining your battery, and we want to create a level playing field. Of course, we also keep a close eye on how long the battery lasts in our everyday use, including screen-on time, standby time, and even how fast the battery charges with the included charger.
What to look for in a phone
Smartphones are very personal. Everyone has different needs, a unique budget, and personal preferences. You might need to access secure corporate email and documents with a phone that works on lots of networks around the world. Or you might spend all your time chronicling your life on Snapchat.
That said, there are major features of all smartphones that you should compare before making a purchase decision.
Display: A good display has a high resolution (1920x1080 for smaller phones, 2650x1440 for larger phones), so that you can read fine text without it becoming blurry or illegible. A high-resolution display
is especially important for VR. You want a display that accurately displays colours when looking at it from any angle, and a high contrast ratio and maximum brightness will make it easier to see in bright sunlight.
Camera: Smartphone vendors like to tout camera specs like megapixels and aperture, but a high resolution and wide aperture (low f-stop number like f/1.8) only get you so far. The particulars of the sensor, image processing chip, and camera software have a huge impact on the photo- and video-taking experience.
You want a camera that launches quickly, focuses in an instant, and has no lag between when you hit the shutter button and the photo is taken. A great phone camera produces shots with accurate colours and little noise in lots of different environments. If you take selfies, pay particular attention to the quality of the front-facing camera. Finally, we love manual
camera controls, and reward phones that deliver manual fine-tuning.
Processor and memory: Most modern phones are ‘fast enough’ for common tasks like web browsing and social media. You don’t always need a super high-end processor and tons of RAM unless you plan to use your phone for more taxing activities like 3D gaming, VR, or video editing. Still, don’t settle for less than 2GB of RAM and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600-series processor or better.
Battery: Every time they poll users about what they want out of their next smartphone, ‘better battery life’ is at the top of the list. The capacity of a smartphone battery is measured in milliamp-hours (mAh), and ranges from just under 2,000- to over 4,000mAh. Phones with bigger, brighter displays and more powerful processors drain the battery more quickly, though, so a smaller and less-expensive phone with a 2,500mAh battery might actually last longer than a big high-end phone with a 2,800mAh battery. Still, as a rule of thumb, more mAh is better.
Size and weight: Some people love big phones. Some smaller devices. Some want a lightweight handset that disappears in the pocket, while others need to feel some heft. It’s a matter of personal preference. Don’t assume that you won’t like large phones if you have small hands, however. There seems to be no real correlation between hand size and preferred phone size.
Software and Bloatware: If you want a phone that runs pure Android with no embellishments, you need to buy a Nexus model. Anything else you buy is going to have a custom build of Android; and that could be good or bad (or both at once).
Phone makers change the Android interface and icons to varying degree, and add features and software of their own. Sometimes this stuff is useful, sometimes it isn’t. Preinstalled apps that can’t be removed (usually called bloatware) can slow down your phone or, at the very least, take up valuable storage space. And if you buy a phone from a carrier instead of an unlocked carrier-neutral model, you’ll probably find a bunch of carrier apps you may not want. Know what you’re getting into before you buy.
Now that we’ve explained what you should look out for we reveal our top 10 Android phones.