Flagship fight: which Android phone wins in 2014?

Screen

The people have spoken, and big screens are in, with customers — and manufacturers — preferring big screens to surf the web, take photos, and generally have at their disposal, making smartphones and tablets closer than ever.

We’ve met lots of people who are ditching tablets for big screens, and in the flagships this year, there’s a minimum of 5 inches of screen real estate to work with, finding 5 inches on the HTC One, 5.1 on the Samsung S5, 5.2 on Sony’s Xperia Z2, and 5.5 on the LG G3.

All of these have at least Full HD resolution (1920×1080), with the LG G3 moving beyond that — the only phone in Australia to do so at present — featuring 2560×1440 or Quad HD (QHD), with all four supporting a pixel clarity greater — yes, greater — than Apple’s Retina-grade iPhone 5S, with each packing in at least 100 pixels more per inch.

There’s an argument, mind you, that says all of this is moot past 300 pixels per inch, with our eyes being the bottleneck, but you’ll have to let your eyes be the judge there.

Sufficed to say, all four of these phones have excellent screens, but we’d have to give the award on this one to LG’s G3 because nothing comes close to the quality offered from this one.

Performance

This is one area that should be identical, or close to it, between all the handsets, because in essence they all run on the same basic setup in this country.

As such, you can expect a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 quad-core processor with varying speeds (all over 2GHz, and generally between 2.3 and 2.6), the Adreno 330 graphics chip, at least 2GB RAM, and Google’s Android 4.4 also known as “KitKat.”

That’s the basic spec all the manufacturers have gone with this year, and you’ll also find a microSD slot for all of the flagships in this article, with the Samsung Galaxy S5, HTC One M8, LG G3, and Sony Xperia Z2 all support upgradeable storage on top of the 16 and 32GBs the various variants will come with.

As such, they all boast excellent performance with only a spot of lag on some of them, but not enough to cry over, so chances are that you’ll be very happy.

Connectivity

Just like how all the phones have similar specs and equally similar performance, they all pretty much have the same connection options, with the exception of one or two things.

For instance, all of these phones support 4G LTE in Category 4, meaning if you have a telco that supports Category 4 connectivity, you could see speeds of up to 150Mbps coming down and 50Mbps up. If you just have a Category 3 connection — and that’s Telstra in Sydney at the time our reviews and this article was written — you’ll only see speeds of up to 100Mbps down.

Neither are anything to sneeze at, and in our tests, all four performed excellently, with speeds ranging between 20 and 90Mbps for each of the handsets.

All support 3G as well, with phone calls still possible, too, so areas without the lovely speed boost that is 4G won’t be left with nothing.

Wireless networks is, of course, included across all of the models, with 802.11ac here, as well as backwards compatibility for the older 809.11b/g/n networks many still use in Australia.

Bluetooth 4.0 is also provided with support for the Low Energy/Smart options, as is Near-Field Communication, GPS, A-GPS, and there’s infrared in every phone except for the Z2.

Why would you want infrared?

If you’re in the mood for some TV, feel like changing the volume on your amp or want to fiddle with the temperature on your air conditioner, an IR transmitter lets you use your phone as a remote, which is something the Samsung Galaxy S5, HTC One M8, and LG G3 all offer, but Sony’s phone does not.

MicroUSB is offered across all, as well, though Samsung’s Galaxy S5 does come with microUSB 3, which should be faster.