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mini stylus pen with each case

Best mobile phones to buy in 2013

Smartphones have never been bigger. Soon enough every pocket will have a mini-computer, and the sheer variety of smartphones out there means there's something for everyone, at almost any budget.

Once you've used a smartphone every day, you'll never look back. Here's our pick of the bunch, from Android

              

Samsung Galaxy S4               

The Galaxy S4 is the update to the Galaxy S3, our favourite Android smartphone for the last year. It's possibly the most hyped phone of all time, but thankfully it's still an impressive handset.

Despite the phone's huge 5in screen, it manages to be slim and light, and weighs just 130g. It's the first phone to use an AMOLED screen with a Full HD resolution, which gives it a huge pixels-per-inch figure of 441, up from 306ppi on its predecessor. The operating system and web pages are, as you'd expect, hyper-sharp.

The S4 uses the same Qualcomm chipset as the HTC One, but it's clocked at 1.9GHz rather than 1.7GHz. The phone is awesomely fast in both everyday apps and running 3D benchmarks. Despite all this power, the S4's 2,600mAh battery managed to keep it running for ten hours and 43 minutes when playing back video, which is one of the most impressive figures we've seen.

The S4 is a lot of smartphone for your money. It's a relatively conservative design, yet has a bigger screen and battery than the HTC One in a smaller package. You may prefer the HTC One's metal body, but if you don't get on with HTC's extensive operating system tweaks, the Galaxy S4 is the phone for you.

    

                                                               

Samsung Galaxy S3

Our Expert Opinion The Samsung Galaxy S3 is no longer the best Android smartphone there is and has been superseded by the S4, but it's still slim, fast, has a beautiful AMOLED screen and is now available at a very reasonable price.

The phone has just got better, too, thanks to an upgrade to support 4G. On Everything Everywhere network we saw speeds up to 25Mbit/s, which is twice as quick as many home broadband connections. However, if you want 4G be sure to get the LTE version of the handset, as there's still a lot of 3G-only ones on sale and only these are available as part of the cheapest offers

Samsung has loaded the phone with clever features. If you bring the phone to your ear while a contact is on screen it will call that person automatically, if you flip the phone over while it's ringing it will turn the ringer off, and the Smart Stay feature uses the front camera to keep the screen on while you're looking at it.

Throw in an excellent camera and you've got all the ingredients for a brilliant smartphone, which is now available for a very reasonable price.

 

 

 HTC One   

Now that the Samsung Galaxy S4 is here, the HTC One finally has some stiff competition, but it still holds its head up high. The phone has a gorgeous metal body and high-contrast 4.7in Full HD display, which is perfect for browsing web pages at full zoom.

The phone feels gorgeous in the hand, and the display's vibrant colours makes using Android 4.1 a pleasure. The HTC One is fast, too, thanks to its quad-core 1.7GHz processor.

Beautiful design aside, the One stands out from other Full HD Android phones such as the Sony Xperia Z due to its far-reaching software modifications. Instead of being full of icons and widgets, by default the homescreen is an information feed, with chunky tiles displaying the latest information from news and social media feeds.

If you'd prefer the standard Android homescreens instead, you can always shuffle around the order so the news feed isn't the first thing you see. If you like your phones to have a gorgeous design this is the handset to buy, but the Samsung Galaxy S4 has a larger screen and longer battery life, as well as less extensive operating system tweaks.

   

Apple iPhone 5

Our Expert Opinion Five generations on, and the iPhone is still the model to beat. Android has taken great strides, but iOS is still the slickest, fastest and easiest to use operating system, and there's no arguing with the quality of the apps in the Apple App Store.

The iPhone 5 is an evolution of the 4, with a longer screen for more room for app icons and an aspect ratio better suited to widescreen films. It's also incredibly quick - more than twice as fast as the iPhone 4S in the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark.

The only thing stopping the iPhone 5 from getting an award is Apple's horrendous new Maps app, which replaces Google Maps, but this should improve with time.