Why Buy a Smartphone?

The top performers in our review are the Gold Award winning Apple iPhone 7 Plus, the Silver Award winning Apple iPhone 7, and the Bronze Award winning OnePlus 3T. Here’s more on choosing a smartphone to meet your needs, along with details on how we arrived at our rankings of the 10 best devices.

We've long since passed the point when people choose between smartphones and feature phones – dumb phones, as they've come to be called. Every major carrier and minor cell phone provider offers phones with touch screens and internet connectivity at virtually any price point – $600, $200, even $50. The question is no longer, "Should I buy a smartphone?" Rather, we now ask ourselves, "Which smartphone is best for me?"

With rigorous testing and our trademark side-by-side comparisons, we've identified 2016's best smartphones and ranked them for their processing power, battery life, camera quality and that almost intangible but extraordinarily important quality: design.

How We Tested the Smartphones

Whenever a major manufacturer comes out with a new smartphone, we put it through its paces with an intense sequence of performance benchmarks. The phone's display, processor, camera, battery life and unique features are each tested multiple times under identical conditions. Once we have our results, we compile them by Olympic average and aggregate them in the grades and scores you see above.

Of course, while synthetic benchmarking can reflect the capacity of a smartphone, it doesn't always reveal real-world performance. Consequently, we also run a series of real-world tests that simulate, as closely as possible, the experiences of a typical consumer.

To obtain each smartphone in our comparison, we either received them on temporary loan from the manufacturers or purchased the phones outright. Manufacturers had no input or influence over our evaluation methodology nor was it provided to any of them in more detail than is available through our reviews. Results of our tests were not provided to the companies in advance of publication.

Android, iOS or Windows Mobile

The first decision you need to make when picking a smartphone is probably the easiest: Which operating system should you choose? Whatever their die-hard fans might say, Android isn't better than iOS, and iOS isn't better than Android. Both platforms have powerful advantages and some nitpicky disadvantages, and your choice comes down to personal preference. Do you want everything on your phone to just work, and are you willing to pay a bit of a premium for that? Go iOS. Do you like customization and buying on a budget? Pick Android. Already have a preference? It's not wrong, so embrace it!

Windows Mobile, recently rebranded by Microsoft from Windows Phone, is the odd platform out. The OS is about to see some extreme revamping thanks to the impending release of Windows 10, and once that happens, it could well be a serious contender in the market. Until that time comes, however, Windows Mobile isn't as functional or reliable as Android or iOS. It takes more time and taps to do anything on a Windows Mobile device, and its app marketplace is dreadfully underwhelming.

Source: www.toptenreviews.com