Flowers are blooming and temperatures are rising, which means it’s time for our Q1 2017 Best Android Smartphones guide. There’s been a flurry…
Flowers are blooming and temperatures are rising, which means it’s time for our Q1 2017 Best Android Smartphones guide. There’s been a flurry of phone announcements over the first few months of the year. HTC launched its new U series phones , including the flagship HTC U Ultra, which has a 5.7-inch IPS display with a secondary 2.0-inch ticker display along the top, and the smaller, less-expensive 5.2-inch HTC U Play that comes with a MediaTek Helio P10 SoC. We also saw several new phones announced at MWC 2017, including Huawei’s P10 , which shares much of its internal hardware with the larger Huawei Mate 9, and LG’s redesigned G6 , which seems to correct some of the G5’s shortcomings while adopting a new, elongated 18:9 aspect ratio for its display that provides some extra screen area without making it more difficult to hold by increasing the phone’s width. Samsung took a similar approach with the recently announced Galaxy S8 and S8+ that also come with taller, 18.5:9 displays with rounded corners.
There were a number of mid-range and low-end phones announced too. At CES 2017, Huawei announced the $250 Honor 6X , which comes with a 5.5-inch IPS display and has a much better look and feel than the Honor 5X. Motorola unveiled the similarly priced Moto G5 Plus at MWC, and ZTE announced a trio of phones in its Blade V8 series: Blade V8 Pro ($250, 5.5-inch, Snapdragon 625), Blade V8 Mini (5.0-inch, Snapdragon 435), and Blade V8 Lite (5.0-inch, MediaTek MT6750).
Not all of these phones are shipping yet, though. And with our current resource shortage, we were not able to look closely enough at those that are available for them to be considered in this Q1 guide (we only include phones that we’ve reviewed). With that disclaimer out of the way, here are the Android phones we currently like.
There’s a lot of options to choose from when shopping for a phablet considering the disproportionate number of Android phones having a screen size of 5.5-inches or larger. A number of these fall into the mid-range category, which we cover below. For people living outside of North America there are even more, usually less-expensive, options to consider too. But for this pick, we’re sticking with globally-available flagships.
With its 5.9-inch IPS display, Huawei’s Mate 9 is a true phablet. Its sturdy aluminum chassis with polished accents give it a solid feel and a classy look, and its good balance and rounded corners make it less unwieldy to hold than you would expect. Its $600 US price is not cheap, but it’s still less than many other competing flagships.
Inside is a Kirin 960 SoC , 4GB LPDDR4 RAM, and 64GB of UFS 2.1 storage that’s expandable via microSD card. Combining this hardware with the F2FS filesystem and other software optimizations gives the Mate 9 excellent in-app performance. Apps launch and install quickly too, and the UI feels responsive.
The Mate 9 also gets excellent battery life as long as you do not lean on the GPU or big CPU cores too hard. The Kirin 960’s power efficiency is not as good as the Kirin 950’s in the Mate 8, but Huawei was able to save power elsewhere (display), ultimately helping the Mate 9 and its 4000 mAh battery outlast the previous generation.
The dual rear camera that Huawei co-developed with Leica captures excellent, natural looking images, with consistently good exposure, gamma, and white balance. Its HDR mode is pretty weak, however, and its images do not show as much fine detail as those from Google’s Pixel XL and Samsung’s Galaxy S7 edge.
I was also extremely impressed with the Mate 9’s fingerprint sensor, which is by far the fastest and most accurate I’ve used.
