Flagship fight: which Android phone wins in 2014?

Battery life and charging

Battery life is one of those hard areas where it can be totally different for every person.

In our tests, the HTC One and Sony Xperia Z2 seem to lead the competition, making it to almost two days of life, while the LG G3 barely grabs a day, and the Samsung Galaxy S5 often loses out to just under a day.

To Samsung’s credit, however, it does come with an ultra low power saving mode that makes it possible to get a full 24 hours of life in those times when you have very little life to work with.

When it goes to this mode, some neat things happen, such as the disabling of connections, push and synchronisation, and even the screen going black and white, which we’ve proven doesn’t do as much as Samsung indicates, except to dissuade you from using your handset.

Charging all of the phones from these brands is handled through a microUSB port, with HTC and LG leaving theirs exposed, while Sony and Samsung have port covers thanks to the ingress protection for dust and water resistance.

LG and Sony, though, have other charging options.

For instance, the Sony Xperia Z2 has a proprietary magnetic port on the side to support its own dock format for charging, making it more convenient for bedside charging than relying on a simple microUSB port.

LG goes even further and includes the wireless Qi charging we saw on the Google Nexus 5 (made by LG) and some of Nokia’s handsets, making it possible to charge your phone just be leaving it on an induction pad.

Without a doubt, this is our favourite charging option, and if your phone supports this, you get high marks from us. All charging should be as effortless as this.

Camera

If you had the choice of carrying just your smartphone and its camera or a smartphone and a dedicated camera, most people will probably choose the former, and it’s a fact camera makers are being forced to face.

Compact cameras are going the way of the dodo — poor dodo — and smartphone cameras are replacing them, because unless you’ve been living in a cave and don’t have access to any smartphone, all of the devices out there that cost over $500 have decent cameras that can rival your regular compact, provided you don’t mind having any zoom.

The flagship models we’re looking at certainly come with decent cameras, and they’re all very capable and yet very decent.

We won’t go into the nitty gritty of each — we have reviews for that, so check the last page of this guide — but there are some things to focus on.

HTC’s is likely the first that will grab attention, technically including two cameras with different lenses for some very impressive effects. Change the focus distance after the fact, work with combined colour filters across different planes, and take high quality front-facing pictures with a 5 megapixel camera.

These are just some of the things HTC is offering in the new One, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the Ultrapixel camera on the back was only technically 4 megapixels, we’d be highly impressed.

Separating foreground from background means effects can occur on a different layer.

But it’s only a 4 megapixel camera, and that’s not a great thing to have around.

Oh sure, in low light, it’s quite nice, and the technology means you can do some really creative things, but just be weary images can’t be resized all that much on the One M8.

The same cannot be said for the others, as the LG G3 features a 13 megapixel shooter, the Samsung Galaxy S5 goes for a 16 megapixel camera, and Sony’s packs in a 20 megapixel module that can either shoot in the full resolution or pack the image with pixels back down to 8 megapixels.

An image from the Galaxy S5's camera

All three of them are great cameras, and all three offer Ultra HD capturing, perfect for those 4K TVs and monitors starting to come out, which is another feature the HTC misses out on, with only Full HD offered there.

They all have different features on top of the great cameras, mind you, and we’re particularly happy with:

LG’s laser-based autofocus, which provides speedy contrast-detection focus times relying on a small laser

Samsung’s playful image modes, many of which do similar things to the camera in the HTC One M8, and

Sony’s software for the Z2, and how it lets you flex creative muscle thanks to the sheer number of artistic effects on offer (we had way too much fun with the mosaic one, which made photos look like 8-bit video games).

Basically, all the cameras are excellent, but we’d have to say that Sony and LG felt like the best for us throughout our testing.

Shot from the Sony Xperia Z2 smartphone