Flagship fight: which Android phone wins in 2014?

One awesome extra feature

Outside of the performance, connectivity, battery, and camera, each phone has their star features that make them excellent, and while our reviews list them in greater detail, we’re also going to cover our favourite extra feature of each here, because they’re worth knowing about even in short (we’re doing this in alphabetical order, not in preference, so don’t go confusing that).

HTC One M8

Aside for the build and camera, the feature you need to know about is the BoomSound speakers, which are two very loud front-facing speakers.

These were present in last year’s One, and this year they’re louder and better, making them ideal for music, movies and the spot of YouTube you love when you’re doing nothing.

We wish all phone speakers were this good.

LG G3

LG seems to pack more extra pizzazz in its phone than anyone else, and in this handset, our favourite is support for high-res audio.

If you’re sick of streaming music services and prefer high-end sound, LG’s G3 is the only smartphone of this bunch to support 192kHz 24-bit FLAC, playing back the high-end format in severaly impressive quality if you have some equally impressive headphones nearby.

With credit to LG, this existed on the LG G2, but that phone had fixed memory, making this mostly useless, especially since an hour of audio can be over a gigabyte in size. Now with expandable memory, this is a serious reason to use this phone, and really makes you wonder why you’d bother with Sony’s dedicated portable high-res audio player.

Support for high res audio (HRA)? Yes please!

Samsung Galaxy S5

We’re going to cheat a little with Samsung and include two features here, because one is useful and the other is useless, but both are missing in action on the other handsets and are both based on the human body. Confused yet?

The useful one is the fingerprint reader, which is built into the home button and allows you to tie your fingerprint to unlocking your phone and paying for things with PayPal. That last one is especially important, and we’re keen to see it used in more apps later on down the track, as it will be harder to break than your regular PIN code.

Over in the useless category is the heart rate checker, which is a neat gimmick to tell you how elevated your heart is, but we’ll probably never use it, and honestly, it doesn’t seem overly accurate, anyway.

Heart rate monitor? The S5 has it. Whether we'll use it or not, well, that has yet to be decided.

Sony Xperia Z2

Sony seems to pack in less “wow” features than anyone else, but the one we really like is the inclusion of a camera button.

It seems so minor, but that camera button on the side lets you go from standby to the camera mode in no time at all, making it more useful as a quick shooter than any of the smartphone cameras it competes against. Pair this with the abundance of camera modes and you have a fantastic little extra.

Value

With all of this technology inside these devices, you have to wonder how much they cost, and being flagship products, the natural assumption is that they’re not cheap.

Oh sure, they’re all available on plans, and when you pay for something over the course of a year or two, that helps to spread that value, but if you decide to do it in one lump — which is how we judge value — which one is worth it most of all?

From our tests, LG’s G3 may turn out the best value altogether, packing in more technology across the board and strong performance for a recommended retail price of $799, just forty bucks more than what Sony asks for, with the Xperia Z2 fetching $759 for what it includes, while HTC makes you pay almost $900 for the privilege, fetching an RRP of $899.

Samsung does manage to push over that $900 price, and if you want to grab one of these outright, expect to pay $929. Ouch.

Cases

If you can’t accessorise your phone, what’s the point?

A highly resistant screen protector from Neon on the left and two Belkin cases on the right, all three for Samsung's Galaxy S5 handset.

We’re not huge fans of cases, but lots of people are, as they protect your purchase from the traumas of your pocket, handbag, backpack, and anything else, especially if the worst happens — heaven forbid — and they take a tumble.

In this department, Samsung seems to have the most push, with companies such as Belkin, Incipio, Otterbox, and Samsung providing a few options out there, and other brands no doubt chiming in that we’ve missed (apologies there).

The other manufacturers don’t quite have as much to work with, as LG’s G3 can be cased up thanks to LG’s own windowed cases, HTC’s One M8 has a really neat pixelating case you can use the phone through, while the Sony cases that we’ve seen are your basic wraparound or edge protectors.

HTC's One M8 case (left) and LG's G3 circle window case (right)