Everything you need to know about buying a smartphone

Table of contents

How to use this guide

Before you decide

Choosing a carrier and plan

Choosing a smartphone platform

Hardware

What's the best smartphone for your needs?

Buying your smartphone

Wrap-up

Comments

This particular guide isn't about giving you recommendations for specific phones. Instead, we're going to give you some general hardware, software, and carrier advice to help you recognize the duds and the gems. (There are plenty of both in the smartphone world.) Think of this as your toolkit for navigating the crazy, ever-changing smartphone retail landscape.

What you are reading here is a crash course on the entire smartphone ecosystem — from iPhone versus Android, to dropped calls, to apps. As you read this guide, think about what it is you want your next phone to do, because there's a good chance we'll address it below.

Generally, our advice boils down to this: pick your carrier first, pick your phone second. You may be tempted by some hot new gadget, but for the vast majority of people this advice holds. If your calls drop, if you can't get data, or if your plan is too expensive, then that fancy new toy is on the fast-track to becoming a paperweight.

One last piece of advice before we get started in earnest: ignore the fanboys. You know the ones, the business people who scoff at iPhones as toys, the Android users who want to tell you about Linux, the webOS holdouts who insist the Pre is still better than anything out there. It's not that we aren't incredibly passionate about these gadgets too, but you're picking a phone, not a religion. To bring it back to the automobile metaphor: somebody telling you that you should only consider a hybrid car isn't being helpful when what you need to do is haul lumber every day.

Before you ever set foot in a store or get your heart set on a particular device, the first thing you need to do is evaluate the current situation with your phone and service — that will often determine your course of action. There's a pretty good chance you were right to pick the carrier you're currently using.

With which carrier do you currently have service? The old adage, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" definitely applies here: depending on the locations of your home, workplace, and areas where you frequently travel, finding a carrier that works well around all of them can be tricky — so if your current carrier is getting the job done, that's something you'll want to take into consideration. Of course, the opposite is also true: you shouldn't feel compelled to stick with a carrier that has no signal or frequently drops calls or data connections in places you need it to work, just because you've been with them for a long time or you like the product lineup. Rest assured, there are great phones available with every carrier!

How far are you into your current contract? Early Termination Fees — often known by their acronym, "ETF" — are the unavoidable bane of the wireless world. In order to make an informed decision about how to proceed, you'll need to know whether you're eligible to drop your account without paying an ETF, which can run as high as $350 depending on your carrier and the device you're currently using. It's also important to note that just because you're eligible to get a discounted upgrade on a new phone with your current carrier doesn't mean you can leave the carrier altogether without getting hit with an ETF — most carriers treat those dates differently. Generally speaking, you can upgrade at a discount before you can leave, often by as long as six months or more. Carriers would always rather you stick around, and they're willing to give you steep discounts to do it.

If you paid full price (usually $400 or more) for your current phone or you bought it from someone other than your carrier, you may not be under contract at all, which means you can leave whenever you like without paying an ETF. Most carriers make it tricky to determine your contract status from your online account portal — they'd rather you not know whether you can leave for free, of course — so your best bet is to call into customer service and ask directly.

Are you part of a family plan? Virtually all carriers (including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile) offer family plans, which bundle multiple lines of service into a single shared bucket of minutes. That means that you don't need to stick with your current carrier just because you want to keep your family on a family plan — but since it's more effort to move an entirely family over to another service, it may mean that you want to pay extra attention to your current carrier's latest offerings first before considering others.

Do you get any corporate or group discounts? When you originally signed up for service with your current carrier, the sales representative may have asked you who you work for. The reason? Some companies and organizations have arranged special rates with a specific carrier so that their employees and members can get discounts, often even if the line is for personal use. These discounts can sometimes total 20 percent off your monthly bill or more and can also include deals on handsets and accessories that regular customers don't receive. If you're in such an arrangement, you'll need to remember that moving to another carrier could result in some bill shock, so you'll want to ask every carrier you're considering (and your employer) if there are any deals available. And even if you're not currently getting a discount, it doesn't hurt to call your carrier's customer service line to ask if there are any available to you.

You need your phone to work, otherwise it really doesn't matter how much you like it or how good of a deal you're getting on service

Finding the carrier that's best for you really isn't a black-and-white issue — there is no universal "right" or "wrong" answer, and there are many factors to take into consideration.

Coverage

It goes without saying that you need your phone to work, otherwise it really doesn't matter how much you like it or how good of a deal you're getting on service. Though all of the national carriers (and most of the regionals) generally have excellent nationwide coverage through their own towers and roaming agreements, every carrier has dead zones — even in heavily-populated areas — and knowing where those dead zones are in your area will help you make the most informed decision that you can.

When you purchase a phone and new service from a carrier, you've got a return period — typically 14 days, 30 in California — during which you're able to back out of your contract with no penalty whatsoever (you'll only be charged for the pro-rated portion of a month's service that you used). Take advantage of it! Use the phone in all your usual haunts for both calling and browsing; just because you've got good reception doesn't mean data speeds will be reasonable, and consistently bad data speeds can really ruin the smartphone experience.

Before you buy, odds are good that you've got friends, family, or coworkers using each of the four national carriers, so be sure to ask around for their experiences in the locations that you frequent. These should actually be your main points of reference regarding coverage quality, simply because they've likely had their service for far longer than a 14-day return period - they have more experience to draw from.

Coverage doesn't necessarily need to be a dream-killer for you, though. If you've just got one nagging dead zone — say, your home or your office — all four national carriers now offer options to help patch the problem. Broadly speaking, there are three different types of solutions:

• Femtocells. Think of femtocells as miniature cell towers (about the size of a Wi-Fi router) that you can install yourself wherever they're needed. They need a connection to your broadband internet service — cable, DSL, FiOS, so on — and in turn, they produce a small cloud of cellular service that can cover several floors and a couple thousand square feet of a building. These devices typically support between five and eight simultaneous connections from different phones, and you can authorize specific lines so that outsiders can't use your connection. One word of warning: because they could potentially be used to "create" service in other countries where your carrier doesn't operate and the required frequencies are not permitted for consumer use, femtocells need an active GPS connection, which means they either need to be positioned near a window with a sky view or they require an external GPS that can be wired to such a location. AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon offer femtocells.
• Signal boosters. Unlike femtocells, signal boosters don't create a new cellular signal that gets routed over your internet connection; instead, they simply amplify an existing signal so that it's more usable by devices that are nearby. This means that you must be able to find at least a weak signal in some part of the affected area in order to use a signal booster, otherwise it won't do any good — but the advantage is that it doesn't require an active internet connection or a GPS signal to operate. T-Mobile offers a signal booster.
• Wi-Fi calling. Femtocells and signal boosters both require separate pieces of hardware that must be installed and set up, but Wi-Fi calling is much simpler: if the feature comes on your phone, you're good to go. When enabled, your phone places and receives calls through Wi-Fi (if you're connected to a Wi-Fi network, of course) instead of the normal cellular connection — and unlike services like Skype, it's totally seamless and it uses your regular phone number. There are downsides, though: if you go out of Wi-Fi range while you're on a call, it'll probably drop — in most cases, the phone can't switch from Wi-Fi to cellular mid-call — and many phones don't support the service at all. T-Mobile is the only major US carrier that offers Wi-Fi calling at the moment; most of its Android devices (and several of its BlackBerry models) have it pre-installed.

If Wi-Fi calling isn't a viable option for you (either it isn't available on your phone or carrier, or you don't have Wi-Fi where you've got a bad cellular signal), you should call in to customer service — don't go to the store! Femtocells and signal boosters frequently aren't carried in carrier stores, and more importantly, you may be able to talk a customer service agent into sending you a unit for free or a discount (for instance, AT&T's 3G MicroCell is normally a whopping $200). When you call, be sure that they're aware you don't get any signal in an important location and that you may need to cancel your service if it can't be fixed — that often catches their attention.

Speed

Though it was almost completely irrelevant a few years ago, it could be argued that the speed of data that your carrier provides is now even more important than voice quality; smartphone popularity continues to grow exponentially, and a good smartphone without high-speed data is a much less compelling device.

As we mentioned in the last section, good signal strength isn't necessarily an indication that you'll get the best data speeds that your carrier advertises. It certainly plays a role, but actual speed that you receive is a combination of a variety of factors: the interface the connection between your nearest cell tower and the internet (known as "backhaul"), the number of active users in your area, the wireless technology between your phone and the tower, and the time of day, just to name a few.

All four national carriers refer to the fastest parts of their networks as "4G," but in practice, that's nearly meaningless — there are significant differences between them. On paper, the newest networks deployed by AT&T and Verizon are the "best" for a couple of reasons: one, they use Long-Term Evolution (LTE), a relatively new and advanced technology that's being used around the world, and two, they're deployed at relatively low frequencies. Networks at lower frequencies have better building penetration, which means you're more likely to have better coverage in more places.

Sprint's "4G" network uses WiMAX, which shares many of LTE's technological innovations — but it's deployed at a relatively high 2500MHz, so coverage problems are more likely to be an issue. Sprint has announced that it is going to switch to LTE soon, but that shouldn't mean that current WiMAX phones will stop working. T-Mobile, meanwhile, uses a highly advanced evolution of an older 3G technology known as HSPA+, and it's quite fast — in fact, it's not uncommon to find that it's faster than Sprint's 4G service in some areas at certain times of day. (AT&T also uses HSPA+ in many locations, including some where LTE isn't available.)

Of course, a super-fast 4G network doesn't do you any good if it's not available in your area. You may have noticed T-Mobile aggressively advertising that it has the "largest 4G network in America," and that's because it has aggressively upgraded its existing HSPA network to HSPA+ and called the upgrade "4G." It's questionable advertising, though it does mean you're more likely to get a relatively fast data connection on T-Mobile in more places across the country than on other networks. Sprint lists its 4G network as being available in a little over 70 markets natwionwide, while Verizon is currently targeting 175 markets by year-end 2011 and intends to fully cover its existing network with LTE by the end of 2013. AT&T is playing catch-up, expecting a total of around 20 markets to have LTE available this year, though — like Verizon — it's targeting 2013 to complete the roll-out.

What does this all mean? If you live in or travel through rural areas or smaller cities, you may not have access to your carrier's fastest speeds — and they may not be available for a few months or years to come. When you visit a carrier's store, be sure that it's a store nearby — that'll give you a better sense of network performance in your area — and do a couple things:

• Test speeds yourself. Find an iPhone or Android demo unit, go to the App Store or Android Market, and install Speedtest.net Mobile by Ookla (in fact, you may find it's already installed because it's such a popular utility). Run several tests — a network that performs inconsistently should be a red flag. If you're seeing latency of under 100ms and download speeds of over 1.5Mbps (1500kbps), that's a fast network that should give you a satisfying experience for browsing, email, streaming music, and the like.
• Inquire about network upgrades in the area. If the carrier isn't advertising 4G service in your area or you've run speed tests on some demo phones and haven't gotten good results, ask sales reps in the store whether there are any plans to bring 4G to town, and if so, when the upgrade will be coming. They may not know — but some carriers have been proactive about identifying markets where they plan on rolling out upgraded service soon, so it's worth a shot.

Another factor to consider is the speed you'll get when you're not connected to 4G. Verizon and Sprint both have 3G data available across the majority of their coverage area, which means it's not uncommon to have download speeds of 600kbps or higher — not blazing fast, but still good enough for a browsing experience that won't drive you crazy. This can really come into play if you do a lot of long-distance driving — it's very common to get 3G service on these carriers any time you're on an interstate highway, regardless of how rural it may be. AT&T and T-Mobile, meanwhile, fall back to much slower 2G speeds in some areas that typically peak at under 100kbps. It's a very big difference: browsing is difficult, streaming is virtually impossible, and even email can become a laborious task.

In other words, if you're in a rural area or you spend a lot of time traveling in rural areas, you may find that you're much better off with Verizon or Sprint than you are with AT&T or T-Mobile. As always, your individual experience may vary — as we mentioned before, be sure to nudge your friends and co-workers to gather intelligence on how different carriers perform nearby before you make any decisions.

International roaming

Does your job call for a lot of foreign travel? Do you enjoy vacationing in strange, foreign lands? Depending on how much time you're spending overseas, it's something you may want to take into consideration when choosing a carrier. It boils down to this: depending on where you're going, what phone you have, and what carrier you're using, your phone may or may not work when you get there. Fortunately, you can plan ahead.

GSM — the Global System for Mobile Communications — is generally regarded as the baseline world standard for cellular service, and it's available in almost every country in the world (well over 200 at last count, with Japan being perhaps the most frequently-travelled exception). AT&T and T-Mobile operate GSM networks in the US, and virtually all of the phones they sell are compatible with the GSM networks used in Europe, Central and South America, Australia, the Middle East, and most of Asia.

In other words, having an AT&T or a T-Mobile phone gives you the highest likelihood that your phone is going to work whenever you're out of the country, particularly in Europe where GSM is used exclusively. The CDMA networks deployed by Verizon and Sprint are less widely-used globally, but that doesn't mean you're totally out of luck — you can still roam in nearly 50 countries and territories that use CDMA, and both carriers offer a selection of devices that include GSM compatibility for the same level of global service that AT&T and T-Mobile can provide. And if you've got a device that doesn't support GSM roaming, you can contact your carrier's customer service line to inquire about buying or borrowing a discounted GSM phone specifically for international travel that will allow you to continue using your regular phone number.

Voice, data, and messaging plans

Generally speaking, with a smartphone, the rule is simple: get as much data and messaging in your plan as you can comfortably afford. Everything about the modern smartphone encourages heavy use of both features, and it's likely that you'll find yourself in the same situation (if you don't already).

In particular, access to high-speed data is really critical to making the smartphone ownership experience as fun and painless as possible. To that end, there's a pretty big difference in how much you'll pay (and what you'll get) among the four national carriers:

• Verizon and AT&T both "cap" their data, meaning there's a limit to how much you'll get each month before you're forced to pay extra — there's no unlimited option available. The most common types of plans include either 2GB or 4GB with overage running $10 per gigabyte.
• T-Mobile has no data caps, but it intentionally slows the speed of your data service considerably once you hit a certain level of usage (levels range from 200MB to 10GB depending on pricing). Once you've reached this throttled level, you'll find it very difficult to do high-bandwidth things with your phone like stream music and video, but basic tasks (email, for instance) should work just fine.
• Sprint has no data caps, and it also doesn't have any explicit throttling levels like T-Mobile does. The only catch here is that there is a cap if you use your phone for hotspot service connected to other devices like laptops.

When you take all aspects of the plan into account — voice, data, and messaging — AT&T and Verizon tend to be the most expensive, while Sprint and T-Mobile typically range anywhere from $15 to $30 less for roughly the same level of service. You might figure that Sprint and T-Mobile are the best deal then, but there's a trade-off: in their LTE markets, Verizon and AT&T are often considerably faster than the fastest service Sprint and T-Mobile can provide. (Also, T-Mobile doesn't offer the iPhone, which may be a deal-breaker for some.) As we've mentioned before, your best bet is to speak to friends and family with devices on different carriers in your area to get a feel for how quick the service is locally.

Voice seems to be less important these days as email and text messaging have taken the place of many phone calls, but obviously you'll be the best judge of how many minutes you need. One thing you can do is call in to customer service with your current carrier and ask for an audit of your usage over the past few months - your carrier can tell you the average number of minutes you've used every month.

Sprint, by the way, has one other key advantage: full integration with Google Voice. If you are the sort of person who needs to have multiple phones but would like one number, you can get a pretty darn good experience on Sprint. Google voice works on other carriers too, of course, but you'll need to choose an Android smartphone in order to get a decent experience.

Now that you've chosen your carrier, the next step generally isn't to get the best looking or most powerful phone you find, it's actually to think about which software platform is right for you. In the US, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry are the big ones to consider. All four have their own strengths and weaknesses, which we will get into below.

Before we do, though, here's something to consider: what are you friends and family using? If you have a community of people around you using the same kind of phone, you'll be able to help each other out with apps and even get unique communication options like BlackBerry Messenger or iMessage. We're not saying you should just follow the crowd here, but it's something to think about.

iOS (iPhone)

iOS is the platform that powers the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. It is quite simply amongst the most powerful and easy-to-use smartphone operating systems out there. The most important thing to know about iOS as a platform can be summed up on one word: apps. iOS straight-up has more quality apps than any other smartphone. As a gaming platform, as an entertainment device, as a business tool, it really does a lot. iOS also has the best mobile browser available. No, it doesn't support Adobe Flash, but it's faster and easier to use than competing browsers.

iOS is an entirely touchscreen affair, there are few physical buttons you'll need to learn. The most important one is the home button, which takes you to the home screen. There, you are presented with a grid of applications that you can easily re-arrange. That approach makes iOS easy to use and understand, but it means that you won't have widgets to display "ambient" information like the weather or your next appointment. Again, it's all about the apps.

iOS has a new version, iOS 5. That's notable for two reasons. First, it is just the latest sign that Apple is pretty good at releasing a major OS update every year, keeping your iPhone up to date. Second, iOS 5 brings a few new features like unobtrusive notifications, free messaging to other iOS devices, media sync over the internet, and more.

iOS also has broad support for accessories. More car stereos work better with iOS than with other platforms, for example, and there's AirPlay, which lets you stream video to the Apple TV. It's also worth noting that the iPad runs on the same OS, which means that you can use the same apps and also not have to learn a whole new platform if you already own an iPad.

Android

The Android OS has taken the world by storm in the past few years. You can buy an Android phone in nearly every shape and size and on pretty much every carrier — it's become ubiquitous. Android is designed from the ground-up to work with Google's services, so if you're a heavy Gmail user it should definitely be on your short-list. It will also work with other services, of course, but it really shines with Google's setup — especially Google Maps, which is stellar on Android.

Although there are a large number of Android apps available, they tend to not be as high-quality as what's available on iOS. Android is also not a very strong gaming platform — the wide variety of phones it comes on means that it's more difficult for developers to support them all. That said, Android has a strong app ecosystem that's second only to iOS and most of the key apps that people care about are available on both.

The basic Android experience is all about customization. Most manufacturers work to build on top of Android to provide custom "skins" with their own widgets and tools. Some of these are great, some are not. Many people dislike these manufacturer and carrier customizations, but in the past year or so most of them have gotten rid of their speed issues and don't get in the way much. This does mean that using one Android phone isn't exactly like using another one, however, so make sure that you get a chance to try out the phone you're thinking of before buying. On the bright side, these customizations usually don't prevent you from installing any apps.

More important, however, is that it offers great customization tools to you, the actual user. Android comes with several home screens that can be filled with the icons and widgets of your choice. It generally takes a little longer to set up an Android device to your liking, but once you do it's very powerful.

Android comes on a very (very) wide variety of hardware form factors. We will discuss this more below, but right now it's important to know that not all Android phones are the same. The less expensive models can often feel slow and sluggish if you try to do too much with them. If you are not planning on trying to make a low-end Android phone do high-end stuff, this may not get in your way. Still, we recommend avoiding the cheapest Android handsets.

We've mentioned that there are a wide variety of phones and a wide variety of custom software "skins." That makes it easier to find a phone with the features you want, but it has a downside as well. Google quite often updates Android with new features and functionality, but it can take some time for those updates to become available on every phone. Those updates have to be tested by every manufacturer and carrier for each phone and custom skin. It can be frustrating to wait for updates that may never even come to your phone, but we urge you to not sweat it too much. Our advice when buying an Android phone (actually, our advice when buying pretty much anything) is this: make sure you are happy with what it does on day one, because you can't be sure that future updates are guaranteed.

Windows Phone

Microsoft made a big change with Windows Phone, it's much different from what Windows Mobile used to be and also, it should be said, much different than anything else out there. Windows Phone is defined by its unique interface, dubbed "Metro," which is based on big, bold text to make it fast, fluid, and very usable. Windows Phone also has deep ties into the entire Microsoft ecosystem, working well with Xbox, Office, Bing, and Microsoft's cloud services.

Windows Phone's most unique feature is its home screen experience. Instead of icons and widgets, you have large square "Live Tiles" that dynamically update to show relevant information. This makes for a simpler, "glance and go" experience than can be found on other platforms, but power users may not find as much customization as they'd like. Each tile brings you into an App, but many of them are actually "Hubs" that bring together functionality that is usually separate on other smartphones. For example, the Music Hub can play your own music, Pandora, or stream Zune music all from the same interface. In general, the focus for Windows Phone is to let users find what they're looking for with fewer steps and the platform essentially delivers on that promise.

App selection is actually pretty respectable on Windows Phone, given how new the platform is and how few people currently use it. Windows Phone has some Xbox integration (though not live multiplayer), so game selection is especially good. It does not have as many apps as iOS or Android, but most of the important, big-name apps are represented.

Microsoft, like Apple and Google, regularly updates the Windows Phone platform. The latest update, Mango, is quite significant, offering multitasking and a few other improvements. Microsoft has done a fairly good job distributing its new software updates in a timely manner. Although we're impressed with the platform and hope it can gain more traction, as of now it has more potential success than actual success.

Windows Phone devices are available on all carriers on a few different form factors, but nearly all of them are all-touchscreen devices. It's also worth noting that as of this writing, the platform hasn't really taken off. That may appeal to those looking for something unique, but it also means it will be a little harder to learn about new apps from your friends. However, Nokia has signed on to sell Windows Phones instead of its Symbian phones, so its possible that the platform will gain more users in the near future.

BlackBerry

RIM's BlackBerry platform has helped to shape the entire smartphone landscape, but recently it has fallen behind a bit. You may know it as a business-user's phone and that stereotype exists for a reason: it excels at business email and communication. BlackBerry's biggest strong suit is that it works well in a corporate environment: it's easy for IT departments to manage and faster than most other platforms at communicating. Part of that is because of the BlackBerry's famous hardware keyboards and part of it is from the software itself. The BlackBerry platform is also popular with those looking to communicate with the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service, which is essentially a free, supercharged form of SMS.

Until very recently, the BlackBerry OS pretty much only excelled at email and BBM. Most older BlackBerrys have terrible web browsing capabilities. App selection is similarly poor even today - while many of the key apps exist and work, apps like 3D games are virtually nonexistent. The latest crop of BlackBerry phones are based on BlackBerry 7 and have better web browsers, but app selection is no better.

The basic BlackBerry experience starts with a home screen with a row of apps on the bottom and plenty of indicators for missed called, emails, and messages on top. The entire interface is generally very text-heavy, but not the elegant text seen on Windows Phone. Instead, many functions come out of a menu system. This works well for people who learn the shortcuts and don't mind a no-fuss experience, but it does feel dated.

While RIM does offer software upgrades for the BlackBerry OS, usually only bug fixes and minor updates come out on existing devices. That is especially true now: the BlackBerry platform as it currently exists will only work on the existing set of hardware and an all-new OS is coming in 2012. The new OS will be called BBX and should run some Android apps, but until we see it released, we won't know if it's worth a look.

For now, however, BlackBerry is best for two different kinds of people: business users and messaging-focused budget users. BlackBerry phones (especially the Curve line) can be less expensive than other smartphones and in some regions also come with less expensive data plans.

The rest (webOS, Symbian, MeeGo)

Right now, it's hard to recommend anything other than iOS, Android, Windows Phone, or BlackBerry. There are other operating systems out there, but many have been abandoned. Most prominent amongst them is Symbian, which powers all Nokia smartphones until it releases Windows Phone devices. Symbian was actually the dominant smartphone platform worldwide at one time, but it hasn't aged especially well and suffers from very poor app selection. More importantly, Nokia will soon cease making new Symbian smartphones, so the platform is at a dead end.

Specs to consider (and specs to ignore)

The market is absolutely flooded with smartphones of all sizes, styles, platforms, colors, and manufacturers. At last count, T-Mobile USA alone offers 26 Android models! How are you supposed to wade through all that data so you can make an informed decision?

It helps if you know which specs are important and which ones aren't. Android phone manufacturers have really taken a liking to throwing out numbers — megapixels, gigabytes, gigahertz, the list goes on — in an effort to demonstrate why their devices are better than the next guy's, but the reality is that many of those numbers have very little to do with how good the phone actually is in day-to-day use.

Let's start with screen size. You'll be met with a lot of phones touting displays of 4.3 inches or larger (some as big as 5 inches!), but bigger is most definitely not always better: depending on the size of your hand, it can actually be very difficult to use a device one-handed once you get into that range. If you have difficulty on those models, carriers typically have a selection of phones in the 3.7-inch to 4-inch range — and the iPhone is just 3.5 inches, relatively tiny by modern standards.

Screen technology is another big selling point. Many manufacturers throw out trademarked terms like "Super AMOLED Plus," "ClearBlack," "Super AMOLED Advanced," and "Super LCD" to describe the technology underpinning the displays in their phones. Broadly speaking, phones made in 2011 (and beyond) have started to rally around AMOLED-based displays and LCD displays with extra-wide viewing angles, which means that regardless of what model you buy, you'll have a much better viewing experience that you would have on a phone from even a couple years back.

AMOLED and LCD each have their advantages. AMOLED displays have much better contrast, more vibrant color, and use less power on user interfaces that show a lot of black; LCD, meanwhile, has superior outdoor viewability in direct sunlight and is generally regarded to offer more "realistic" color. Both technologies can (and often do) look fantastic, but if you're looking for the absolute best, most high-tech displays on the market, smartphones from Samsung may be your best bet: Samsung is a major researcher and manufacturer of display technology, and its handhelds are usually the very first devices on the market to benefit from advancements.

If you have an opportunity to demo phones before you buy (in a carrier store, for instance), turn them on and turn them from side to side so you're looking at the display from an angle. Do the colors wash out? Do blacks start to look gray or white? Is there a noticeable gap between the surface of the touchscreen and the display itself? These are all signs of a lower-quality display. It may not bother you in practical, day-to-day use, but it's something to keep in mind.

The camera can be a big source of "spec overload," too. Just because a phone has a high megapixel count (often 8 or higher) doesn't mean it can take good pictures! A good smartphone camera, like any digital camera, is a symphony of hardware and software that includes quality optics, a good sensor, and image-processing software that's up to the task. When you're shopping for a smartphone, there's no real science to sniffing out the best cameras by looking at specs, unfortunately — your best bet is to read reviews and try them yourself — but there are a few things you can look out for:

• Pay special attention to models with heavy camera advertising. Usually, if the manufacturer has spent a lot of engineering effort to make the camera especially good, they want you to know. Likewise, be wary of cameras that are barely mentioned other than to state their resolution.
• Look for notes on low-light performance. Phones that advertise improved light sensitivity or a back-illuminated sensor (a "BIS") can often take better pictures — regardless of ambient light — than those that don't.
• Look for dual-LED or xenon flashes. Cameras that emphasize performance will often be bundled with a superior flash, and that usually comes in the form of a dual-LED configuration or, very rarely, a xenon flash.

The processor suffers from the same affliction as the camera: bigger numbers aren't always better. Much ado is made over dual-core (and soon, quad-core) processors these days, but in reality, there's very little benefit to these extra cores unless software is specifically written to take advantage of them. Android doesn't yet have all these issues ironed out, and it's not uncommon for phones with extremely beefy dual-core CPUs to stutter and lag just the same as older single-core models. Likewise, the processor's clock speed doesn't necessarily mean much: it's generally true that a higher clock speed (say, 1.2GHz or 1.5GHz) indicates better performance, but the amount of work that a processor can do per clock cycle varies from model to model. The T-Mobile G2 is a well-known example of this — it used an 800MHz processor of a newer generation than some existing phones with a 1GHz processor, and some would-be buyers incorrectly assumed that meant that the G2 had inferior performance. In reality, it was able to do more work per clock cycle, and it was able to do it more efficiently.

That's not to say that you should ignore processor specs altogether, but be aware that most smartphones sold today — even inexpensive models — offer ample performance for everyday tasks. And it's really about the experience you have, not the processor's capabilities. Take Windows Phone, for example: it doesn't yet support dual-core processors, but it offers one of the smoothest, fastest, most stutter-free experiences you can find on any device.

Similarly, the battery capacity — usually measured in mAh, or milliamp-hours — isn't an exact indication of how long the phone will last before it needs a recharge. The rate of battery drain is influenced by many things, including the number of apps running (which can be especially high on Android), the size and technology of the display, the speed of the processor, and the radio technology in use. Phones with LTE radios, for instance, drain at a considerably higher rate when LTE is turned on than phones without, so an LTE phone with a 2,000mAh battery might not last as long as an HSPA-only phone with a 1,700mAh battery. Quoted talk times are a slightly better indication, but as with the camera, your best bet is to keep an eye on reviewers' experiences.

Accessories

If accessories are important to you, it's a no-brainer: the iPhone wins by a country mile. The consistency of the iPhone's design (especially the 30-pin connector on the bottom), the fact that there are so few models, and the fact that it's such an overwhelmingly popular device all means that accessory makers support it more enthusiastically than any other phone on the market. Cases, music docks, car docks, screen protectors, stands, you name it: odds are that it exists for the iPhone, and you can get it in pretty much any style you like.

Now that you've made a decision on your carrier and your phone, you're almost there. Now you just have the buy the darn thing. A few pieces of advice on that.

First, you need to decided where to buy it from. You can go directly to your carrier's store. This is often the best option — it means you will get personal help from somebody and you'll be establishing a direct relationship with the company that you'll be paying monthly. If you find a cheap price online for your phone, don't let us stop you, but be sure to read the fine print. With third party sellers there may be a second early termination fee — those cheaper prices sometimes mean less flexibility if something goes awry.

Speaking of things going awry, there's no guarantee that you'll like the phone you've chosen. Most carriers have a 14 day return policy that should allow you to both exit your contract without paying an early terminal fee and get your money back on your phone (after a potential restocking fee). Make sure when you buy you find out exactly what the return period is and that you do everything you can in that time to make sure your phone is going to work for you.

Finally, your smartphone will likely come with a one-year warranty from the manufacturer, but it's usually easier to handle warranty issues directly with the carrier. Most carriers also offer some sort of extended warranty plan for a monthly fee. This plan will cover a lot, but it will almost never cover water damage (which all phones have detection dots for). With most consumer electronics, it's best to skip the extended warranty from the seller. With phones, however, it's not such an easy call. The monthly fee is often reasonable and sometimes also makes it cheaper to replace the phone if it gets destroyed or lost. If you are hard on phones, it's worth considering.