Gadgetory

what's up guys brian tong here with cnet.com and i'm in a Best Buy store and we're here to talk about CNET's buying guide for smart phones and come on who better to help me out then senior editor Jessica dual court here was seen it and we know that the smartphone is going to be the biggest purchasing decision a lot of you at home are going to make so there are so many different platforms and different things we can talk about but let's start off with Android iOS and Windows Phone what is the best platform you know pros and cons for people at home to decide about Android is on a ton of different phones right now it has the best tie-in to Google services it's got Google now which is really convenient and it's most customizable if people are into that one con however is that since it's on so many different phones the experience isn't always the same phone to phone and not every phone will have the exact same features sometimes you have to look out for that people think it's the same everywhere but it's not but then we have something like iOS which gives you a consistent one over all right exactly they're only two phones to choose from with iOS there's the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c right now those are both really good iOS is very clean it's very consistent and easy to use straight out of the box and they're serious well it also is a shoo-in if you've got Mac equipment at home it is the best one to sync with all of those different devices however it is not customizable at all so if you're a person who likes to tweak things you are out of luck now let's talk about Windows Phone there they're becoming a new player now yeah Windows Phone is really clean there are a lot of really good nokia phones right now unfortunately it is going to be the last to get the new apps and it just isn't quite as feature-rich right now so that's a platform that's really good for somebody who just wants a simple experience and doesn't want to add on a lot of extra whistles and bells so design and screen size let's kind of talk about some of the sweet spots with phones screen sizes have changed a lot in the last year five inches is now almost the norm yeah so we have something here like the HTC One this is a hot phone 5-inch screen really big I mean it's still easy to hold to perfect example so benefit there is that you've got a big screen real estate so you can look at things very comfortably without having to squint or shove the phone up to your face then we've got even larger phones we've got the phablets and those start at about 5.5 inches go all the way up to six point one inches this is the Galaxy Note 3 that you're holding it is a lot larger so it's a lot harder to stick in your pocket it's a lot harder to use one-handed but because the screen is even larger it's even to watch videos read articles look at photos things like that and then one cool thing about this one is that it has a stylus so you can really interact with this big screen a lot of different ways right yeah with the stylus you can draw you can write I use it a meeting for all the time and then the old style you know screen size that's still staple but you know things have evolved so that would be under five inches and unfortunately that's the iPhone family right there this guy right here yeah so you're gonna see a lot of mid-range phones also i phone 5s is the most premium phone at the size it is incredibly easy to use one-handed so that is a benefit slips really easily into pocket so if you're a person who cares more about ease of use then this is going to be the size for you so we talked about the different sizes of phones a thing now though is that this phone here has started to become people's camera right no longer we know there's DSLRs we know there's point issue cameras but by default this is it so what should people look for in a camera on their phones these days looking at megapixels isn't gonna tell you a lot these days anymore HTC has something they call ultrapixels Apple doesn't really tell you much at all and then you've got of course phones like Samsung phones that have a 13 megapixel camera you've got the Nokia Lumia 1020 with a 41 which is huge enormous but that only resolves to 5 megapixels so I think what you really need to know is that any premium phone is going to take pretty good pictures most of the time people don't even use photos for printing anymore putting in photo books that's when you're going to care about the quality if you're just going to be uploading to Facebook or to Instagram then most of the cameras out there are going to do the job alright so we've talked about you know platform design and camera we also have contract phones vs. no contract phones what are some of the benefits you know for that as well so a lot of people really don't like to be tethered to a carrier there's also a problem if you leave your carrier you're going to get smacked with a penalty so no contract carriers like t-mobile and some of the prepaids are good options for that they generally offer lower price data plans but you do have to pay more for your phone upfront or you can use an installation payment method you also have the contract carriers that's really good for people who are on family plans for people who plan to stay with their carrier for a while and they get the subsidized price of the phone so that's going to be a lot less upfront so you're talking about $200 for a high-end smartphone instead of $600 for a high-end smartphone so Jessica we've talked about platform design camera and then contract versus no contract but really what is your number one tip for everyone watching what they should look for when they're getting a phone before you go and buy the phone make sure that you go into a store and get your hands on it because it doesn't matter how fast the processor is or how fancy the specs are if you don't enjoy using that phone every day if you don't like the way it looks and feels in your hand then it is not the phone for you yeah and we want everyone to go home happy absolutely phone that they pick right right all right well there you go there's our buying guide for smart phones from Cena comm i'm brian tong this is jessica dual core make sure to check out our website if you want to find out more reviews tips and how-tos on all the phones we talked about and we'll see you guys next time