Five top phones from Mobile World Congress

Mobile World Congress (the mobile phone version of CES if you will) has been booming along at a pace all this week, so we thought we’d make it easy for you to know exactly which blowers to talk about down the pub. We’ve seen new devices come flying from the design labs of Nokia, Sony Ericsson, HTC, LG and Samsung, to name a few. Every manufacturer wheeled out its big hitters for the first half of the year, and in some cases beyond that. But which were the best? Read on to find out!

Samsung OmniaHD
HTC has been bandying around the HD badge with the Touch HD for a while, but there really wasn’t anything truly HD About it. Now Samsung’s teaching it a lesson with the OmniaHD – a phone that records video in 720p HD! That means crisper clips of your potato-headed mates, and it could even put an end to crumbly cameraphone footage popping up on the evening news. Of course, the built-in screen won’t quite do its footage justice, but it’ll hook up to a telly to output in HD with a simple cable.


LG Arena
We luuuuuuuuurve the LG Arena. It’s a dinky phone with more features than an IMAX cinema. Inside there’s a five-megapixel camera, DivX support, Dolby Mobile, Wi-Fi and GPS, all accessed by LG’s new S-Class interface. It’s ultra-responsive, and more than a bit similar to the iPhone’s . Best of all, there’s an FM transmitter inside, making it instantly able to send sounds to car stereos or Hi-Fis. Nifty.


HTC Magic
The follow-up to the T-Mobile G1, the HTC Magic wasn’t quite the show-stopper at MWC, but it came close. That’s no mean feat, considering it actually comes with fewer features than its predecessor. Inside is the same 3.2-megapixel camera (although sadly, without flash), Wi-Fi, and the latest version of Android. The new software includes Android’s Cupcake upgrade, so it’s able to ditch the hardware keyboard in favour of an on-screen version, making the HTC Magic much slimmer. It’s also exclusive to Vodafone, so T-Mobile fans will need to switch… or snap off the G1’s thumb-board by hand.


Nokia N86 8MP
We’ve waited over a year for Nokia to improve on its five-megapixel cameraphones, and it’s finally delivered the goods with the N86 8MP. It’s a good all-round smartphone, with all the goodies you’d expect: N-Gage support, Nokia’s newest Share on Ovi software and a generous 8GB of built in storage. It’s the camera that’s the creme on this caller cake, though. It’s not just an eight-megapixel snapper, it uses Carl Zeiss optics to give sharper images, as well as a wider angle lens than usual and an ultra-quick mechanical shutter.


Sony Ericsson Idou
We bet Nokia thought it was going to dominate Mobile World Congress when it turned up toting the N86 8MP, but it didn’t reckon on the Sony Ericsson Idou rearing its gorgeous little head. It’s the world’s first 12 megapixel cameraphone, and a true work of genius. Small, sleek, and with all the latest Cyber-shot features squeezed in for good measure. There’s a proper Xenon flash too, and GPS to make sure those hi-res snaps are geotagged. The screen is OLED and true 16:9 so it’ll make a nice job of showing movies too. It’ll also run new software from the Symbian Foundation and pack a hefty chunk of built-in memory. Oh, and it’s going on sale in June, at the same time as the Nokia N86 8GB. We’ll be keeping an eye on the big picture. Ha ha! Big picture! Geddit? Sorry, we”ll be leaving now.

What do you think of our top phones? Agree with the list? Get chatting about it on the PriceRunner forums.

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