More from Popular Mechanics’ cold weather phone survival test here: [PopMech]

[WSJ]

[Fudzilla via MaxConsole]

[Drobo]

He’s a classy one, Mr Brin. Like our own Brian Lam. [CrunchGear, Ryan Block]

To be clear, we’re only looking at sets that are at least 46 inches (117cm) — go big or go home. And though there are some nice 720p plasmas out there for amazing prices, the majority of TVs we’re concerned with are 1080p — it’s the standard now, even in cheap HDTVs, and probably the only resolution you’ll see next year.

We focus on LCDs quite a bit here, not because we prefer them, but because there are key enhancements that can be put in LCD technology to make them look better. With plasma, the problems — energy consumption, weight, thickness — are more of an evolutionary, year-to-year thing. A cheaper plasma often is one that’s just using older technology.

Also, we’re using Amazon as our pricing base line, since it’s on average a good standard for low but legitimate street prices, and we use Samsung examples a lot because they have a ton of different models on the market, so it was easier to isolate individual features and to gauge subtle differences in pricing.

Size Matters

The first and most obvious thing that’ll cost you is more screen real estate. There’s not an absolute inches to dollars ratio, but generally speaking, the first step up is the cheapest, and somewhere in the middle there’s a sweet spot, after which you basically lose money by upgrading. The funny thing is, each maker seems to have a different idea of where the sweet spot is, which you could play to your advantage:

Take for instance, Panasonic’s plasma G10 series. It’s $US200 to go from the 42-inch model to 50 inches, and then $US400 to go up to 54 inches. So the sweet spot is at 50 inches. Similar thing happening with Vizio’s XVT line: Going from 42 inches to 47 inches is just $US250, though going up to 55 inches from 47 inches costs about a grand. Hence 47 inches makes the most dollar-per-inch sense if you like that TV.

With Sony and Samsung, though, it pays to keep going up. In Sony’s top-of-the-line Bravia XBR9 series, the hop from 40 inches to 46 inches is $US360, but going from 46 inches to 52 inches is just $US250. Samsung’s LED-backlit TV costs $US350 to go from 40 inches to 46 inches, and just $US500 to go from there to 55 inches. (There’s a limit, of course, Samsung’s 65-inch LN65B650 doesn’t have many of the frills discussed below, but still lists for $US6000.)

The real lesson here: Don’t think of size as a foregone conclusion. When you’ve narrowed down your options using all the criteria, go back and check the sizes and relative prices. There may be a surprise, hopefully good but possibly bad.

Vroom, Vroom

Everything after size you can roughly sweep everything you’d pay more for into the category of performance. The grand trick of buying TVs though, according to our friend Gary Merson of HD Guru, is that “the TV industry is set up like the car industry”. Just like buying a Corvette to battle your mid-life crisis because it vrooms real good, when you pay extra money for extra horsepower, you’re also going to get leather bucket seats and the in-dash GPS. It’s hard to buy a stripped-down car that just delivers better performance, and the same goes when you’re trying to scrimp on a TV without compromising picture. In the case of TVs, a higher performer might come with a million HDMI jacks or integrated Wi-Fi and video on demand, and you never know exactly what you’re paying for.

Fortunately, we can break performance into two major categories so it’s slightly easier to interpret those price differentials: Backlight (for LCDs) and panel quality.

Fancy Backlighting

The single most expensive upgrade for LCD TVs right now is LED backlighting. As we explain here, there are a bunch of advantages to LED over conventional CCFL backlighting for LCD TVs. Which particular advantages you pick up depends on the kind of LED backlighting in the set. While both offer instant on and power savings, edge-lit models mainly deliver serious thinness, while backlit sets can offer local dimming, which delivers noticeably better black levels and contrast.

How much will it cost you? Well, comparing two Samsung sets with fairly equivalent panels, the price difference is about $US500. The CCFL-backlit LN46B650 is $US1360, while the UN46B6000 is $US1850. Because it’s got LED edge lighting, the B6000 is only 3cm thick, compared to the B650’s 7.8cm. When you step up and compare Samsung’s edge-lit to back-lit, the difference isn’t as great: A 46-inch 8000 series edge-lit model goes for $US2300, while the 8500 series with local-dimming is $US2600. (If you’re already paying for LED technology, you definitely want to step up.)

So yes, backlit LED sets with local dimming tend to cost more. Sony’s year-old Bravia XBR8 uses tri-colour LEDs to improve colour accuracy over the most LED sets, which use white ones. Though its production is discontinued, it’s still nearly $US2200 at 46 inches. However, Toshiba consistently delivers cheaper sets than most of its fellow “name” brands, and their 46-inch LED backlit set with local dimming is just $US1700.

Panels and Oh, It Hertz

The panel is the other major thing that determines how good an HDTV actually is, and it applies to both LCDs and plasmas. Typically, as you move up in price, you get a better panel. Cheaper sets generally use older panels with previous-generation tech that Merson says have a poorer viewing angle, so there’s a smaller area you can actually stare at on your TV to get a good picture. The problem is that no TV manufacturer actually declares its panel attributes on the box, so you’re often on your own to figure it out. The best way is to go to the store and check out the viewing angles.

Hertz, for the uninitiated, is simply the number of times per second that LCD TVs refresh their picture. (Plasma isn’t part of this discussion because phosphor pixels work differently than liquid crystal ones, and plasma’s “refresh rate” would be way higher — to the point of irrelevance.) A 60Hz LCD refreshes the picture 60 times a second, 120Hz is 120 times a second, and so on, up to 240Hz in the top-priced LCD sets. A higher refresh rate is supposed to increase the ability to see fast-moving video at its highest intended resolution, and it works well in theory, though there are issues with 240Hz execution. At this point, a minimum of 120Hz is a given on all premium LCDs, says Merson. There isn’t one LED-backlit set that doesn’t have it.

Here’s how the refresh-rate step-ups look: The 46-inch Samsung B550 is a standard 1080p CCFL-backlit set for $US1020. Moving up to the same size B650 for $US1360 — $US300 more — gets you 120Hz (plus a higher contrast ratio). Going up again, to the B750 for $US1630, another $US300, you get 240Hz, and again even better contrast ratio. That’s about the top of Samsung’s CCFL-backlit line.

You can see the same thing with their LED sets: The 46-inch B6000 is a 120Hz LED edge-lit set for $US1850. The 46-inch LED edgel-lit B8000 goes to 240Hz and it costs $US2300, about $US450 more.

What About Plasma?

As we mentioned, plasmas are a little less complicated, since there’s nothing like refresh rates to deal with. On the other hand, the situation may be more obtuse, since you don’t always know what the real differences are. Merson says there are a few basic levels of plasma performance. Stepping up to the 50-inch 1080p plasmas will generally cost $US300 to $US400 more.

There are more issues, however. Panasonic has a new panel called NeoPDP that’s more energy efficient, but it’s sometimes hard to tell which models have it and which don’t. (Hint: Look for the Energy Rating sticker.) Finally, you have THX-certified panels that offer nearly perfect calibration right out of the box. Beyond that, contrast ratios do tend to get better over time, but it’s relative: At the low end of the HDTV price spectrum, plasma sets have generally delivered better picture than LCD anyway.

Frills and Other Stuff

The funny thing about TVs nowadays is that there’s more to them than the screen. Like inputs. Until recently, one thing you got more of by paying more money were more holes to stick things into. That’s not really the case once you get up into 46-inch sets — you’re gonna get four HDMI slots in a set that big no matter what. But there are other things nowadays. Like video services that come in through other holes, or maybe without wires at all.

An example, to use our old friends at Samsung: The B6000 looks a lot like the B7000, but with the B7000, for $US180 more you get online video services via Yahoo’s widget engine, like YouTube.

Or, let’s look at the upcoming crop of LED TVs that aren’t even out yet, or are in limited distribution for now. LG’s 55LHX and Sony’s Bravia XBR10 both have wireless HDMI and 240Hz, but with Bravia Internet Widgets and Slacker radio, the Bravia is $US5000, $US200 more than 55LHX. Wireless HDMI itself is a pretty pricey feature. Same Sony, compared to Samsung’s 8500. The 8500 has built-in video services, but no wireless HDMI, and it’s $US500 cheaper, at $US4500. Oh, and did I mention that the Sony is even 7cm smaller than the Samsung and LG?

Wireless is still in the gimmick phase, but next year, we assume we’ll be able to track its price premium as well as we can track size, refresh rate, backlighting and other factors today, $US300 to $US400 at a time. How do you get from $US600 to a $US6000? You just add, add some more and then keep adding.

Well, rather, I know that it’s definitely something about the phone itself. It’s missing that spark, the emotional drippings of OMG, that say, the Droid has. The X10 is perfectly fine. It’s just that everything outwardly belies the specialness of what’s going on inside. The all plastic-build feels just slightly better than cheap, the shape is kind of awkward unless you have gorilla hands, the design — it all just feels, well, incredibly ordinary.

What stood out in terms of hardware was the screen (at four inches, with a resolution of 854×480, it’s big), and the camera, which borders on amazing for a phone. The extra betaness of the software meant we couldn’t really get a grasp on how deadly the 1GHz Snapdragon processor is, since while things were quite speedy, the phones also froze a lot, apps crashed or wouldn’t start, etc.

Sony Ericsson’s approach to customising Android with its own Nexus interface is mercifully respectful of your boundaries. That is, if you don’t want to use their TimeScape or MediaScape UI for managing your contacts and media (though you probably want to in the latter case), you don’t have to — the default android contacts app is still there. The only thing you can’t escape is all the blue. If you take Windows Media Center and imagine it ported to a phone, that’s pretty much the Xperia X10. But with more “infinite buttons”.

MediaScape actually feels like Media Center, the way it arranges and presents your photos, music and videos. The concept behind TimeScape should be pretty familiar at this point. Everything from a contact, like Facebook, emails, Twitter, photos, text messages, calls, whatever are integrated into a single interface, so you can check their status updates or get a hold of them however you want. That infinite button is what coagulates all of the services into a cohesive contact.

For the most part, I think the Nexus interface works (even as crashy as it was today on these pre-production phones). It’s easy enough to navigate, it stands out against the other custom Android interfaces with lots of bright colours and transparencies and it’s not bad too look at. More than that, you only use it as much as you want. (Some people might want a more complete Android UI overhaul, and that Nexus doesn’t quite deliver.) I don’t see how Sony Ericsson is going to get developers to put out apps just for Nexus, though I’m not sure how much that matters. It’s an example of Android’s potential in the hands of phonemakers who actually know how to design interfaces.

Sony Ericsson’s always had trouble getting their smartphones to crack the US, since they haven’t had carriers footing the bill for phones to make them actually affordable. It seems like they’re trying to make that change with the X10, saying it’s “our desire to have a carrier relationship for this product.” So you might actually get to use one. It still doesn’t set my pants on fire like the Droid did, at least not yet, so I’m not sure how much you actually want to. But maybe it just needs more time.

Example: Sony Ericsson Timescape, the “signature” Nexus app, sounds a lot like HTC’s Sense in that it pulls in a bunch of services like Facebook and Twitter for your contacts, but it’s more straightforwardly organised around timelines, which you can break down by service, events or whatever. There’s also an infinite button. For infinite discoveries.

MediaScape looks uncannily like Windows Media Center, if you stuck it on a phone. It’s actually nice. The camera software is swanky, with facial recognition and tagging like a real Sony camera.

Apparently, it’s not going to be restricted to just smartphones, but could reach some of their more “mainstream” phones. How they’re going to get developers to develop apps for Nexus though, is another question entirely.

TouchWiz is the first custom Android interface that’s worse than the standard one, and shows what kind of horrible things emerge when Samsung’s interface designers are left unchecked. Here’s how I think the design process went, roughly: The designers dropped a bunch of acid, stared at old Atari games while binging on Taco Bell, then proceeded to shit all over the phone for hours and hours.

If it’s not inherently ugly, like text input screens with awful ’80s neon orange and blue, it’s gratuitous and redundant, like the 3D app cube. Or an entirely separate menu of Samsung icons for apps. And some things, like moving the slide-out menu to the left instead of its traditional place on the bottom, actually work against the way you use the phone — the menu gets in the way now, since I’d often bring it out by accident while changing between desktops. It’s just… terrible. Worse, Home Switcher, an app that reverts phones back to the stock Android home screen, can’t erase Samsung’s disgusting mojo. The Behold II would be 10x better with a vanilla build of Android 1.6.

Even the phone hardware is a mess. The front of the phone is an orgy of buttons: seven, to be precise, not including a d-pad, with a dedicated button for the app cube. The lock key isn’t just on the side but it’s kind of hidden, flush against the bezel. The USB port is weirdly shoved on top. And, uh, what the hell is up with the back plate?

Two things are good about the Behold II — Samsung’s custom camera setup comes straight out of their point-and-shoot cameras, and is packed with features, like extensive manual controls and burst shooting, and it’s very fast unlike the rest of the phone. The other is the AMOLED display which is nice, though marred by the same kind of bluish tint as Samsung’s other AMOLED Android phone, the Moment.

Take a good long look at the Behold II though: It’s a warning to other developers what not to do, and a scary look at one dark possible future for Android, in its infinite permutations. Not just deep fragmentation of the platform, but customised crimes against humanity, perpetrated in the name of Android. It makes me want to cry, except that my brain’s too mushy to make my eyes work.

Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies replicates the best part of Treyarch’s otherwise inferior Call of Duty game — Nazi Zombies — to the iPhone. It looks great. It sounds great. And parts of it, like the multiplayer over Wi-Fi, work great.

It doesn’t feel great though. The controls suck. We’re all used to the inherently mediocre virtual joystick, a pale translation of a three-dimensional control implement into a flat two-dimensional space, which here moves you backward and forward, and strafes left and right. Turning and looking up and down is both finicky and imprecise, accomplished by sliding your thumb in the direction you want to turn or look — a longer slide makes you turn faster and further. What’s tricky, and tensely uncomfortable, is trying to turn while moving with the virtual joystick. It winds up being jerky and spinny, like your soldier had one two many peppermint schnappes before fighting the undead.

Even with the computer helping your sorry arse aim — a little too much, actually — it just doesn’t work. Often, you’ll try to turn by swiping your thumb and accidentally tap the button to aim down your sites, or fire, sending your bullets past the zombie, who proceeds to om-nom-nom on your brains. Knifing is still awesome though.

But in the end, the lack of tight controls crushes the whole experience, which is otherwise a pitch-perfect translation, down to Activision planning to charge for add-on maps on top of the $13 you already paid for the game. [iTunes]