This week we’re announcing the best tech of the year, starting with the best mobile phone of 2013. And the winner is…
Thousands of votes were cast in our week long poll to find the best mobile phone of 2013, and the skin of its teeth was:
Readers’ Choice
LG Nexus 5
Congratulations to LG and Google on the win, scoring the top spot with 20.31 per cent of the vote.
It was incredibly close this year, with just nine votes separating first and second, with second and third having 22 votes between them. A good battle well fought by all!
Honourable Mentions:
• HTC One — 19.23 per cent
• Apple iPhone 5s — 16.59 per cent
Editor’s Pick
HTC One
New phones are hyped to the point of madness and advertised to the point of nausea, but when you get your hands on them, you find that they’re just another iterative upgrade and not the game changer you were hoping for. This year’s winner certainly wasn’t a game-changer but it was unlike anything else we saw in 2013.
This year’s phone of the year is the HTC One.
HTC has done more for Australia than you may realise. It was the first big manufacturer to introduce Android into the country via a major telco, and went on to make some incredible gear. Things tapered off in the last few years, and we wondered if we would ever see an Android-powered HTC handset that made us believe in the company again. Enter the HTC One: the saviour, the hero, the new yardstick.
The company ditched the design language of the old One series in 2011 where it belonged, and started work on something that we’d really like. It put the speakers on the front rather than up the back. It changed up our expectations of what a camera should do with Ultrapixel technology (that Apple later followed on with). It made Android sexy for the first time ever, and it made a third-party UI that was actually worth having.
It wasn’t just a great phone for us, either. It was a boon to HTC. If the still-ailing company didn’t have the One, we might not have an HTC this time next year.
Congratulations to HTC on a great phone: one worth of our Phone Of The Year title.
Honourable Mention
• Apple iPhone 5s
On the surface, the iPhone 5s doesn’t look like a huge improvement on the iPhone 5, but you then look deeper and realise just how good it is. You’ve got a blitzingly fast processor, a 64-bit operating system (the first of its kind), better low-light camera performance from the same camera and a fresh new take on security. More than worthy of an honourable mention!