What were the best android phones of each year to date?

[jakeno]

Title.
Just curious, because I hear lots of stuff about apple's first phone "revolutionising" the smartphone industry, and I do not think this is the case, it's just that the android phones of the time were unheard of.

 

[KOLIO]

@jakeno

WELCOME TO ANDROID FORUMS!

That's a subjective question at minimum............
......... How about starting us out with what you think were/are the best Android phones for each year.

 

[scary alien]

Welcome @jakeno!

 

[KOLIO]

@jakeno

OK,I'll get things kickin',dating back not quite to the very beginning of Android devices being commercially available,but,back to 2010,when I got my 1st:
2010:HTC Evo 4G
2011: Motorola Photon/Atrix
2012: Samsung Galaxy S3
2013: LG G2 (very good year,this was a difficult one)
2014: Samsung Galaxy Note4
2015: LG V10
2016: HTC 10

Very subjective to say the least.
My list includes models that are/were available to just about any carrier.
The Samsung Galaxy Note series could have very well been #1 for each year it's been out (2011),but,I felt the Note4 was a refined & powerful phone anyone would be pleased with,even those who prefer a phone not quite so large.

Next...............................

 

[scary alien]

I'll throw our the OG Droid (Motorola Droid) for the 2009 device and the Motorola Droid X (which I owned) for the 2010 device.

I purchased the HTC Droid Eris in November 2009 instead of the Droid (the app I wanted to use actually did not work on the Droid) and it was (and still is ) a great little device.

Several Androids before the Eris and Droid, of course (HTC Hero, G1, etc.) but I'm not familiar with their release dates.

edit: oh, and my 2015 Nexus 6P is a pretty darned good device, too .

 

[girolez]

2010: HTC Desire (Bravo A8181)
2012 Note 2
2014 Note 4

 

[KOLIO]

@scary alien
Lotta VZW devices are worthy of the list,was hoping Sprint would get 'em eventually...............
I've since moved on from Big Yella,nice to be on a GSM network,lots more to choose from.
Added 2010 to my list,it was very late in the year,joined A/F the following month (Jan 2011)
Started out w/Cricket,while they were an MVNO using Sprints' network.
The phone,a Huawei Ascend M860,not exactly phone of the year material,LOL...........

 

[lunatic59]

Although the Nexus One was technically released in 2010 (January) I have to include it with the phones for 2009 since many of them were released late in the year.

(BTW, I'm moving this thread to the Lounge so more people see it.)

 

[jakeno]

I'm asking really because well i was only interested in tech a few years ago and my first 'smart' phone was a samsung galaxy europa in like 2012, so i don't have much knowledge of phones older than 2013
It's also interesting because you never see anyone with a 2011/2012 android phone, whereas many people rock an iphone 5 that seem to be running well, albeit obvious difficulties. Is this to do with android phones being bad then or just simply the fact that apple managed to draw in sheep from the start?

For 2013 i would say the nexus 5 is a good choice, my brother's one seems to run better than my new moto x force, despite it being 3 years old.
2014 i think the oneplus one was a great device having owned one myself, but i think it was riddled with too many bugs which made it hardly usable sometimes (like randomly having the flash on when you take your phone out from your pocket without realising and noticing people staring at you). i think the nexus 6 was an absolute fail, the S5 was good at the time but someone in my family has one and it's really slowing down compared to the iphone 6's i have in my family. Note 4 was good but it was for a niche market really and is still overpriced.
2015 the SD810 phones aren't as bad as people say, however the S6 (exynos) was good and so was the note 5 (which never came to the uk.. fail), but looking at the benchmark figures it seems like the 6S was sadly the best phone of last year, unless anyone can state otherwise. The 6p was very solid but it just never caught on for me because of the inflated price, lack of features and ridiculous size.
For 2016 i can't really tell because we have yet to see all the phones, but currently i think the s7 edge has an 'edge' above the rest purely because it does everything you can imagine. I hope it is better than the iphone7 when that comes, otherwise i would be disappointed.

 

[jakeno]

Did realise that i set the title to "ANDROID" phones, but i do believe that the 6S has been a good contender unfortunately. Although the stupid inflated antutu scores of iphones that suddenly started appearing with antutu 6.0 meant that people now think that the 6s is bestest, and it is awkward when your x force of the same year gets 90,000 compared to a 6s with 130,000. Hard to gauge the true facts.

 

[dynomot]

Far too subjective, you could go on many things, specs, units sold, battery life... etc etc etc.

Much better you tell us what your best phone was for you and why. A lot more interesting.

For me my all time favourite devices from these years only,

2007 the Nokia N95. I still have that little Symbian Brick. It still works as well.

2009 the Nokia N900, a weird Linux (Maemo 5 -Freemantle, a fork of Debian) tablet with phone functionality It was "root" by default and you could program it from terminal directly. The best mobile browser in the form of "Micro B" I have ever seen, and I include today's efforts in that. Unfinished (it didn't even support MMS messaging natively), buggy, but stunning, truly stunning. I actually got it to boot Windows 95. A totally useless exercise; it took nearly an hour to get to desktop, but it did it. It had true multitasking, back in 2009. Still have this one as well and it still works. The battery lasts about half an hour though from full these days.

2011 (funny, this seems like every other year) Samsung galaxy S2 - my first Android phone. It was like coming home to Symbian and was what that doomed OS should have become.

2012 - an honourable mention to the Samsung Galaxy S3. loved it and modded it to pieces.

2013 Samsung Galaxy Note 3. Curates egg, flawed, massive, but lovely with it. still used daily by a work colleague who bought it from me.

That's it, I'm currently rocking a Samsung galaxy S6 edge. It is more than fine,it is stunningly superb. TouchWiz is no longer a swear word, and even the added "features" are fewer and easy to get rid of in some cases; and it is for all intents and purposes as good in Marshmallow guise as it's newer younger flagship the S7 edge. I think the age of huge improvements in the "flagship" side of things is at an end. Indeed the more esoteric manufacturers from China are producing some fabulous devices for less than half a "flagship" cost.

So there you go, not one overpriced locked up fruity phone mentioned. In all seriousness the iPhone 6 is a very, very nice device (I have an Apple mad friend, we upgrade our devices at roughly the same time every two years and have since 2012 swapped devices (and used as if from new) for a week, over Christmas usually. Last Christmas we could have happily swapped our "6" devices, he however struggles to get an Android device to work with his Apple centred home, with it's Mac, iPads and Apple TV, not unsurprisingly.

 

[jakeno]

Far too subjective, you could go on many things, specs, units sold, battery life... etc etc etc.

Much better you tell us what your best phone was for you and why. A lot more interesting.

For me my all time favourite devices from these years only,

2007 the Nokia N95. I still have that little Symbian Brick. It still works as well.

2009 the Nokia N900, a weird Linux (Maemo 5 -Freemantle, a fork of Debian) tablet with phone functionality It was "root" by default and you could program it from terminal directly. The best mobile browser in the form of "Micro B" I have ever seen, and I include today's efforts in that. Unfinished (it didn't even support MMS messaging natively), buggy, but stunning, truly stunning. I actually got it to boot Windows 95. A totally useless exercise; it took nearly an hour to get to desktop, but it did it. It had true multitasking, back in 2009. Still have this one as well and it still works. The battery lasts about half an hour though from full these days.

2011 (funny, this seems like every other year) Samsung galaxy S2 - my first Android phone. It was like coming home to Symbian and was what that doomed OS should have become.

2012 - an honourable mention to the Samsung Galaxy S3. loved it and modded it to pieces.

2013 Samsung Galaxy Note 3. Curates egg, flawed, massive, but lovely with it. still used daily by a work colleague who bought it from me.

That's it, I'm currently rocking a Samsung galaxy S6 edge. It is more than fine,it is stunningly superb. TouchWiz is no longer a swear word, and even the added "features" are fewer and easy to get rid of in some cases; and it is for all intents and purposes as good in Marshmallow guise as it's newer younger flagship the S7 edge. I think the age of huge improvements in the "flagship" side of things is at an end. Indeed the more esoteric manufacturers from China are producing some fabulous devices for less than half a "flagship" cost.

So there you go, not one overpriced locked up fruity phone mentioned. In all seriousness the iPhone 6 is a very, very nice device (I have an Apple mad friend, we upgrade our devices at roughly the same time every two years and have since 2012 swapped devices (and used as if from new) for a week, over Christmas usually. Last Christmas we could have happily swapped our "6" devices, he however struggles to get an Android device to work with his Apple centred home, with it's Mac, iPads and Apple TV, not unsurprisingly.

I'm thinking that too. I can't imagine phones being much more special in 5-10 years time. Of course, we said exactly the same 5-10 years ago, however i think we actually have reached a point where design is limited, CPU/GPU will probably advance to PC-levels of spec, cameras to near DSLR spec and screens with 4k screens as a new standard, but apart from that, i don't think things will just change much. Transparent phones? don't see that catching on at all, seen several of those renders. Hopefully we'll see some fingerprint scanners implemented into the physical glass display though in a few years. Everyone in my family is fruit mad as well and i can't understand it either.

The iphone 7 seems to have been the most anticipated phone ever though and i expect we'll see loads of rubbish from the media about it. For example, back in 2013 with the 5s release people were spreading stupid renders of the 'iphone 7' being made entirely like a thin slab of glass, or something like that.

 

[jakeno]

I also noticed in 2012 there was a lot of craze about the HTC wildfire.. maybe its just me
dunno why that was so special

 

[olbriar]

2010 was a good year for HTC with the release of the Droid Incredible. I joined AF to while away the weeks as I waited for my back ordered Dinc.

 

[mikedt]

Every new iPhone has been the most anticipated and hyped phone ever, isn't it?

 

[jakeno]

Every new iPhone has been the most anticipated and hyped phone ever, isn't it?

Probably, but I think for some reason the iPhone 7 is the one that people have been speaking about for years

 

[mikedt]

It's the tenth anniversary of the iPhone. So the iPhone 7 will be something really special, revolutionary and magical.

 

[lunatic59]

It's the tenth anniversary of the iPhone. So the iPhone 7 will be something really special, revolutionary and magical.

So your saying it will be a cross between Che Guevara and a unicorn that rides the short bus? Yeah, I could accept that.

 

[shalemail]

Well, there's more than one way to answer your question. The best "ANDROID" phone each year would have to be each years Nexus line phone(s) since it provides pure Android (the most current and updated version) unfettered by carrier and manufacturer software. So you get your BEST Android experience with those phones. That said if you're talking about "best" hardware it is the single most subjective question you can ask. I prefer Motorola handsets (or did anyway before Lenovo took them over) and I think they have produced solid hardware that has if not the best antennaes on the market they are certainly top 2 or 3, and I value my phone as a phone first and foremost so I want a quality connection. Now some will prefer faster processors, bigger batteries, water and shock proof, etc etc. I think Moto, LG, HTC, Samsung (cough) and others have all made and are making quality handsets you really need to find the build (metal?, plastic?, compact?, phablet?) features and style you prefer and then rock that thing out. Or something like that anyway. Just one man's humble opinion.