The NVIDIA Shield is unlike any device. The 5" Android gaming handheld isn't the Sony Xperia Play since it has no cellular radio and it has a beefy controller that makes no concession to compactness. It's not the Sony PS Vita or Nintendo DS either since it's a full powered Android handheld with access to the Google Play Store and everything an Android can do: Office, ebooks, web, maps with GPS and of course all those Android games. It weighs a hefty 1.28 lbs. and the controller portion is modeled after the XBOX game controller. It looks like the offspring of an Alienware gaming laptop. It feels extremely rugged and I doubt the joysticks or display will snap off any time soon. (or possibly ever unless you're getting wicked with a hammer).

The Shield is the first product on the market to run the NVIDIA Tegra 4 with its 4+1 ARM Cortex A15 cores and crazy number of graphics cores. It benchmarks twice as fast as the fastest Android smartphones and tablets currently on the market: quadrant scored 18,854. 3DMark's Ice Storm test scored 19,342 and 105 fps for the demo test. Honestly, this is more speed than anyone needs in a smartphone or tablet today, but I'm sure the apps will eventually come. Eventually. However in a device like the NVIDIA Shield that's meant to play TegraZone games flawlessly along with other Android games and PC Streaming games from your desktop gaming rig's Steam Library, you'll want all the horsepower you can get. This little handheld can even play 4K video, though the 1280 x 720 display makes that pointless. It does have both Miracast wireless display streaming and a mini HDMI port so you can output the video to a bigger screen.

The NVIDIA Shield has dual band WiFi with MIMO and strong reception so latency in streaming and multiplayer games is minimized. It has Bluetooth 3.0, a GPS and a huge 7,350 mAh battery in the handgrip sections. It also has a fan, something we've never seen in an ARM-based mobile product. Happily you'll rarely hear it. The Shield has a microSD card slot and USB Host.

The AMOLED display is extremely crisp at 294 PPI, and it has rich colors and is extremely bright (bright enough to use outdoors). The Shield's display had better color saturation than our desktop's LG IPS monitor, so we're impressed. It's certainly a great gaming experience for those who don't prefer the bigger screen experience of a tablet tethered to a USB or Bluetooth game controller.

The controller is console quality and it's every bit as big--there are no shallow PS Vita buttons or abbreviated hand grips here. The controller is modeled after the XBOX PC controller and it has the hoped-for shoulder buttons (two left and two right), A, B, X and Y buttons, two joysticks, a d-pad and a center cluster of dual purpose and Android buttons (game start, power, home, back and a volume key that triggers on-screen volume controls that can also be controlled by L1 and R1 buttons after hitting the volume button). It worked well for a variety of Android games that are controller-aware and it was great fun in games like ShadowGun THD, GTA III and the bundled Expendable Rearmed and Sonic 4 Episode 2. The controller has motion sensors, a six-axis gyro and the Shield has an accelerometer.

After we and NVIDIA failed to come up with a solution, they were kind enough to send us a Falcon NW Tiki gaming desktop that was pre-loaded with their GeForce Experience software and an NVIDIA GTX 760 graphics card, and that worked like a charm. Speaking of supported games, NVIDIA has a list of compelling titles that includes Skyrim, BioShock Infinite, Metro 2033, Resident Evil 6, Tomb Raider (2013) and Batman Arkham City. You'll need a fairly expensive desktop rig to be the Shield's streaming partner, making this more a handheld for serious gamers if PC Streaming appeals to you. The desktop must have at least an NVIDIA GTX 650 graphics card (sorry, ATI is out of the question, as are mobile GPUs used in gaming laptops), a solid CPU and a fast network connection with Ethernet preferred over dual band WiFi. You'll also need a dual band 802.11n access point according to NVIDIA. The list of restrictions means that casual gamers with multimedia desktop PCs or gaming laptops are left out.

What if your Steam library is slim? Then this product might not be for you if PC Streaming is a prime concern. Serious gamers probably do have a healthy Steam library and you can add non-Steam games to your Steam library, though there's no guarantee they'll work. Happily NVIDIA didn't partner with Origin, which can barely run correctly on the desktop without grievous bugs. One more caveat: your gaming PC and the Shield must be connected to the same WiFi network, so you can kick back on the couch to be closer to your family when gaming, but you can't play PC Streaming games from a hotel while your desktop purrs along at home. And yes, your desktop must be turned on for this to work. While the Shield is connected, the PC's resolution is set to 1280 x 720 to match the Shield, and you can't use your PC for other things or it will kick the Shield out. Yes, you'll need to enable beta mode in Steam, at least for now (that setting is under account settings).

This isn't a PDA or smartphone that you can tuck in your pocket: it's simply too bulky and heavy. But it can do all the things an Android media player or smartphone can do, minus cellular calls on smartphones. You can make VoIP calls using Skype or Google, and there's a 3.5mm combo audio jack that works fine for that feature. But you can't make video calls since the Shield has no camera.

The Shield has impressively loud and full stereo speakers for a 5" device. They fire at you from the controller deck, and thus aren't muffled by a desk or hands. It outdoes even the HTC One with its BoomSound stereo speakers and sounds as good as can-style Bluetooth stereo speaker units.

The touch screen works well, though it's a bit awkward reaching over the controller to tap it (at least you can push the display far back to reduce interference). Again, it's not the highest resolution display on the market, but we can't fault its sharpness.

The Shield runs Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean with no UI customizations, which purists will love. NVIDIA's focus was to deliver a massively powerful gaming handheld, not start a branded and customized line of Android handhelds. Likewise they wanted to showcase their latest mobile CPU, the Tegra 4. Using a 4+1 quad core design with a low power companion core and a GPU that NVIDIA says can be built with up to 72 cores, the 1.9GHz Tegra 4 is something to boast about and will likely give the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 serious competition. It feels fast and it is fast. The Tegra 4 is mated with 2 gigs of LPDDR3 RAM and it can drive a display up to 3200 x 3200 resolution according to NVIDIA.

The Shield has 16 gigs of internal storage with ~12 gigs free and there's a microSDXC card slot. Currently, you can only install apps and games to internal storage due to Android 4.x's limitations, though NVIDIA is working on a hack similar to Samsung's for theGalaxy S4 that would allow you to install apps (and games) to microSD cards. Note that the Shield supports FAT32 and NTFS cards but not ExFAT, so you may have to reformat your higher capacity cards (64 gig and above) that ship formatted ExFAT.

Battery life is of concern when gaming, especially when gaming on a handheld that has an extremely fast CPU and GPU. That's why NVIDIA crammed a 28.8Whr, 7350 mAh battery inside the Shield, despite the added weight. They claim that it can last for 4-5 hours of gaming with TegraZone optimized games (these are generally the most demanding games on Android), 10 hours for non-TegraZone Android games, 15 hours of local video playback and 40 hours of music playback. In our tests, this was accurate and the Shield never got hot when gaming, though it did blow warm air out the back via the fan vent. The NVIDIA Shield ships with a 5v, 2.1 amp charger similar to that used with other tablets.

This is where it boils down to personal preference. Some folks think a 5" highly portable device (albeit bulky and heavy compared to a 5" smartphone) that can play the most demanding Android games and stream PC games is heaven. Personally, I prefer a 7 or 10 inch Android tablet with a wired XBOX controller or a Bluetooth controller like GameStop's for the bigger screen experience. The Shield weighs as much as many 10" tablets and more than 7" tablets, and I find the screen too small to be immersive. And then there's the OnLive gaming service that works on tablets, and OnLive provides a cloud PC host so you don't need an expensive gaming desktop to have some serious PC gaming fun. Even better, you don't have to be connected to any particular WiFi network. But for you hardcore gamers who simply want to move away from your desktop to sit with the family or relax when sitting on the couch, the NVIDIA Shield has its appeal. It's obviously less bulky than a tablet and you won't need a stand.

Then there's the PS Vita, whose game library has been something of a disappointment compared to the more vigorous ecosystem that accompanied the PSP. Still, it gets a tier 1 game release each month and the selection of PSN and PSP titles is quite large and varied, not to mention affordable compared to the very high quality but very expensive top titles like Uncharted that sell for $40 to $50 at launch. You'll pay the same or more for PC games at launch, but you'll have the pleasure of using them both on your PC and Shield (again, assuming your PC and network is up to snuff). The Vita was supposed to get PS3 streaming but few developers actually supported this feature. Supposedly it will be a requirement for PS4 games, so there's hope you might get to have streaming fun. In favor of the PS Vita: it's a turnkey system that even an adult could get running right away. You buy it and you're almost instantly ready to game. That's true of the Shield for Android games, but not so much for PC Streaming until they get the kinks worked out. In favor of the Shield: it's an all around Android handheld that can do a lot more than the Vita.

Take heart BlackBerry diehards, your day is finally here. The BlackBerry Z10 was just a warm up and a promise to the QWERTY faithful that their device would come. The BlackBerry Q10 runs the all new BlackBerry OS 10.1, based on bulletproof QNX, and it's wildly modern compared to the OS on the BlackBerry Curve and Bold. And yes, it has a hardware QWERTY keyboard that won't let you down. Throw in a 3.1" AMOLED touch screen and you've got the Q10. The internals are identical to the touch screen slate BlackBerry Z10, and though the hardware can't compete with the most powerful Android phones, it doesn't need to because the OS is optimized for the hardware inside (much like Windows Phone and the iPhone are highly optimized for specific hardware). The phone has a 1.5GHz dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU, 2 gigs of RAM and 16 gigs of internal storage. The BlackBerry Q10 will be available on all major US carriers and on many carriers overseas. Here in the US at launch, it's $199 with contract ($99 down plus $20 monthly payments on the newly contract-less T-Mobile).

The OS and basic navigation work just the same as on the BlackBerry Z10, so we won't go into great detail in this review. The OS supports multi-tasking via active panes (small windows that tile across the multi-tasking screen), and it has several screens for the app launcher (app icons). BlackBerry Hub is your unified inbox for all notifications from emails to texts, to missed calls and alarms. It's easy and intuitive and you needn't leave the Hub when replying to emails, social networking messages and texts. In fact, there are neither icons nor a separate app for your various email accounts, though there is an SMS/MMS icon. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare are preloaded. Box and Dropbox are pre-loaded as is BlackBerry Maps (not the strongest mapping and navigation solution we've seen), a shortcut to the YouTube mobile site and Documents to Go for mobile MS Office compatible work. The OS comes with a file manager, PIM apps that can sync with MS Exchange and other services like Google, POP3/IMAP/Exchange, weather, a clock, calculator, Adobe Reader, a games portal and a compass.

The BlackBerry Q10 has dual band WiFi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC and a GPS with digital compass. It has a rear 8MP camera with an LED flash (the same as the Z10) and HDR mode that comes courtesy of OS 10.1. BlackBerry World is your one stop shop for apps, music and video. As we noted with the BlackBerry Z10, the app selection doesn't yet come close to competing with iTunes, Google Play for Android and even the Windows Phone app store. The OS and ecosystem are very young, and we hope to see more apps as time progresses, though this in part depends on how many folks buy OS 10 devices (developers need a reason to make apps, after all). Still, some popular apps are here like Skype, MLB at Bat, Angry Birds, Google Talk (a RIM app), TuneIn Radio and Wisepilot (navigation).

The Q10 looks like a modern interpretation of older QWERTY smartphones. I wouldn't call it a stunning phone (it may be nearly impossible to make a phone with a hardware keyboard look uber-sexy), but the black model's carbon fiber back appeals to the car geek in me and it's strong too. The phone's face has a clean and modern look with attractive metal strips between the key rows that make it easier to find your place on the keyboard in the dark. The phone isn't very thin, but the hardware keyboard and removable battery don't allow for impossible thinness. The back cover slides off to reveal the removable 2100 mAh battery, micro SIM card slot and micro SDXC card slot.

The metal volume rocker with center action button is the same as the Z10's, and it's easy to locate by touch but stiff enough that we didn't activate it by accident. The power/sleep button is up top as is the 3.5mm combo audio jack. Both the micro USB and micro HDMI ports are on the left side. The 2MP front camera and notification LED that blinks urgent red when messages and alerts are waiting sit above the display and the speaker is on the bottom edge. Our black model's back is grippy but not sticky and feels good in hand. The phone is relatively small compared to today's gargantuan smartphones and the Q10 is a bit shorter than the Z10. The Q10 feels sturdy and the sides are reinforced with metal underneath the plastic.

BlackBerry phones are typically excellent voice phones, and the Q10 on AT&T didn't disappoint. Our call recipients thought we were calling from a landline phone and likewise incoming voice was clear with average volume by cell phone standards. This is an excellent phone for calls. Data speeds according to speedtest.net were in line with today's LTE 4G phones and our BlackBerry Q10 averaged 25Mbps down and 16Mbps up on AT&T's LTE network in the Dallas metroplex. The phone played nicely with our Jawbone and Motorola Bluetooth headsets and our BMW's built-in Bluetooth for calls.

Gone are the trackballs and optical nav pads found on older BlackBerry smartphones. The touch screen replaces them, though purists will likely lament the further travel to the screen vs. the nav pad. I have no qualms with the thoroughly modern touch screen and I suspect the days of auxiliary navigation elements have passed. The keyboard is pure joy for hardware keyboard lovers and it maintains the sculpted waterfall keys we loved years ago on the BlackBerry Bold 9900. The tactile keys make it easy to tell when you're on target and it's clear if you've wandered from your desired key. The usual BlackBerry keyboard shortcuts live on: double press the space bar for a period, for example. BlackBerry OS 10.1 brings a host of hardware keyboard tricks including typing "tweet" followed by a message to send a new tweet, and "BBM Joe Blow" to start a BBM to Joe. The keys are tactile and clicky, and for those who love their hardware keyboards (some 70 million strong use BlackBerry phones worldwide), it won't disappoint.

At 328 PPI, the Q10's display has sufficiently high pixel density that text and graphics always look very sharp, even though the 720 x 720 resolution won't win any competitions with current smartphones. The challenge is the 3.1" size: OS icons and text are reasonably easy to see but text in web pages and documents is tiny. That's the price you pay for the hardware keyboard that consumes much of the front face real estate. Even with mobile sites, I often had to pinch zoom to make text easy to read and desktop sites have absolutely tiny text. As with BlackBerry smartphones of old, be prepared to zoom when viewing web pages. Email and text messages are easy to read since the OS handles font scaling, though you'll have to scroll often to read through a medium length email. The Super AMOLED display has very good color saturation and contrast and it's viewable outdoors.

In an Android phone review, this is where we include many different benchmarks and analyze speed in detail. As with Windows Phone, that's not necessary here, not just because myriad benchmark programs don't yet exist for BlackBerry OS 10, but also because the phone's software is completely optimized to perform well on the hardware. This is a quick and responsive phone and the UI maintains speed after several days of uptime. The active panes are here, just as with the BlackBerry Z10 running OS 10, and these are miniaturized windows where your running apps sit when minimized. Tap one and it runs full screen with no significant delay, just where you left off. The OS handles memory, so some apps may not update when running minimized as active panes, but if you have 9 or fewer running, they generally do update. The thoroughly modern webkit web browser with Adobe Flash is very fast and is competitive with other platforms in terms of speed and website compatibility.

Unlike the BlackBerry Z10 that launched with just OK runtimes that improved with OS updates, BlackBerry clearly focused on battery life with the Q10 knowing it had to compete with the OS 7 BlackBerry phones it supplants. Thanks to the small display, relatively undemanding CPU and a large 2100 mAh battery, the phone delivers impressive runtimes. We routinely managed two days on a charge with moderate use that included Facebook, Twitter and 3 email accounts updates, 45 minutes of voice calls, 30 minutes of streaming HTML5 video via YouTube and an hour of web browsing each day.

Like the BlackBerry Z10, the Q10 has a 2MP camera on the front and an 8MP camera with LED flash, backside illuminated sensor and a fast f/2.2, five element lens on the rear. Though BlackBerry OS 10.1 introduces HDR shooting for better high contrast exposure, the camera is hobbled by a simplistic UI with few controls. Yes, the iPhone has few camera settings and controls, but Apple has a way of making users forgive them because photos and videos come out looking great without having to fiddle endlessly with settings. With the BlackBerry Q10 camera, I often feel that its good hardware fails to meet the iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S3 and Nokia Lumia 920 challenge because the software isn't as good as it could be and I'm not allowed to tweak settings to help it.

With good, even lighting, photos are sharp and colorful. With stark outdoor sunlight or poor indoor lighting, HDR really helps bring out detail in dark areas. Video stabilization is decent but not nearly as good the optical image stabilization on the Nokia Lumia 920. That said, with proper lighting, the BlackBerry Q10 captures sharp and colorful shots and fairly smooth 1080p video. And it's certainly leaps and bounds ahead of Curve and Bold cameras. If you're upgrading from an older BlackBerry model, you'll be in heaven.

The Nokia Lumia 1020 is the manufacturer's latest flagship, and as with the previous flagship Nokia Lumia 920 in the US, it launches exclusive to AT&T. In fact, the Lumia 1020 bears a strong resemblance to the 920 when it comes to looks and also internals, with one important exception: it has Nokia's simply crazy 41 megapixel PureView camera. And that camera adds a black aluminum Cyclops eye on the back, which may not be attractive but it's much less bulky than the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom's rear mechanical zoom lens. In fact, Nokia approaches the issue of zoom in a more creative and practical way, where practical means keeping your phone compact and looking like a phone rather than a camera. Given the huge number of available pixels, Nokia uses digital zoom instead of optical. Digital zoom used to be a dirty word because it resulted in blocky and pixelated images, but when you've got more pixels to work with than a pro DSLR, it's no longer a problem.

The Nokia Lumia 1020 is a GSM Windows Phone 8 smartphone with 4G LTE. AT&T will offer the phone for $299 on contract at launch, which exceeds the usual $199 with contract flagship phone price (the Samsung Galaxy Note phones are the other exception, having also cost $299 at launch). This is the opposite tactic from the bargain priced $99 on contract Lumia 920, where Microsoft was looking for instant Windows Phone traction and likely sweetened the subsidy.

As with the Lumia 920, this is a uniquely designed polycarbonate unibody phone with a 4.5" display. The Lumia 1020 is available in white, yellow and black, and all have a matte black aluminum ring on the back for the camera assembly. The camera assembly sticks out a bit and I don't find the giant black disc attractive, though it would blend in much better on the black model vs. our white Lumia 1020. Nokia managed to devise a matte finish that they say won't get dirty--a challenge particularly for white phones and that's why they're usually glossy. The color runs through the polycarbonate, so it won't change color if it picks up a scratch. Because the camera section sticks out a bit, the phone doesn't sit flat on a table, which is a bit annoying. Happily there's an automatic lens cover so you won't have to worry the lens.

This isn't a light or small phone, and you'll feel it in your pocket or hand at 158g (5.6 ounces). Nokia's polycarbonate Lumias can survive some nasty attacks, and it's built like a tank. The phone measures 5.12 x 2.8 x 0.41 inches, making it similar in size to the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One with larger displays. Given the curved sides and matte finish, it feels good in hand and isn't likely to slip out... as long as you have large hands, that is. The phone has metal volume, power and camera buttons on the side, a 3.5mm combo audio jack up top and a micro USB port for charging and syncing at the bottom next to the mono speaker.

The phone has a stunning 4.5" AMOLED ClearBlack display that looks great outdoors and works with gloves. The 1280 x 768 resolution won't wow those who've grown accustomed to full HD Android smartphones, but at 334 ppi we're not complaining. That's excellent pixel density and you won't see a jaggy font or noisy image on this phone. The display is curved and covered with Gorilla Glass 3. Viewing angles are wide and the display has a fast 60Hz refresh rate. It's the perfect partner for photography since it's colorful and easy to see outdoors as well as indoors. The Lumia has settings for sunlight readability, touch sensitivity and you can adjust the color profile via saturation and color temperature sliders. It has an ambient light sensor that does a good job, and you can turn this off if you wish.

Windows Phone 8 smartphones share mostly Microsoft-mandated specs, so there's not much variation. The Lumia 1020 has the usual 1.5GHz dual core Snapdragon S4 Pro CPU with Adreno 225 graphics and 2 gigs of RAM. Compared to today's Android supercomputer smartphones with even faster quad core CPUs that might not sound like much, but keep in mind that Windows Phone is less demanding than Android, and the software is highly optimized to work with the S4 Pro, much like the iPhone is optimized to run well on its CPU and graphics chip. Sometimes you don't need the fastest chip to have a fast phone, and indeed the Nokia Lumia 1020, like most Windows 8 phones, is extremely fast and responsive.

We tested demanding 3D games like Mass Effect Infiltrator and they played smoothly. 1080p MPEG4 video likewise played perfectly and the phone multi-tasks well, so performance didn't degrade with several apps running in the background.

The phone has 32 gigs of storage and no microSD card slot. Camera images shot at full resolution (each one accompanied by a 5MP image for sharing) can eat storage, though at 10 megs per full resolution image and 2 megs for the 5MP image, you can fit hundreds of photos on internal storage and still have room for apps and beefy games. AT&T includes 50 gigs of Locker storage with the phone and you can sync your photos and video to Microsoft's cloud service, SkyDrive. Still, we'd love to see this camera (that happens to have a phone) with a storage card slot, just like a dedicated camera.

The Lumia 1020 is a GSM world phone with 2G EDGE, HSPA+ 3G and 4G LTE. The phone has a micro SIM card slot up top that uses the same pop-up drawer as the Lumia 900 and 920. Nokia makes excellent voice phones and the Lumia didn't disappoint us: incoming and outgoing voice were landline clear and had adequate volume. Ambient noise rejection worked well to block out distant construction noise and kids giggling without making my voice sound harsh or digitized. The phone has Bluetooth 3.0 and it worked well with a variety of Bluetooth headsets, stereo speakers and our car's built-in Bluetooth.

Data speeds on AT&T's LTE 4G network were excellent in the Dallas area, and speeds matched the iPhone 5s,HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 on AT&T. We tested using Ookla's Speedtest.net app, just as we do on iOS and Android, and we averaged 19Mbps down and 17Mbps up. Windows Phones ship with IE 10 mobile and it does a good job of rendering full desktop sites as well as mobile optimized sites. Pinch zooming is fluid and HTML5 video playback (YouTube) at full screen is very good. Sorry, there's no Adobe Flash Player support. For those who use mobile data sparingly, the phone has dual band WiFi 802.11b/g/n with channel bonding that worked perfectly in our tests using our 802.11n network.

Isn't that an insane number of megapixels? Well, Nokia put them to excellent use and it's not just a pointless feature or spec. With that many pixels, you can actually use digital zoom and create images that aren't lossy: think of it as using Photoshop with a very high resolution image: you can crop a section and still have a high quality image without resorting to blowing it up via enlargement. Likewise, the Lumia 1020 creates a companion 5MP image that works like Photoshop resizing a 7,000 x 4,000 pixel image down to less than half those dimensions: it has a lot of data to work with and the result is sharp and clear detail rather than the harsh and artificial sharpening algorithms used by many camera phones. In fact, zoomed shots (up to 3x zoom, which isn't much) are saved in full frame fashion so you can bring back more of the surrounding image if you wish. Don't think of it as zoom; it's really pre-cropping of the photo that you can later undo.

We were worried that the larger than average BSI image sensor and excellent software algorithms would be held back by a tiny camera phone lens. The f/2.2 Carl Zeiss Tessar 6 element lens has one glass element and 5 plastic elements, which is complex compared to most high end camera phone lenses, and as far as we can tell when viewing images at 100% crop, the lens isn't a problem. Nokia's second generation optical image stabilization keeps the lens stable via barrel stabilization that uses electronics, magnets and ball bearings to float the mechanism. It works quite well, and my video was much less shaky compared to video taken without OIS on the Samsung Galaxy S4.

1080p video actually requires way fewer megapixels than do still images, so the Lumia 1020 can shoot full HD video at 4x zoom without any drop in resolution. At 720p it can zoom up to 6x. To zoom a video, swipe your finger across the viewfinder. Video is equally impressive, particularly with good lighting. In our sample video you'll see colorful reflections painted on clearly defined rippling water, and natural color and detail for the ducks' plumage. The stabilization keeps things smooth and stereo audio recording quality is good. In low light situations like a home at night lit by incandescent lighting, colors are quite bold and noise is tolerable, but we noted the same orange color cast that we saw with photos, and it was harder to correct using the white balance setting.

Nokia includes their own Nokia Pro Camera app in place of the very basic Windows Phone camera app. You can run everything on auto and get a great picture most of the time. The only exception is indoor incandescent lighting where images are too warm, and the Xenon flash makes things yellower. Nokia's novel UI makes it easy to dial in white balance correction to correct this; even a novice could do it. There are settings for flash control, white balance, focus mode (auto, macro and infinity), ISO, shutter speed and EV. You can bring up settings individually or together at once as a series of settings arc patterns.

As mentioned, each zoom shot has a companion full frame image to allow for image editing and corrections and there's an option to take a full resolution (~34 meg) image + a 5MP image for sharing. Honestly, unless you view the images at 100% on a big monitor, you might be hard pressed to tell the higher and lower resolution images apart; the 5MP images look that good. And thank goodness for that since it takes about 2-3 seconds to save the 34 + 5MP image set, making action photography difficult. Even when we set the camera to create just a single 5MP image per shot, it took 1-2 seconds to save images. Focus times likewise aren't lightning fast, whether relying on autofocus or using tap to focus. It's a great camera for macro shots and landscapes but not for catching a zippy 2 year old or the football team in action.

That camera can shoot photos at 16:9 and 4:3 aspect ratios, and Nokia's Cinemagraph, Creative Studio and Panorama features are here as well. Nokia's image editor, Creative Studio is great. Why isn't Photoshop this fun and easy to use? You can use it to change colors, saturation, add background blur to macro shots and create collages. Every high end camera phone should come with this sort of app: it's powerful, addresses most of the corrections we'd want to make and its simple to use.

Windows Phone 8 isn't the new kid on the block anymore; that title goes to BlackBerry OS 10 now. And the OS has matured, with over 100,000 apps available on the Windows Store and a complete feature set that includes multi-tasking, copy-paste, full featured PIM apps, mapping and navigation, and mobile versions of IE 10 and MS Office. If you're an app junkie, then Windows Phone probably isn't for you. If you're the average user that wants high quality games and many of the popular staples like Netflix, The Weather Channel, Skype, Adobe Reader, Pandora Radio and ESPN, you could do just fine with Windows Phone. As always, the Live Tile UI is easy to use and is customizable for theme (colors), tile size and which tiles you want. If there's a pre-installed AT&T app (aka bloatware) that you don't want, you can delete it.

Nokia's very good HERE Drive, Maps and Transit are on board, as is the HERE City Lens augmented reality app. The suite of tools provides driving directions, satellite view maps, transit directions and POIs. For those who prefer AT&T's solution, AT&T Family Maps and Navigator are pre-installed. Nokia Music provides free streaming music with mix radio, and we've enjoyed this service since it debuted on our Lumia 920. You can even select mixes and download the tunes for offline playback, and refresh the mixes when online to get a new set of songs. The built-in XBOX Live music and video player has an FM radio that works in conjunction with wired headphones that act as the radio's antenna.

The Lumia 1020 has a 2,000 mAh Lithium Ion battery that's sealed inside. If you run out of power on the road and aren't near an outlet, you'll need to use an external USB battery pack since you can't swap in a spare battery. Nokia's optional camera grip includes a secondary battery for those who shoot lots of shots. Nokia claims almost 7 hours of video playback on a charge and 13.3 hours (max) 3G talk time and 5.5 hours of web browsing over WiFi. We're still running battery tests, but so far we've made it through the day when talking on the phone for 30 minutes, shooting 70 photos and 5 minutes of HD video, streaming several short YouTube clips, checking email and browsing the web using 4G LTE for 45 minutes. That's on par with other high end smartphones, and battery time is noticeably longer if you aren't shooting 60 to 100 shots per day like us. The Lumia 1020 supports wireless charging with an optional back.

The Droid Ultra by Motorola is the middle child in Verizon's fall 2013 Moto Droid lineup. There's the Droid Mini with a 4.3" display, our $199 with contract Droid Ultra and the $299 Droid Maxx with double the battery and storage. The Ultra is very similar to the Moto X in terms of software and internals. The exterior is all Droid though, with its masculine, dark and imposing look. Though still clad in very durable Kevlar, the Ultra has sadly gone high gloss, so the Kevlar pattern is less apparent and the phone more slippery. The Maxx keeps the matte finish with underlying diagonal pattern and is our choice for looks and tactile feel. Verizon offers the Droid Ultra in your choice of gloss black and gloss red.

Though the Ultra has more curved corners than older Motorola Droid RAZR models, it's still wide and tall enough that we wouldn't call it wildly ergonomic. It's also a slippery beast that begs for a case to increase grip. The phone is incredibly thin at 0.28", is well made and the slim bezel makes for a modern look, so it's not all bad news. It does adore fingerprints and our black phone looks simply gross after an hour of use, so keep the cleaning cloth or your shirttails handy. Better yet, if you can afford the $100 extra, get the marginally thicker and heavier Droid Maxx since it won't show fingerprints, isn't slippery and has longer battery life.

Both the power button and volume controls are on the right hand side, and they're quite tactile and thus easy to find when your eyes have better things to do. Motorola went with a very unusual SIM card slot: the nano SIM card drawer (yes, it's smaller than a micro SIM) is capped by the volume controls. Yank on them with a fingernail and you'll remove the nano SIM card holder. There is no memory expansion slot since Google now owns Motorola and Google doesn't love removable storage.

The speaker is at the upper rear so you won't likely cover it with your hand and it's louder and fuller than average, even if it can't compete with the big stereo HTC BoomSound speakers on the HTC One.

Just like the Moto X, the Droid Ultra runs on a custom 1.7GHz dual core Snapdragon S4 Pro (which usually has 4 cores). These are two Krait 300 cores with Adreno 320 graphics, so performance and benchmarks are actually very good even if they don't beat the two top speed demons, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One. Actually, graphics benchmarks match those two top Android smartphones. In use, you won't feel the difference between those two phones and the Droid Ultra plays 3D games like a champ. There's no lag and no heavy UI overlay to slow things down. In fact, it's more responsive than the Samsung Galaxy S4 that's often bogged down by Samsung's TouchWiz UI overlay and myriad software features.

Motorola includes custom cores that handle the always-on voice recognition and motion detection, and they call it their Moto X8 computing system. Yes, like the Moto X, the phone can listen for your commands even when sleeping and it can handle any command that Google Now supports (finding pizza, getting directions, launching an app and much more). Its off the cuff responses might not be as humorous as Siri on the iPhone, but it does handle natural language queries like Apple's assistant.

According to Motorola's spec sheet, the phone has the same 10MP rear camera as the Moto X, and it can shoot 1080p video and 60 FPS slow motion video too. The camera uses an RGBC sensor that should improve low light shots. In practice, it does handle low light well, and it maintains detail with decently controlled noise. Colors in general don't pop, in fact colors looked a bit lifeless compared to our Moto X, which isn't known for vibrant photos. We made sure to clean the lens since that greatly affected image quality on the X, but even with a clean lens, things often look a bit washed out (but not every shot, macro shots have bolder colors). This is likely due to image processing in firmware: folks like better than life colors and some high end camera phones like the Galaxy S4 and Lumia boost color saturation as a crowd pleaser. Clearly, Moto isn't doing anything to enhance colors when they should. We'd like to have more color to work with when post-processing with Photoshop. It's not all bad news: images are sharp with good detail, photos aren't oversharpened, and tap to focus/shoot is very quick and burst mode works well.

The Droid Ultra and Maxx have the shake to shoot feature where you snap your wrist twice to wake up the phone and launch the camera app. Once you get a hang of the motion, it's a time saver. The camera uses an improved version of the vanilla Google camera application with a large arc housing settings. You swipe in from the left to bring up settings and swiping from the right takes you to Gallery. Settings are fairly basic with HDR (on/off/auto), LED flash control, touch focus on/off, slow motion video on/off, panorama on/off, shutter sound on/off and Quick Capture (shake to launch the camera app) on/off. You can play with color effects and filters after shooting a photo using the editor, rather than in the camera app before shooting.

The 5" AMOLED display is very colorful and sharp looking, though it's 1280 x 720 rather than full HD. Honestly, with a quality panel at 5", that's plenty enough resolution and pixel density (294 PPI) for very sharp text and crisp images. Colors aren't terribly exaggerated and there's no noticeable color bias so whites look white. This is an RGB stripe display rather than Pentile Matrix, which helps apparent sharpness.

We do question Verizon's decision to go with a 5" display, and we assume they wanted to differentiate the Droid Ultra from the 4.7" Moto X and HTC One. The display size and overall design make the Ultra as large as the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4, losing some of the Moto X's appeal as a big screen phone with a relatively small casing and ergonomic design. In fact, some of you have asked why the Droid Ultra (and even Droid Maxx) exists at all. The answer is that Verizon's Droid line has always been strong in terms of marketing and sales, and Verizon wanted the line to continue. It's still differentiated by its stark, techno and masculine look and the red wallpapers and ominous "Droid" startup sound that we assume appeal to a different set of people than does the Moto X. As for the Ultra vs. Maxx, we'd go with the Maxx for its matte patterned Kevlar finish, doubled storage and bigger battery. But $299 with contract means the Droid Maxx has a maxed out price.

The phone works on Verizon's LTE network and it's a GSM world roamer too. It has dual band WiFi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 and a GPS as well as the new Miracast wireless display feature.

Call quality was surprisingly average; usually Motorola does an excellent job of voice. Outgoing voice sounded moderately digitized and incoming voice wasn't super clear. It's not a bad voice phone, but it's not as good as the top Verizon competitors or the Moto X on AT&T.

Data speeds on Verizon's strong LTE network were as expected: 10 to 17.6Mbps down and 3.5 to 6.5Mbps up according to Speedtest.net. Those speeds are comparable to the HTC One X and Galaxy S4 on Verizon and are more than adequate for HD video streaming, web browsing, app downloads and using the phone as a WiFi hotspot for a tablet or laptop.

You get all the goodies we loved so much on the Moto X: Active Notifications, Touchless Control and Motorola Assist. The Droid trio adds Droid Zap for wireless photo sharing with other Android devices (you can download Droid Zap for non-Moto phones on the Google Play Store). These three features (not so much Droid Zap) are examples of what smartphones should be doing. They make the phone easier and more fun to use, and they address real problems like driving safely while interacting with the phone, getting info without turning the phone on and using voice to control the smartphone. I prefer these features to some of the showy but less useful features we've seen weigh down other phones (ahem, Samsung).

- Active Notifications show the time and notifications such as new emails, text messages and more on the sleep screen. The notification screen appears when a new item arrives, and it shows when you move the phone. For example, if you take it out of your pocket or pick it up from the desk, you'll see the time and notifications so you needn't press the power button or unlock the phone. You can control what appears on the screen (in the interest of privacy) and you needn't wake the phone to see more info. If there's a new email, drag the email notification up and it will show you a preview of the new message. Motorola says this saves power since most users turn on the screen many times per day simply to check notifications and the time. The Active Notifications screen uses less power and keeps you informed. Once you get used to this feature, it's hard to go back.

- Touchless Control is Moto's name for voice command that's always listening, even if the phone is sleeping with the display turned off. Thanks to Moto's custom CPU for voice processing, it doesn't drain power madly as does Samsung S Voice with the always-listening function turned on. You'll have to preface your command with the phrase "OK Google Now" so the phone doesn't randomly respond to everything it hears. You'll train it to recognize your voice (just in case you and your spouse or co-worker both have Moto Droid or Moto X phones) and you must use the phrase "OK Google Now". I admit I feel a little dorky saying that phrase, but I quickly got over it when I enjoyed asking the phone what time it was when the phone was in my pocket and my hands and eyes were busy playing BioShock Infinite on my PC. Then I set an alarm for 30 minutes... because you know how one loses track of time when playing a fun game. Yes, there are more serious uses like calling someone or composing a text message, and the phone handles natural language queries well even if it isn't as sassy as Siri.

- Motorola Assist is the evolution of the work Motorola has done to automate tasks based on location and activity. The night mode can silence the phone for the hours you specify. It can automatically silence the phone during scheduled meetings. It uses the GPS and motion sensors to determine when you're driving and it enters car mode where it can announce caller's names and read text messages to you.

Motorola quotes battery life in a novel way, rather than stating talk time or video playback time, they simply state the battery will last for 24 hours of average use. Don't get excited: unlike talk time or video playback time estimates, Moto's claim includes screen off time when your phone is idle or in deep sleep. Granted, Motorola's X8 computing platform revolves around saving battery life while enabling some normally battery-killing features like the always-listening touchless control, and they went with a two core Snapdragon and 720p AMOLED display to save even more power, but a heavy phone user won't make it 24 hours unplugged. With light use, it's perfectly feasible, but for those of you who stream lots of YouTube, indulge in 3D games or use the GPS heavily, this is the usual charge it every night when you go to bed phone. In terms of screen-on use time, it falls between the GS4 and HTC One, and runtimes are shorter than the Moto X.

The Droid Ultra has a 2130 mAh Lithium Ion battery that's sealed inside. That's a little bit less capacity than the 2300 mAh Moto X and considerably less than the 3500 mAh Droid Maxx. The phone ships with the usual compact world charger and it does not support wireless charging. You can of course use micro USB based portable battery packs if you need more power on the road.

The LG G2 is LG's flagship mainstream size (by Android standards) smartphone for fall 2013. It competes with the Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One, Moto X and iPhone 5s, and it does a fine job. While the shiny plastic back and simple front don't set it ahead of the classier competition from Apple, HTC and Nokia, the edge to edge 5.2" full HD IPS display does set it apart, as does the Qualcomm 800 CPU. Sure, in 6 months that CPU will be standard fare for top tier phones, but right now it's one of the very few on the market. The LG G2 also features an excellent 13MP rear camera, WiFi 802.11ac, NFC, a larger than average battery and an immense bundle of LG software. Following the flagship Android trend, the LG G2 has an IR remote so you can control your home theatre gear from the comfort of your couch.

LG has come a long way from promising but flawed high end Android phones to the well-received Optimus G Pro phablet and now the G2. The G2 carries on for the Optimus line (LG has dropped the Optimus name here), and it's a very good smartphone with no caveats or fatal flaws. Yes, the design isn't wildly imaginative, but it feels good in the hand, has tapers and curves in the right places and it's solidly put together. The phone is available in gloss black and gloss white. LG did exercise a little imagination for button placement: the power and volume controls are on the back, where your index finger would naturally fall when holding the phone in portrait mode. They did this so they could bring the display out to the very edge on the sides. I wouldn't call it a selling point, but in actual use it works easily enough except when holding the phone in landscape mode. Then I had to hunt for the volume controls since they don't live where my hands tend to hold the phone. Oddly, the Verizon version of this phone has slightly different rear buttons that are less tactile; we prefer the "standard" version buttons used on other carriers' models.

Look out, HTC One: the LG G2 is threatening your top display title. The G2's 5.2" full HD IPS display is simply sharp, colorful and gorgeous. Viewing angles are generous and colors are natural and well balanced. In fact, the color calibration is among the best we've seen on a smartphone (which admittedly doesn't say much since most phones and mobile OS tablets pay little attention to color calibration). The display is viewable outdoors, unlike the Super AMOLED displays used on the Galaxy S4 and Moto X. We're impressed that LG managed to fit an even bigger display in a phone that's the same size as the 4.7" HTC One and 5" Galaxy S4. Pixel density is an impressive 424 PPI, and that means you won't see staircasing on text, no matter how good your eyes are.

The Qualcomm 800 CPU is another shining star. Though phones are getting faster than we need, I know a lot of you like to have the fastest and feel your gadget is at least reasonably future proof. Clocked at an impressive 2.26GHz, the quad core Snpadragon 800 with Adreno 330 graphics is top of the line for Qualcomm. It holds up well against NVIDIA's Tegra 4, which we've seen in the NVIDIA Shield and a few tablets so far. Benchmark numbers are through the roof and the phone is wickedly fast. Even LG's huge suite of custom software doesn't bog down the phone. 3D games play flawlessly on the G2, and the back gets warm but not hot when playing demanding 3D games. The display remains cool to the touch.

The US LG G2 models have 32 gigs of internal storage, but there's no microSD card slot, so you won't be able to expand storage. The phone does support USB host and we used it with USB flash drives. You'll need to buy a USB OTG cable if you want to use this feature. And yes, you can also use USB game controllers, keyboards and portable hard drives that don't draw too much power from the USB port.

Calling and Data

Call quality on our AT&T and Verizon review units was excellent with clear voice that sounded full and natural by cell phone standards. The G2 joins other top voice phones like the Nokia Lumia 1020, HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 as well as the iPhone 5s for excellent call quality.

The smartphone has 4G LTE with fallback to HSPA+ on GSM carriers and EV-DO Rev. A 3G on CDMA carriers. Data speeds matched other top phones according to the Speedtest.net app, and the phone can act as a mobile hotspot for your tablet or laptop.

Speaking of software, there's an incredible helping here, from items like Quick Memo and QSlide multitasking that we've seen on other recent LG phones, to the Samsung-like features that include a floating transparent and resizable video player, the function where the phone uses the front camera to watch you so it won't turn off the screen while you're looking at it, and conversely it will pause video playback if you look away. LG offers much more user UI customization than we've seen on other brands, and that's a nice touch. You can change icons, change the app drawer layout, set folder colors and you can even select the set of on-screen Android buttons that appear along the bottom (the G2 has on-screen rather than capacitive or hardware front buttons). Yes, it's a lot of software, but I actually find much of it pleasant and easy to use. I really enjoy LG's Knock feature where you tap the screen twice to wake up the phone or put it to sleep. Having the phone answer an incoming call simply because I'm pulling it from my pocket and raising it to my ear is excellent and the QSlide multitasking (think of them as persistent floating widgets) is handy. Overall, LG's software appeals to me, even though I generally prefer phones with a clean Android experience. I find most of LG's apps and add-ons intuitive to use while Samsung's TouchWiz is moving toward devilish complexity on phones like the Galaxy Note 3. The phone ships with Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean.

Here's why I love the G2: the camera. Though not the only smartphone to use Sony's capable 13MP Exmor RS sensor, the LG pulls ahead for excellent image processing and optical image stabilization. There's plenty of image data thanks to the megapixel rating, and happily LG resists over-sharpening what's already sharp enough. That means photos look detailed and they're very natural looking with good tonal variation and warmth. Exposure is generally balanced with none of the white out that the Samsung Galaxy S4 is prone to, and it takes better low light shots than the GS4. The HTC One is still one of the best low light phones, but you won't get the resolution on the One that you do with the LG G2. Does it take better photos than the also very good iPhone 5s? Yes it does in terms of image detail (the added resolution helps) and optical image stabilization outperforms the iPhone's digital stabilization for video recording. In terms of exposure, color balance and saturation they're on equal footing. The iPhone 5s' larger pixels capture more detail in very low light settings like nightclubs. Does the LG G2 beat the 41MP Nokia Lumia 1020 and its PureView camera? Nope. But unless you're a photo buff, the LG will be plenty good enough.

LG offers plenty of features including a variety of filters, full control over manual settings, macro mode and even Intelligent Auto that works much like the same feature on Sony cameras and smartphones. The camera can shoot using the 2.1MP front and rear cameras simultaneously and the rear camera has fast HDR (likely thanks to the fast CPU). Thanks to optical image stabilization, video is smooth and there's more detail captured rather than noise from movement. As you'd expect, the rear camera can shoot 1080p video.

Past LG Android phones haven't been Energizer bunnies. Happily that's changed with the LG G2, thanks in part to the unusually high capacity 3,000 mAh battery that's sealed inside. The phone has to power a fast quad core CPU, large full HD display panel and 4G LTE radio; and it's up to the task. With moderate to heavy use I easily made it through the day on a charge. This included phone calls, an hour total of web browsing, shooting 40 photos and a few short videos, streaming YouTube HD video, listening to music with the display off and playing games for 30 minutes. For actual screen on time, the G2 lasted an hour longer than my Galaxy S4 (standard edition, not Google Play Edition) and 40 minutes longer than my HTC One. Since the battery is sealed inside, you won't be able to swap in a spare on the road. As with the HTC One and iPhone, you can use external micro USB battery packs to extend runtimes if you'll be away from a power outlet for long periods of time.