CES 2013: Top 5 Smartphones on show

The International CES is finally over, and it’s now time to look back and see what interesting devices were announced. Although there were not that many smartphones being launched at this year’s show, AMELIE HUNTER rounds up the top five.

1. Sony Xperia Z

I think everyone will agree that Sony’s Xperia Z is the most interesting smartphone shown at the CES 2013. With its 5-inch Full HD 1080p touchscreen, it’s one of the most serious rivals of Samsung’s Galaxy Note phones: it’s also dust-resistant and waterproof to three feet for 30 minutes, and this feature makes it even cooler.

In its thin 7.9mm body it hides a quad-core Snapdragon S4 with 2GB of RAM, and a 2330 mAh battery. Another interesting feature is the camera it has 13MP lens and takes quite good pics. As for software, the Xperia Z runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and will later be upgraded to 4.2. 4G LTE and NFC are also supported.

Sony introduced another good phone, the Xperia ZL, too, but it’s almost the same Xperia Z without the waterproof feature and a few other changes, so I decided not to include it in this list.

Huawei’s Ascend series have been quite popular lately, and now they’ve decided to add a new phone to this line. Meet the Ascend D2! In terms of features, it has much in common with the Sony Xperia Z and can also make quite a good rival to the Samsung Galaxy Note 2.

The Ascend D2 has a 5-inch display with 1080 x 1920 pixels resolution. It’s not really waterproof, but it is splash-proof, which is also not bad. Its quad-core processor is clocked at 1.5 GHz, and with 2GB of RAM, 3000 mAh battery (!) and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean it’s a rather attractive smartphone.

Like most other phones introduced at this year’s CES, the ZTE Grand S has a 5-inch Full HD touchscreen, a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor and 2 gigs of RAM. However, the battery is rather small (1,780mAh only), and Android 4.1’s buggy custom UI is rather disappointing, but ZTE still have a chance to conquer the US if they clean up the UI at least.

Lenovo’s K900 is quite a gorgeous smartphone with a 5.5-inch display with 1080p resolution, Intel’s Atom z2580 processor clocked at 2 GHz and a 13MP camera with Sony’s Exmor image processor. It’s also very thin measuring at only 6.9mm, and it weighs only 5.7 ounces. The only problem of this cool phone is that it is designed for China, so most likely it won’t be released in the US and Europe. But who knows, maybe Lenovo will eventually bring it to our markets, too, if it becomes very popular.

The last interesting smartphone shown at the CES 2013 was Alcatel’s One Touch Scribe X. It has a 5-inch display (are you surprised?), a quad-core processor clocked at 1.4 GHz, and a 12MP camera. The rest of the features aren’t known yet, but even if they aren’t very attractive, the One Touch Scribe X can still become a best-seller If Alcatel sets a good price, of course!

* Amelia Hunter is founder and editor ofhttp://www.teqno-logical.com. Follow her on Twitter on @HunterAmelia