15 Hottest smartphones of 2009

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Korean giant Samsung refreshed its popular Omnia line-up in the country with the addition of two handsets, Omnia HD and Omnia Pro B7320.

Samsung claims Omnia HD is the world's first full-touch handset with an AMOLED screen size of largest 9.4 cm (3.7-inch). The Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode or AMOLED, touch screen offers sharpness of tone, vivid colours, greater clarity in direct sunlight and consumes less power. The phone has a 16:9 screen with 16M colours.

Unlike the HD's touch screen interface, Omnia PRO has a full Qwerty keypad and boasts of a compact design. Pro has a 2.4-inch TFT LCD display and supports 16M colours.

With 8 megapixel camera, Omnia HD is said to be the first handset featuring 720 pixels high definition (HD) video recording. Pro features a 3 megapixel camera with auto-focus.

Omnia HD comes with an internal memory of 16GB which can be extended to another 32GB, adding up to a total memory capacity of whopping 48GB. Omnia Pro B7320 offers an internal memory of only 70MB, which is expandable up to 16 GB.

At the launch, Omnia HD was priced at Rs 33,990 while Omnia Pro came with a price tag of Rs 16,500.

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HTC became the first company to bring India's first smartphone that runs on Google's open source Android operating system. HTC Magic, popularly called G2 or the second generation Google phone, as priced around Rs 30,000 approximately.

The phone has a 3.2 inch HVGA touchscreen display with 320 x480 resolution. HTC Magic weighs 116 gms with battery and comes with onscreen keyboard.

The vital statistics of the phone is 11.3 x 5.56 x 1.36 cm. There is a trackball for scrolling screens with Enter ****on. Other features include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mini USB and GPS. In addition to accelerometer, HTC G2 has one G Sensor. There is also an MP3 player that supports major audio formats like AAC, AAC+, AMR-NB, MP3, WAV and MIDI.

Magic sports a 3.2 megapixel with Auto Focus. It supports only video formats like MP4 and 3GP which are slightly less when compared to the current standard of Android mobiles.

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Samsung too joined the megapixel war with the launch of a 12-megapixel phone Pixon12 M8910 in the Indian market.

Measuring 108x53x13.8mm, Pixon12 features a 3.1-inch AMOLED touchscreen display. The screen boasts of a contrast ratio of 10,000:1.

The phone packs features like GPS, Bluetooth and an FM radio with RDS. As for memory capacity, Pixon12 comes with 150MB of internal memory and supports up to 16GB of MicroSD cards.

The phone's USP is its 12 megapixel camera which has a Xenon power LED flash and touch autofocus, that lets users decide the focal point with the touch of a finger.

Pixon12 also has a 28mm wide angle lens and a Smart Auto feature. The phone's Smart Auto feature enables camera to automatically change the scene and mode based on background and lighting. Pixon12 records with 720 by 480 resolution at 30 frames per second. Pixon12 was priced around Rs 29,990.

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RIM refreshed its Curve line-up in India with the launch of BlackBerry Curve 8520. Measuring 109mm in height, 60mm in width and 13.9mm in depth, it weighs 106 gram.

Priced under Rs 15K, the phone replaces the BlackBerry’s traditional trackball navigation and is the first BlackBerry device to sport dedicated music keys.

Sporting a glossy finish, Curve 8520 has a 2.64-inch TFT widescreen with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. The phone has a Qwerty keypad with smaller keys compared to other Curve models. However, they have been slightly raised for easy tapping.

The smartphone has only a 2 megapixel camera with 5X digital zoom. Also, there is no flash or auto focus feature. It offers video recording at a resolution of 320 x 240. Curve 8520 supports most of the video formats including MPEG4, H.263, H.264, and WMV3.

Curve 8520 has a stereo headset, a 2 GB card, USB cable and a 3.5mm headphone jack.