The summer of the smartphone is upon us. With the arrival of a new messiah phone from Cupertino (Apple iPhone 4, $200 on AT&T), the very first 4G phone in the U.S. (HTC Evo 4G, $200 on Sprint), and the fastest Android device on the market (Samsung Captivate, $200 on AT&T), smartphone buyers have never faced a better slate of options – or a more confusing one.

While it’s tough to go wrong with any of these Herculean challengers, one must naturally reign supreme. We’ve pitted all three head-to-head in the most important feature categories to see which phone should call your pocket

Display

Winner: Apple iPhone 4

The screens on all three phones equate to big, bigger and biggest, with 3.5 inches on the iPhone, 4.0 on the Captivate and 4.3 on the Evo 4G. So how does the smallest one win?

It’s not all about diagonal span. Both the Evo 4G and Samsung Captivate offer fewer pixels (800 x 480) than the iPhone 4, which quadrupled pixels from the original iPhone to an unheard of 960 x 640. The Captivate also uses an OLED screen. While it looks more vibrant inside, it also washes out easily in the sun, and whites swing toward an unnatural blue. While the bigger size of the Evo 4G and Samsung Captivate might be superior for watching movies, we’re evaluating phones, not media players. The iPhone’s outdoor livability and ultra-sharp text – something you’ll be looking at a lot of – make it the most practical of the three.

Connectivity

Winner: Evo 4G

With both the Captivate and iPhone 4 sharing AT&T’s infamously hobbled 3G network, and the Evo wearing its first-4G-phone-in-America pin, this one’s a no-brainer. Besides the sheer speed, it’s also the only one that can double as a Wi-Fi router to share connectivity with other devices.

For what it’s worth, the second-place winner between the AT&T phones is just as easy to peg. Reception on the iPhone 4 sucks. Despite all the numbers Steve Jobs packed into a PowerPoint presentation to claim there was no problem with the iPhone 4 antenna (while simultaneously announcing a way to rectify the non-problem), the collective complaints of thousands of iPhone 4 users still speaks otherwise. Frequent dropped calls and notoriously poor reception make the iPhone 4 far inferior to the Captivate for making calls.

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Source: http://shopping.yahoo.com

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