Winner

This year no one smartphone has truly stood out head and shoulders above the rest of the pack and that’s largely due to the fact that, as we said earlier, the gap at the top has shrunk down to almost nothing.

Each of the competitors could have won our supertest and those that didn’t missed out on the top prize because of a glaring omission or problem with them. In the end though it was the HTC One (M8) that won us over because of a combination of fantastic design on both hardware and software.

That said, it’s still has a seriously flawed camera experience and if high fidelity mobile photography is your thing there are better options out there.

The HTC One may not reign supreme for long on the top of our charts either with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6+ as well as the Sony Xperia Z3 all slated to arrive in the next few days putting even more serious competition into the top end of the market.