[LG Optimus 4X HD] UIQrules:
I'm still cheating on it with my p1i. But if you need an android phone, you can do (a lot) worse than this one. Battery life is good, when comparing it to other android phones I've tried... also compared to other tegra 3 devices.. Standby-time tends to be measured in days, which is as it should be (even if that hasn't been obvious for designers for a while for some reason). And battery life while running low-power apps also is good because of the companion core, and lack of in-built apps that use active focus, or keep requesting busy services too fast, etc. So playing music or streaming in the background, and so on, actually didn't draw much power.

So then you have basically the standby time of the second generation iPhones, while still also having the low power-draw while running modest tasks, or flipping through the menus. Seems to be intelligently set up when it comes to using cores when accelerating video, and running on hdmi out as well. That it's not pushing every core to full burn, and balance the running cores. I expect that this is not specific to this phone, though, and happens transparently on the chipset (and that it's the lack of active in-built apps in the background that makes the difference between this and the onex that I tried). On top of that you have apparently the best 3d performance in the shop, without the thing becoming a glowing hot potato in your hand after two minutes.

Menu system and standby screen with the circle unlock (that opens up directly to the app below, etc) also works well, imo. Would wish they did a bit more with it and let you customise it a bit more, though.

Did I mention it has a stereo-plug connector that's not in conductive rubber? That's lovely. Screen and edges I like better than the iPhone I was forced to use for a short while.

Also, optional and removable sd-slot. Thought that was standard nowadays, but no.

Negatives are.. no led blip when getting new messages. Is a bit strange, but saves me a lot of stress, strangely enough :p

Has no keyboard. And it's fricking huge (relatively speaking.. it's smaller than both the galaxy 3 and the onex.. :/ which makes it the smallest in this class.. :( fail.. ). If you open it up, the widest component is the module with the home-buttons. Next is the external modules for antenna, I think. The actual core chip with the bus-interface is less than half the thickness of the device. Battery is tiny inside the chassis as well. They could easily have fitted a slightly flatter but larger lithium-polymer battery inside that casing, and had twice the battery life on this thing.

So maybe one day, we'll get a device like this in a credit card sized ips panel. Grey or Tegra4 maybe? Should be possible in the current design as well, though.

Other than that - no odt text editor in Android yet. But I can spam twitter and facebook with every touch of my fingers. Otherwise, format support is good, and this phone doesn't force you to use specific applications via annoying vendor registry settings. Which is a mercy since the boot-loader is locked.

But lacking that smaller phone... since there unfortunately ARE NO PHONES LIKE THAT ON THE MARKET WHATSOEVER. Smaller phones also tend to be thicker. And the different manufacturers are competing with themselves on who can make the most iPhone-like iPhone copy. And have apparently decided that slide-out keyboards are evil... So with that in mind, this is probably the best you can get at the moment, since it's also the cheapest tegra 3 phone on the market. Frankly agonized a lot over buying it, but I'm not unhappy with it so far.