[Xperia Z General] Shasarak:
As I mentioned earlier I had a play with an Xperia Z yesterday, and also with an HTC One (in a different shop). In passing I messed around briefly with a Galaxy Note II as well. Some quick impressions:

The colours on the Note II's screen were so badly over-saturated that they made my eyeballs bleed, but there was no denying the inherent fabulousness of a larger screen. I'd actually like something even bigger, really. (It's a constant source of irritation that none of the 7" tablets have 1080p displays,.and they don't make phone calls either).

The Xperia Z, as expected, had unusually narrow viewing angles, but they're not quite narrow enough to actually be a problem in any way. (On my old HTC HD2, it really was an issue: when watching a movie there was a visible difference in brightness between the centre of the screen and the edges because of the angle). I watched a bit of video on the XZ, felt my eyes starting to bleed again from the horribly oversaturated colours, then went into the display settings and switched off Bravia: that made everything look an awful lot better: still a little over-saturated, but quite tolerable. Whites were also quite visibly pushed towards blue.

Mobile phone shops always have demo models anchored down underneath blindingly bright spotlights. This a cunning ploy which makes it utterly impossible to get an accurate impression of the screen's black-level. But I was struck by the fact that, even with the blinding spotlight, blacks still weren't black.

(As a sidenote, Sony has stupidly opted to give most of the UI a dark grey background, which makes everything look even more washed out than it actually is. But genuine black - for example in the camera app with the lens covered - still showed a definite blue glow, even when viewed from straight ahead.)

There wasn't much to play with on there, but the UI was smooth as silk - not even the faintest hint of stutter anywhere. My Galaxy S2 suddenly feels very juddery by comparison.

I wasn't able to pick it up - it was bolted down - but the shape is very geometric - all straight lines and right angles.

The HTC One feels remarkably light in the hand. (I was actually able to handle one that wasn't tied down). I found it extremely difficult to hold securely - it's so thin at the edges, with a narrow bezel, that there's nothing you can keep a grip on.

If you're the kind of person who is happy to pay £500 for a nice-looking piece of metal or plastic, you'll probably like it - the back is all curved aluminium.

The salesman gave me a lengthy (but fairly informative guide) to all the stuff it does. Highlights are the news-feedy rectangles you can put all over the home screen (and which can include links to TV shows that update to tell you when the next episode is and give you a summary; tap on it, and the IR blaster switches your TV to the correct channel to watch it), front-facing stereo speakers which, while not exactly hifi, are far better then anything else you'll find on a phone, and an apparently never-ending series of camera-gimmicks which are all almost unbelievably cool, but probably of rather limited usefulness in practice. For example, if someone is walking around in the background of your photo, you can very easily remove him: each photo is actually a short video 9about 3 seconds long), so the phone (automatically) figures out the edges of the object you want to remove, and then replaces all the pixels within that region using pixels from other frames that cover the same area of the background but don't contain the moving object/person. You can also do the reverse - capture multiple versions of the same moving object from different frames and display them all within the same frame. The Gallery screen is also animated with all the mini videos, so it looks rather like the front page of the newspaper in the Harry Potter movies....

The screen is effortlessly superior to the one on the XZ except for its smaller size - and it does somehow seem a LOT smaller, possibly because the body of the phone is so long and narrow.

One truly idiotic decision by HTC was to include hard buttons for "home" and "back" but only a soft, on-screen "menu" button, thus giving the worst of both worlds.

I swore I would never, ever buy another HTC phone after the never-ending fiasco of the HD2, but I must admit to being tempted.... If only the screen were bigger!