[Xperia Z General] RCJ89:
This ^^^^^^, I had all top phones from the top three Android OEMs you could say? I had Xperia S, I had SGS3, I had One S, I had One X, I had Xperia T and I had GN2. I am going to cast my opinions of the phones, others may feel differently.

First of all let me start with the two phones that were supposed to be the best phones of the year:

S3/note 2 - Good points: battery life was great especially note 2, notification light, camera autofocus/speed, camera quality outdoors/indoros at night with flash, design of the phones, audio quality, I liked the extra volume in phone calls and earpeice/loud speakers are very good.

Bad points , boring boring boring UI, horrid keyboard, S3 screen I thought was horrible, alot of those so called smart features didn't work very well on either phone, audio volume was low on s3 note 2 was a bit louder, I could always see the pixels and screen didn't look very smooth on S3, note 2 dispite lower ppi and bigger screen was much better due to normal RGB arrangement, camera indoors with lighting was washed out on both S3/GN2, audio recording was better on note 2 but still not upto scratch especially when recording moving objects and just generally found the phones really boring.

Xperia S/T - Good points: screen, camera/video quality, video audio, xperia UI, keyboard, notification light on xperia S, design of both phones, audio quality, loud speaker/earpiece speaker on xperia s, speed and performance on xperia t

Bad points: slow performance on xperia s, poor battery life on both, poor loud speaker/earpiece speaker on t, audio volume on both, pointless notification light on t, button placement on t, slow auto focus on both.

One S/X - Good Points: screen on X, Camera/video quality on both, auto focus speed, video audio on s, battery life on s, HTC have best UI and keyboard imo, notification light, design on both phones, audio quality and volume, earpiece/loudspeaker, speed and performance,

Bad points - screen on s, battery life and over heating on x, poor memory on s only 9.9gb, video audio on x was too sharp and video was too zoomed in on both phones.

Here is hoping that HTC improve video audio/zooming and battery life, in regards to sony i believe they are there now and it is for these reasons I am sticking with SONY and HTC from now on.

If i read the reviews of the z before playing with it, my heart would have sank and I would have probably cancelled my pre order however I have played with the phone have spent over 3hours now playing with it in the shops and I dont have any complaints about it and I am hearing good things about battery life so for me everything has been improved over the s/t. PA gave the one x 7.8/10 didn't phase me I thought it was a great phone bar the poor battery and overheating due to the tegra 3. also most reviews said the camera was bad I didn't think so atall I found it better than the s3/note 2 which all reviews generally praised.

I have learned not to trust reviews anyway and to go and evaluate a product myself. If everyone listened to reviews in the car world/family hatch segment all would have a golf for example and in phone world either iphone or s3. Reviews at the end of the day are subjective imo and some say one feature is good or give something a score another review may say that feature is bad and give it a different score. I am my own reviewer.