Comparing Android Touch Phones Under Rs. 20K

Phones with Google's Android are being baked and sent to the market one after the other. This open-source mobile operating system has been more than a blessing to many phone makers, who had the expertise in making the hardware, but didn't really have a polished OS with enhanced functionality to run them on. The best part about Android is that it's free for any manufacturer to take and slap on their devices. Also, there isn't a stringent hardware checklist to follow, unlike Microsoft's Windows Phone 7.

This enables companies to roll out cost-effective smartphones that are within the reach of many. Not to say that they have to compromise on certain features to get that price down, and the degradation in the performance of these when compared to the flagship Android phones is noticeable. But considering the lackluster interface, laggy performance and fragmented availability of apps on phones that were sold before Android was born, things definitely have gotten better.

Today, I am honestly not skeptical about touchscreen phones as I was, maybe, two years before. The interfaces are intuitive, the touch response is accurate, which makes me not miss hardware buttons anymore. Thus, we're taking a look at touchscreen only phones that have cropped up aplenty between the Rs. 10,000 and Rs. 20,000 price range. By comparing the specs, you'll see that they are quite similar. There are only a few minute differences that differ from model to model. Let's take a quick peek at what those differences are. Now, I don't want to go on rambling about the same things over and over again, so I'll just list out features that are common to all in this segment:

a) All are 3.5G ready (i.e. HSDPA compatible). This is good since we're witnessing private operators roll out 3G services one by one. Other forms of connectivity i.e. Wi-fi, Bluetooth and data cable are present as well. Lastly, all have a GPS chip that is necessary for extremely nifty apps like Google Maps.

b) All have capacitive screens that are optimized to be used with fingers.

c) All have accelerometers for automatic rotation of the content on the screen according to the way you hold it.

d) All have FM Radio; a feature that may be of prime importance to some.

Now that we've gotten this out of the way, let's take a closer look at what each phone has to offer.