The Best Android Phones

By Wendy Sheehan Donnell, PC Magazine

It's hard to believe that it's been just three years since Google's open-source Android mobile operating system hit the scene. When the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, was released, the mobile landscape looked very different. Most people carried simple handsets that focused on making calls. If you were lucky, you could listen to music or play games on your mobile phone.

Back then, you didn't have to have a smartphone that ran thousands of apps to let you, in the palm of your hand, do many of the things your computer could do. Apps weren't even a thing yet. Apple had only released the iPhone 3G and launched its groundbreaking App Store a couple of months earlier.

It was the introduction of Android that helped propel the app-based smartphone to what it is today. The thing Android offered, which Apple's iPhone couldn't, was choice. Since it was an open-source platform, several hardware manufacturers could use the OS on their handsets, and a variety of wireless carriers could offer those phones—and they did.

A year after Android was released, in the U.S. there was a single Apple iPhone on a single carrier, but there were eight different Android handsets with varying form factors available on three of the four major carriers. Today, you can find a variety of Android phones on AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless. Even the little guys like Cricket and Virgin Mobile offer Android options. According to Comscore, Android enjoys 33 percent of the U.S. smartphone market today.

That's a lot of phones to choose from. To come up with our list, we've chosen two winners for each of the four major carriers, one for each of four smaller carriers, and, if you're contract-phobic, the best unlocked handset. If you've settled on Android as your mobile platform, these phones are your best bets—for now, that is. At this rate of growth, we can assure you that there's another great 'Droid right around the corner.

Another unlimited mobile broadband plan bites the dust

Another unlimited mobile broadband plan bites the dust - Yahoo! News: "Now that Virgin Mobile has decided to start capping its once-unlimited 3G mobile broadband plan, there's only one national U.S. carrier left that's offering true, all-you-can-eat broadband data. For now.

Virgin Mobile's $40-a-month, unlimited 3G broadband plan instantly became one of the best deals in wireless when it was announced last August, especially given that you could use it with a $150 portable MiFi hotspot on a no-contract basis.

But now comes word from Wired's Gadget Lab that starting February 15, Virgin will begin throttling its 'Unlimited Broadband2Go' users if they bust over 5GB of data a month.

How much slower will your downloads be? Virgin Mobile isn't saying, but given that mobile 3G data can be poky even under the best of circumstances, don't expect to be streaming any Netflix videos once you get throttled. (Incidentally, Wired reports that Virgin will be keep using the 'Unlimited Broadband2Go' name, despite the new 5GB cap.)

So, given that Virgin Mobile's unlimited 3G broadband plan will, as of next month, become quite limited, U.S. road warriors will soon be left with precious few options — well, one option, really — when it comes to true all-you-can-eat mobile broadband data from a national carrier, and even this last remaining option is starting to look shaky.

(Note: Just to be clear, I'm referring to mobile broadband plans for USB modems and mobile hotspots, not smartphone plans — although more and more smartphone data plans are capped, too.)

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Your Own Hot Spot, and Cheap

Your Own Hot Spot, and Cheap - Yahoo! Finance

"Someday, they’ll build wireless Internet into every building, just the way they build in running water, heat and electricity today. Someday, we won’t have to drive around town looking for a coffee shop when we need to check our e-mail.

If you want ubiquitous Internet today, though, you have several choices. They’re all compromised and all expensive.

You could get online using only a smartphone, but you’ll pay at least $80 a month and you’ll have to view the Internet through a shrunken keyhole of a screen. You could equip your laptop with one of those cellular air cards or U.S.B. sticks, which cost $60 a month, but you’d be limited to 5 gigabytes of data transfer a month (and how are you supposed to gauge that?). You could use tethering, in which your laptop uses your cellphone as a glorified Internet antenna — but that adds $20 or $30 to your phone bill, has a fixed data limit and eats through your phone’s battery charge in an hour.

Last year, you could hear minds blowing coast to coast when Novatel introduced a new option: the MiFi. It creates a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot that, because it’s the size of a porky credit card, can go with you everywhere. The MiFi gets its Internet signal from a 3G cellphone network and converts it into a Wi-Fi signal that up to five people can share.

You can just leave the thing in your pocket, your laptop bag or your purse to pump out a fresh Internet signal to everyone within 30 feet, for four hours on a charge of the removable battery. You’re instantly online whenever you fire up your laptop, netbook, Wi-Fi camera, game gadget, iPhone or iPod Touch.

The MiFi released by Virgin Mobile this week ($150) is almost exactly the same thing as the one offered by Verizon and, until recently, Sprint — but there’s a twist that makes it revolutionary all over again.

The Virgin MiFi, like its rivals, is still an amazing gizmo to have on long car rides for the family, on woodsy corporate offsite meetings, at disaster sites, at trade show booths or anywhere you can’t get Wi-Fi. If you live alone, the MiFi could even be your regular home Internet service, too — one that you can take with you when you head out the door. And it’s still insanely useful when you’re stuck on a plane on a runway.

But three things about the Virgin MiFi are very, very different. First, Virgin’s plan is unlimited. You don’t have to sweat through the month, hoping you don’t exceed the standard 5-gigabyte data limit, as you do with the cellular-modem products from Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile. (If you exceed 5 gigabytes, you pay steep per-megabyte overage charges, or in T-Mobile’s case, you get your Internet speed slowed down for the rest of the month.)

If you hadn’t noticed, unlimited-data plans are fast disappearing — but here’s Virgin, offering up an unlimited Internet plan as if it never got the memo.

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Hands-on review: Helio Ocean 2 smartphone

Hands-on review: Helio Ocean 2 smartphone : Ben Patterson : Yahoo! Tech

"Helio may have been gobbled up by Virgin Mobile last summer, but the brand name lives on, as evinced by the new—if only modestly revamped—Ocean 2 QWERTY slider. Is the latest Ocean worth the $70 premium over the already robust original?

Set to go on sale next Thursday (Feb. 12) for $149 with a two-year contract (post-paid, not pre-paid as with Virgin Mobile's other handsets), the Ocean 2 has been whispered about for months—indeed, the first fuzzy photos appeared on the Web last May, while a series of leaked images have had the blogosphere buzzing in recent days."