Back in January, Gizmodo teamed up with EE to run a competition called Testmodo, where three lucky winners could review three high-end smartphones on EE’s super fast 4G network, and then keep all three!
Testmodo is finally over, and the three lucky winners — Craig, Baij and Amanda — have had their chance to push the three smartphones to the limit.
The Samsung Note 3 was unsurprisingly popular for its specs, endless array of features and sheer power. Its downfall it seems, was in Samsung’s insistence on bloating their software with apps and functionality that aren’t always useful, with Craig commenting “It offers you every feature that might be possible on a phone; not necessarily a useful feature, not usually a well implemented feature, but Samsung wants to offer it first”.
While the size of Nokia Lumia 1320’s 6-inch display left them in awe, it was the smartphone’s specs that left Craig & Baij wanting, with Baij writing: “It’s a cheaper device and this is reflected in the specs, 5MP camera, a meagre 8MB of internal storage and while a huge screen, not one with a great resolution”.
The best all-rounder seems to have been HTC’s new flagship, the One M8. This smartphone was showered with praise about its slick design and construction quality. While they would have liked improvements to the Ultrapixel camera, the software on this phone was the preferred out of the three, with Craig saying “As a control freak and stock-Android zealot it is significant to highlight just how satisfied I am with the OS out of the box”.
One unanimous decision was that EE’s 4G speeds performed exceptionally, with all three reviewers claiming rapid download/upload speeds. If you’d like the full breakdown of their reviews, just visit the link below!
