For the past few months I've been living with most of the phones on the market in an ongoing mission to find out which one is best. Today's test is mainly about establishing which is the best 4G phone on the market although I'll also cover the best 3g smart phones at all price points too.

The fast-paced, cutting-edge nature of phone technology means there's always something new appearing. However, it does pose a challenge for tests such as this in that I can only wait so long for the next phone to appear.

The importance of cameras
A factor that has become increasingly more important is camera. My son's recent school concert was illustrative: there wasn't one single camcorder or stills camera on display as all the parents were using phones instead. As such I look for decent video, sharp outdoor pictures and good indoor performance.

4G
4G coverage is still patchy throughout Australia but it's definitely improving. Furthermore, despite fears for a network collapse due to all of the new iPhone 5 users, it's still working very well. It's not uncommon to hit 20Mb/s upload and downloads and you get used to having these speeds very quickly. Being able to upload HD videos from your phone is now doable and waiting fractions of seconds to upload videos is hard to give up.

Operating System
I'm not too fussed about platform: Android, Apple iOS and Windows Phone all work very well nowadays. So long as a phone doesn't annoy me by making core functions fiddly or not having access to key apps, they're fine.

You could wait forever to buy your next phone - there are always newer and better models on the horizon. It is worth waiting a little longer to buy a 3G flagship. There's every chance that the new Nexus could trump the SGS3 and One X in a fortnight's time. However, both older phones are still very good.

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