Look and feel

When it appears beautiful on the outside, it sure will be a hit amongst your group of friends. Make sure the phone you choose matches your style and is convenient for you to carry. It makes no sense, buying a large sized phone if you usually don’t have a pocket or purse to carry it around. Keeping it in your hand can be tiresome and sometimes lead to frustration; moreover you are sure to forget it somewhere and bear a heavy loss and make a hole in your wallet.

Touchscreen or keypad

With the advancing technology, even some full touchscreen phones come at the same price as the ones with a keypad. Touchscreen phones are easier to use and you can do more work at a faster rate and with ease. But make sure you opt for a phone with capacitive touch which makes your touch experience less tedious.

If you are someone who will use the phone for constant typing and texting, you should choose a one with a QWERTY keypad. QWERTY keypads enhance smoother and faster typing.

Call quality

What good is a phone if it can’t make calls? Some of the most basic phones offer the best call quality whereas some smartphones often have some issue of miscellaneous call drops. Make sure you test the call quality in a noisy room.

Operating system

If you want your phone to do more than just make calls and send texts, have a look at the platform on which it runs. The operating system you choose will greatly affect the capability of your phone. Some of the most popular OS are the Android OS, iOS and BlackBerry OS. Make sure you have a look at what the OS has to offer especially if you want some particular application running on your phone.

Display

If you plan to use your phone to browse the web, play games or use the phones organizer make sure the screen is up to the mark. There is no point in having a large screen where you have to engage both your hands to use the phone or very small where everything is cramped up. The screen size will greatly matter when you are going to use your phone to edit office documents.

Make sure the contrast of your phone is good, displaying sharper images enhancing your viewing experience on the long journeys. See to it that the backlight works for you to be able to type seamlessly in a completely dark room.

Consider the screens resolution too, the higher the resolution the better your screen will look especially while viewing videos and photos.

3G support and availability

Finally 3G has seen light of the day in India and is available to common man today. 3G enhances your experience on the web, enabling faster downloads with high speed and significantly improved streaming. If you are buying a smart phone make sure it supports 3G or it will actually be useless to buy a smartphone and invest huge bucks in the phone. 

Camera

For the mini-photographer in you who seldom wakes up and indulges in photography you don’t have to spend big bucks on a digital camera, your phone camera can do the job for you just fine. Your phone camera allows you to take pictures on the go and immediately share them with your friends and family. You will obviously want a good camera to capture quality pictures. Today, 5 megapixels is pretty much standard and some phones even support 8-12 megapixels. A higher megapixel does not necessarily mean a better camera rather verify that your phone has a flash probably a dual LED or a Xenon flash.

Most of the phones have video capturing facility; some even capture high definition 720p or 1080p. If you are in to taking videos, make sure your OS supports uploading videos to Facebook or YouTube.

Music Player

Many of the phones today, incorporate the best of the music player thus freeing you from carrying another device especially if you are a music buff. With thigh interface and audio quality, you can make your phone a primary music player. Make sure the phone has enough internal memory that stores your songs or at least support expandable memory.