Of course, this comes with a massive caveat. The catch is that you’re not on the hook for only the $99. That’s just the up-front payment. After that, you’ll be paying monthly installments (of a yet to be determined amount) until you’ve effectively paid off the full price for the HTC One. Alternatively, you can pay the full retail price for the phone from the beginning, which should be in the $600 kind of range. By comparison, the iPhone 5 is also $99 sans contract with monthly installments of $20. The HTC One monthly installments should be comparable.

While it is refreshing to see one of the nation’s four major carriers adopt the no-contract model, it is going to be sad for all the people who have grown accustomed to carrier-subsidized devices. It’ll be interesting to see if this “uncarrier” approach will ultimately help or hurt T-Mobile’s bottom line, but they do have “Simple Choice” plans starting at $50 a month for unlimited talk, text and 500MB. Then again, if you’re tacking on the $20 monthly installment, your monthly bill suddenly balloons to $70 before taxes.

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That’s good news for Verizon subscribers who want to get their hands on this flagship smartphone with all its Ultrapixel goodness, according to “a source familiar with the situation,” but it comes with a catch. While the exact date has not been formally revealed, we’re hearing that Verizon will be getting the HTC One some time after the other three major carriers launch it. Indeed, it’s sounding like Verizon will lag about a month or two behind. That’s enough time for current Verizon users who really want the HTC One to jump ship to someone else.

Even if that’s the case, this is still a win for HTC overall. It helps to create a more unified vision of the HTC brand in the eyes of the average consumer, since the flagship HTC One will be available through all four of the major carriers. Remember that this is the same struggle Samsung faced with the plethora of Galaxy variations before it convinced carriers to essentially all carry the same Galaxy S III last year. And look at where Samsung is now. It helps with unified branding and unified advertising efforts.

While this in itself probably isn’t enough to propel HTC above Samsung and Apple, it does seem like a step in the right direction… even if the Verizon crew end up being late to the One party.

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Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The CAT B15 is clearly not being geared toward average Joes who work a conventional 9-to-5 in the safe confines of a climate-controlled office. It’s very much for people who work in construction and in other more “extreme” environments where their devices do need to be tougher. Not surprisingly, the CAT B15 offers military grade protection against all sorts of things, like drops, water submersion, dust and extreme weather.

It is disappointing that it’s built like a tank on the outside and like a toy on the inside. The specs are worthy of a smartphone from three years ago: 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9, 512MB of RAM, and a 4-inch WVGA display with Gorilla Glass. That’s equivalent to a first-gen Samsung Galaxy S. When you consider that the people working at construction sites really rely on this tech, you would think that Caterpillar would put some beefier specs to back up the beefier exterior. At least it’s running a newer version of Android, if the mocked up screen above is to be believed.

In any case, the Caterpillar CAT B15 should ship in March for the European market at an MSRP of £299. I’d assume Caterpillar will ship to North America too at a comparable price.

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While the 5-inch LG Optimus G Pro looks like it’s an exclusive to NTT DoCoMo in Japan for the time being, the phablet sized 5.5-inch Optimus G Pro is apparently heading to LG’s home country of South Korea. That 5.5-inch display retains the 1080p resolution of its slightly smaller cousin, along with a 1.7GHz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm and 2GB of RAM.

To help power the bigger screen, they’re also giving it a bigger battery, a 3140mAh unit to be precise. That’s right around the same size as the Note 2, which makes sense since they have the same sized display (though the Note 2 is only 720p). Rounding out the spec sheet are 32GB of internal storage and a microSD slot for even more space.

This is just a leak at the moment, so we haven’t found anything in terms of pricing and availability just yet, but I’d say it’s pretty safe to assume that some variant of the Optimus G Pro will eventually make it to our shores. We just don’t know if it’s a 5-incher, a 5.5-incher, or something different altogether.

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These are just codenames at the moment, so it’s likely that HTC will change the names before an official unveiling and launch. They wouldn’t want to confuse that G2 with an LG Optimus G2, right? Starting with the mid-range HTC M4, it sounds like it’s going to have a 4.3-inch 720p display, backed with a 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon and 2GB of RAM. Other specs include the 13MP f/2.0 camera, 1.6MP front facing camera, 16GB storage, 1700mAh battery, Android Jelly Bean and HTC Sense. It’ll come loaded with LTE “where available.”

Approaching the much more entry level end of the market is the presumably affordable HTC G2. It’s quite a bit smaller with its 3.5-inch screen, leading us to believe that this is a replacement for something like the HTC Desire C. There’s a single core 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, 4GB storage, microSD, 1500mAh battery and 5MP camera. Strangely, it’ll ship with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, rather than Jelly Bean.

Both the HTC M4 and the HTC G2, along with more information about the HTC M7, should all be announced to the world at HTC’s event on February 19.

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What are some of the specs you’ve come to expect from flagship smartphones that are going to be released in 2013? Perhaps it’s a 5+ inch display boasting a 1080p resolution. Maybe you want a super fast quad-core or even octo-core processor, backed by at least 2GB of RAM. Maybe you want to see a 12MP or better camera on there. Unfortunately, the newly revealed Acer Liquid E1 Android smartphone doesn’t have any of them. This is not a high-end smartphone at all.

Instead, you can probably better describe the Acer Liquid E1 as more of a mid-range device, the kind of phone that you’d be able to get free on a contract or perhaps offered for a reasonable price through prepaid. There’s a 4.5-inch qHD display, a dual core 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 4GB internal storage, 5MP main camera, VGA front camera, and a 1760mAh battery. At least it’s rocking Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean, but it’s missing out on the Android 4.2 action.

This isn’t necessarily to say that the Acer Liquid E1 is a bad smartphone, per se, but it’s hardly able to compete against the likes of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S4. In fact, looking at those specs, it’s probably better equipped to compete with the Galaxy S2 from 2011. Let’s just hope it’s cheap. Then, all is forgiven.

What do you think, if the price is right would you be interested in a midrange Acer phone like this or not?

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It’s obvious enough that the trend among Android smartphones these days is to go bigger. With devices like the Huawei Mate pushing the 6-inch envelope, not everyone wants something that ginormous. If you’d prefer something far more pocketable, then you may be interested in the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Pocket Plus. See, it’s right there in the name that it’ll fit in your pocket.

The new Android 4.0.4 smartphone has not yet been formally announced by Samsung, but it has been leaked onto the Internet. Going in completely the opposite direction, this is decidedly an entry-level phone with its tiny 2.8-inch display and mere 800MHz Broadcom processor. That makes the display even smaller than the 3.1-inch we saw on the Palm Pre! The rest of the specs are equally small with 512MB of RAM, 4GB internal storage, 2MP camera and 1200mAh battery. It also gets Bluetooth 3.0, aGPS, WiFi-N, FM radio, USB 2.0, and an accelerometer.

Being a Samsung device, it should come as little surprise that the Android build is being skinned with TouchWiz. And it’ll get the similar kind of hardware and touch-sensitive buttons that we’ve seen on earlier generations of Galaxy devices. It certainly won’t compete at the higher end with the S3 and the like; instead, it’s probably going to be one of those cheap prepaid phones that still gives you a smartphone experience.

The Samsung Galaxy Pocket Plus is expected to launch in the first half of this year.

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I like to use the Galaxy series as a prime example: the original Galaxy S Captivate had a 4-inch display. The Galaxy S II got up to the 4.3-inch range (with some variations) and the Galaxy S III is in the 4.8-inch range. Then, the Galaxy Note and Note II arrived, pushing screen size to 5.3 and 5.5-inches respectively. A device like the Huawei Mate was inevitable.

Announced here at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Huawei Mate is a beast of an Android smartphone. It has really pushed the envelope by offering a huge 6.1-inch display. This is getting awfully close to the 7-inch range where “true” Android tablets begin their range. Interestingly, although there are now a few 5-inch offerings with 1080p displays, the Huawei Mate has stuck with 720p. I suppose this will help with battery life, but in using it in person, its display doesn’t quite look quite as crisp, given the lower pixel density.

That said, it is still a very nice display. Huawei went with a HD IPS+ panel for great viewing angles and, not surprisingly, it’s protected by Corning Gorilla Glass. I still feel that it doesn’t quite get the same kind of color saturation as an AMOLED family display, looking more like a blown up version of the screen you see on the Optimus G for example, but it certainly does the job.

You can tell that Huawei has borrowed some design inspiration from Samsung with a rounded smooth back and the overall slate style, but it’s really hard to differentiate the core design of a slate-style smartphone these days. So, Huawei decided to go big. In fact, the marketing materials that accompany it proudly proclaim it to have the “world’s largest screen.” Did this make it unwieldly? I think it depends on the size of your hands. I thought it was perfectly comfortable as a two-handed experience, but trying to do much of anything one-handed is going to be a challenge. You can hold it up to your face for a phone call, but you can’t really expect to reach around much of the screen when you’re only holding it with one hand. The larger display, though, is great for GPS navigation, video watching and other multimedia functions.

The performance should be up to spec with most higher end smartphones these days, given that it is powered by a quad core 1.5GHz Hi-Silicon K3V2 processor, backed with Intel XMM6260. It wouldn’t really be fair for me to completely gauge its performance at this time, seeing how it’s not quite ready for market and I only had it in my hands for a few minutes, but it did seem to lag and hang a little when switching between apps or opening new apps. It’s not slow, per se, but it’s not quite as fast as what we’ve seen on other high-end Android devices.

At the end of the day, a device like the Huawei Mate isn’t going to be for everyone. It’s huge, but it should still fit in larger jacket pockets without too much trouble. As with the Galaxy Note II, it may also appeal more to women as it can easily fit into a purse, though there are plenty of guys who carry around bags too. It doesn’t have the “S Pen” stylus of the Galaxy Note II, but I don’t think too many people use that anyway. For now, the Huawei Mate makes a firm statement about where the industry is heading. I remember when I thought the 4.3-inch smartphones were big. Now, compared to the something like the Motorola RAZR HD, those 4.3-inch phones just seem so tiny.

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I don’t need to tell you that the African economy, in general, isn’t as strong as some other parts of the world. VMK is trying to change that, turning itself into the Congolese equivalent of a Samsung in South Korea or an Apple in the United States. VMK has revealed two of its initial designs for public scrutiny.

The first, shown above, is a smartphone called the VMK Elikia. Meaning “hope,” the Elikia is only running on Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread and a 600MHz processor, so it’s clearly targeting emerging markets (like Congo). Taking on a gentled curved back reminiscent of the Palm Pre, the Elikia features a 3.5-inch display, 512MB RAM, 123MB internal storage, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a 1300mAh battery. Expect this smartphone to sell for $170 outright.

The other product is the VMK Way-C tablet, which is similarly targeting emerging markets. Meaning “light of the stars” in the local Lingala language, the Way-C has a 1.2GHz processor, 512MB RAM and 4GB of internal storage. It is powered by Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread and has a 4200mAh battery. The Way-C is expected to retail for $300.

Neither device is groundbreaking in terms of design or performance, but it’s good to see a locally-designed family of products priced appropriately for the local African market.

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Remember that the 5.5-inch successor to the original Galaxy Note only launched a mere two months ago. In its first month, the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 broke the three million mark in sales and, less than a month later, it has added another two million to that count. Maybe people really do like that S Pen, it seems. It also helps that the Note 2 is available in everywhere from Korea to Europe, Middle East to Latin America. The device also has solid specs overall and reasonably attractive styling.

To be fair, while selling five million units is no small feat, it still pales in comparison to the flagship Galaxy S3. Yes, the Galaxy S3 has been out for longer, but earlier this month, that Android superphone broke the 30 million mark. Whatever the case, the trend is clearly moving toward larger Android smartphones. We’ve got the HTC Deluxe (Droid DNA with Verizon) on the way, after all, and it certainly won’t be alone moving forward.

Do you prefer a larger phone like the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 or do you prefer something with a slightly smaller display and overall size?

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