Android

The fifth element. As early as the Nexus 4, Google has offered a price-competitive challenge to the rest of the smartphone manufacturing world. The current hardware flagship puts its direct competitors under powerful pressure, because the Nexus 5 offers extremely high-powered hardware and Google's newest operating system - Android KitKat.

Hot smartphone. Samsung is offering the Galaxy Ace 3 GT-S7275R for less than 260 Euros (~$352) but this is no cheap piece. In fact, we are surprised by the high quality of the 4-inch smartphone which even offers an LTE module.

Big brother. Step one: Take HTC's successful One smartphone and blow it up to a gigantic 5.9-inches with Full HD resolution. Step two: Add a swift Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 quad-core with an integrated Adreno 320 graphics card. Step three: Blend in 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage, a big 3300 mAh battery and a fingerprint scanner. HTC's new One Max is complete. Is this recipe enough for a podium placement in the phablet category?

Kicking it. The innovative IdeaTab Yoga Tablet 10 comes with an integrated kickstand which allows switching between what Lenovo calls stand, hold, and tilt mode. Is this standout feature enough to differentiate the tablet with its middle-of-the-road hardware and average feature set from the competition?

A niche tablet. In a more and more saturated market, tablets with telephone capability always count as niche products. The Chinese manufacturer Huawei wants to change that. With the MediaPad 7 Vogue, it throws into the mix a 7-inch candidate that not only surfs and plays films, but also serves as a fully capable phone replacement.

Telephone tablet. The name says it all: On the outside, the Asus Fonepad 7 is an Android-based 7-inch tablet, but its inner parts contain a full-blown telephone module. As our review shows, the mid-class device's performance makes a good name for it too.

Little stylus giant. Fonepad goes smartphone. Everyone is making their smartphones bigger. Asus shrinks its Fonepad and turns its 7-inch tablet with telephone function into an ultramodern, 6-inch phablet with Full HD based on Intel's platform. Its contender is Samsung's Galaxy Note 2. It's 1:0 for Asus in terms of price.