Our Smartphone World Cup is starting this week, here are the groups

It's World Cup season and we though you'd like to join the fun with a smartphone-themed competition – welcome to our Smartphone World Cup. The group stage kicks off tomorrow, but before that we'd like to introduce the participants and detail how they qualified and the rules of the tournament.

We decided that if a phone is going to win, it has to be the best phone that its brand offers. What’s “best”? Either it’s the most “skilled” phone, the one loaded to the brim with features, or the most popular one, the one that has proven to be a success in the market.

And so we picked the flagships of the 14 most popular brands in our database (barring rare phones like Porsche Editions, for example). Along with that, we also selected the most popular 14 phones from our database regardless of brands.

The final 4 spots were wildcards – the theme this year is gaming phones. Even if they fail to disrupt mobile gaming, they are flagships with some unique features (high FPS screens, big batteries, better cooling, etc.).

The tournament will proceed like this: we start with the group stage where groups of four will go head to head. The top two of each group move forward to the knockout stage. It will be single elimination from then on until we have our champion.

The winner of each match will be decided by you – you get one vote per day for each game currently going.

With that, let us introduce us to the groups:

The groups were seeded by sorting the phones based on popularity (an average of current and all time hits, so its fair to both recently introduced phones and those that are a few months old).

Watch out for the first group matches this weekend and don’t forget to vote for your favorite!