GSMArena smartphone shopping guide: June 2014

€400-€500

We didn't intend it this way but the €400-€500 category is the domain of flagship phablets. Flagship smartphones are still over €500, while non-flagships have dropped below €400, so here come three large phablets with 1080p screens and Snapdragon 800 chipsets.

The Lumia 1320 is nice, but for a proper flagship experience you'll need the Nokia Lumia 1520. Its 6" screen has more than double the number of pixels (1080p resolution) and the chipset inside is the much more potent Snapdragon 800.

It uses Nokia's latest PureView camera - a fairly big 1/2.5" sensor with 20MP. It's optically stabilized and uses Carl Zeiss optics and while there's no xenon flash like on the Lumia 1020, at least it has a dual-LED flash. You get the same camera app with manual controls too.

The Nokia Lumia 1520 is currently the Windows Phone device that comes closest to Android flagships, but is fairly large. The Lumia 930 (due to launch later this month) will offer the same features in a 5" package.

Like the Lumia 1320/1520 pair, the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 shares similarities with the Galaxy Note 3 Neo but improves on it on just about every level.

It has a bigger, sharper 5.7" 1080p Super AMOLED screen with an S Pen stylus and is powered by Snapdragon 800 running Android 4.4 KitKat with the extensive TouchWiz customizations. The 13MP camera can record 2160p video and can high-quality zoom during recording, almost as good as the one the Nokia 1020 manages.

The Galaxy's perennial rival is the LG G Pro 2. It has a larger screen - 5.9" IPS LCD with 1080p resolution but LG's trademark slim bezels keep the phablet fairly compact. It too is using a Snapdragon 800 chipset to run Android 4.4 KitKat modified with Optimus UI.

The G Pro 2 adds optical stabilization to the 13MP / 2160p camera to one-up its nemesis, but other than that the two are closely matched.