We're always posting reviews that compare individual gadgets to other, similar gadgets, but sometimes it's nice to have something a little more comprehensive. For the last two years running, we've been rounding up all of the smartphones that are worth your time and weighing them against one another. With 2014 winding down, it's time to do it again.

Table of Contents

In past years, we've run down a list of flagships and declared "winners" in several categories—we'll be taking a slightly different approach this time, since there are just so many phones to talk about and their specs are more homogenized than ever. So we'll run through all of the phones we think you should be paying attention to, highlighting what each one does particularly well or particularly poorly. We'll bring a few interesting low-end and midrange phones into the fold. And we'll give a broad overview of the major operating systems and their ecosystems, and where things are going in 2015.