CES 2015: 11 Scene-Stealing Smartphones

Smartphones Front And Center At CES

CES 2015 offers some new innovations in growing technologies including wearables, home automation, IoT, drones and much more. Having said that, it doesn’t forget to leave out the most popular tech spaces in the industry, and that is of course is the smartphone.

Almost all of the biggest smartphone vendors in the world are present in Las Vegas this week for the biggest tech show of the year, and a few of them brought new innovations to the table, while others rolled out their recently announced tech toys for consumers to hold and feel for the first time.

Here are 11 cool smartphones that caught our eye at CES 2015.

Samsung Galaxy Note Edge

The Galaxy Note Edge was announced by Samsung last fall along side the Galaxy Note 4, and both devices have grown in popularity. Samsung’s flagship phones both feature impressive 5.6-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED displays for one of the best screens currently on the market. The big difference between the two devices is the Edge features a secondary display along the side of the device that makes it appear the display is curved around the phone. The Edge display is used to house a user’s most frequently visited apps, news tickers and more.

With both the Note Edge and the Note 4, users can take notes with the Samsung S Pen, a popular commodity from the company.

Sony Xperia Z3

At CES, Sony has made its presence felt with one of the largest booths at the show. The company has brought all its devices to the table in its vast ecosystem, and this includes the Sony Xperia Z3, widely considered one of the top phones of 2014. The device features a 5.15-inch LCD TRILUMINOS display and has a 20.7MP camera with LED flash and the ability to take 4K video. Sony also had the Xperia Z3V at the show, which is a little thicker and a little heavier, but has wireless-charging capabilities.

Yota Phone 2

One of the biggest innovations in the smartphone industry is the Yota Phone 2, which was first announced just four weeks ago. Yota Phone was present at CES and impressed tech fans with its back-panel e-ink display. The phone's back display looks just like that of a Nook or Kindle, and can stay on at all times, even when the phone's battery dies. With the world’s first double-screen smartphone, users can do pretty much everything on the e-ink screen that they can on the main one, including check email, get bar codes in apps scanned, use social media and more. As cool as it looks in pictures, the phone is even more impressive in person.

LG G Flex 2

LG's second generation of its curved smartphone was unveiled on Monday morning at CES, one of the biggest smartphone announcements at the show.

LG claims it has worked out the kinks of last year’s G Flex model and offers a phone with a 5.5-inch curved 1080p OLED display. The company said the curved screen is a strengthened form of Gorilla Glass 3, and absorbs contact from drops up to 30 percent better. The G Flex 2 also features an improved "self healing" back panel, meaning scuffs and marks from drops and bumps will disappear on their own in seconds. LG also boasts that the phone's larger battery has fast-charging capabilities and is the only phone that can get 50 percent juice in under 40 minutes of charging.

Samsung Galaxy A5

As CES is an international tech show, there were many popular phones that consumers in the United States don't see and usually have never even heard of. Samsung had its Galaxy A5 smartphone on display in its booth at the show, and said the Galaxy A lineup is quite popular internationally in many developing markets. The phone is unique in that it is thinner than other Galaxy phones at 7mm, and has an-all metal casing, an idea the company has toyed with doing to all its devices. The Galaxy A5 has a 5-inch AMOLED display and features a quad-core processor.

Lenovo P90

Lenovo showed its new P90 smartphone at CES on Tuesday, the first smartphone with Intel's new 64-bit Atom processor. Lenovo's new device features a 5.5-inch LCD display with 16M colors and runs on Android KitKat. The P90 packs a massive battery that lasts up to two days. Lenovo said the new device will launch in the spring, excluding in the United States. It packs a 13MP camera with optical image stabilization built in, and dual-tone LED flash.

Huawei Ascend P7

Huawei is another Chinese smartphone vendor that has seen great success over the past year in its local market, but is not prevalent in the United States.

The company had its Ascend P7 smartphone on display in its booth at CES along with more than 100 other devices. The Ascend P7 has a 5-inch LCD display and 13MP camera, running on Android KitKat.

Motorola Moto X

Lenovo also was showing off some of the top devices from recently acquired Motorola at CES, including the new Motorola Moto X. Released in September, the device has a 5.2-inch AMOLED display and a 2.5GHz Quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor. It also packs a 13MP camera with dual-LED flash and has a personalized back panel that can come in a plethora of designs or materials of the user’s choice.

BlackBerry Passport

BlackBerry made some news on Wednesday, saying that the Passport has arrived exclusively with AT&T and will be available for sale in the carrier stores. The phone may appear a little different as it has undergone a redesign now that it is with AT&T. It features curved edges, takes away a little bit of its square shape and looks a little more similar to the BlackBerry Classic announced last month. The new Passport packs a 2.2GHz Quad-Core Qualcomm processor with Optical Image Stabilization and 32 GB of internal storage. It still sports the 4.5-inch square display and will be available in the U.S. soon.

HTC Desire 826

HTC revealed the new Desire 826 smartphone at CES on Tuesday, a high-end device that will be released later this month. It sports a 5.5-inch, 1080p HD display and has a 13MP camera with HTC's Sense 6.0 software. The device will come standard with Android 5 Lollipop and runs on a 1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 octa-core 64-bit processor. The device will come in white, blue and purple.

Sharp Aquos Crystal Frameless Smartphone

Sharp first launched its frameless smartphone named Aquos Crystal with Sprint in October.

The Aquos Crystal phone revealed Monday was a 5-inch frameless HD display that incorporates Sharp's signature technologies, including its thin-bezel LCD innovation and its technology that uses the optical lens effect to eliminate edges and can reduce device size. The phone also sports an 8MP camera and a 1.2GHz Quad-core processor.