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At CTIA Wireless this week, HTC scored the early profile points among the handset makers, launching the US' first WiMAX phone, 'EVO', and showing off its increasingly well regarded range of gigahertz Snapdragon smartphones running its Sense user interface. These are now four in number plus Google's Nexus One, which HTC makes - the EVO and Nexus run Android, as does Desire, which T-Mobile will launch in the US. The similar HD2 runs Windows Mobile, and another Android variant, the Incredible, should launch for Verizon soon.

However, Samsung, which has promised to get serious about smartphones this year, made a bid for the limelight yesterday with the launch of the Galaxy S Android phone. This has most of the hallmarks of Samsung's high end strategy - big hitting hardware, the most advanced super AMOLED display technology available, and a widget-based user interface to hide the underlying OS.

The user interface is increasingly the main differentiator for Android phones, and Samsung has been wise to revamp its offering, unveiling S Life (Smart Life). This draws on the basis elements of its existing TouchWiz widgets platform, but the jury has been deeply divided on the pros and cons of that, and it certainly has not won the acclaim of HTC Sense or LG's S-Class UI. Indeed, on some other Android phones Samsung has gone with a vanilla Google UI. Now it has added significant new layers and functionality with S Life. This supports extensive personalization by carrier or consumer, and is heavily geared to content - Galaxy S is emulating the iPhone by seeking to be an optimized platform for viewing multimedia and text content. For instance, S Life has a Daily Briefing feature, which gathers custom information from a series of widgets and delivers them on demand.

In general, Samsung has further complicated the software issue by launching its own developer platform, bada, which was the highlight of its star turn at last month's Mobile World Congress. But in Android-loving north America, it focused on open OS handsets, and showed off the features in which its prowess goes undisputed - multimedia hardware.

Like the HTC top ends, Galaxy S runs the Snapdragon gigahertz processor - though this may be a short term contract, given that Samsung is planning to launch smartphones with the upcoming Hummingbird apps processor from its sister company in the chip market.

The phone is superslim considering its power, at 9.9mm, and runs Android 2.1. Its most obviously striking feature is its bright screen. Samsung's leadership in AMOLED technology has been a genuine competitive advantage and now it has moved to a new super AMOLED that it says supports 20% more brightness and 80% less reflectiveness in direct sunlight, compared to previous iterations. It also boasts improved power consumption, essential given that the battery life of the current Galaxy is notorious.

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