Testing smartphone screens for sunlight visibility was always my domain, my speciality, my rant. Eventually, I was heard, it seems, and manufacturers started to put real effort into this area. From ClearBlack Display to Super AMOLED+ to Reality to Super LCD2, at every turn phone makers are putting in screens that are better and better, even in sunlight. Anyway, kudos to GSM Arena for doing some objective testing in this area, even if a few comments are needed from me below....

From the GSM Arena piece:

Now, the testers admit that this is a fairly small sample of current smartphones, but I'd like to draw out a few points...

• The Nokia N9 here is the only representative of the 'AMOLED with ClearBlack Display polarisers' arrangement used on quite a few Symbian phones (including the Nokia E7, C6-01, 700) and on the Windows Phone-powered Lumia 800 and 900. I'd expect all these to fare just as well as the N9. In other words, as well as the very best in the market on other technologies.
    
• The other top contenders in sunlight use Samsung Super AMOLED or Super AMOLED+ - it's not clear what tricks Samsung uses in terms of polarisation, but clearly there's not much in it between CBD/AMOLED and Super AMOLED.....
    
• HTC's new Super LCD2 technology (e.g in the One X) doesn't fare as highly in the chart, but I can vouch that the display is pretty sumptuous across all conditions.
    
• The Nokia N8 (and C7, with the same era display) fares slightly worse because Nokia could only add an anti-reflection layer at the time - CBD post-dated the N8 screen design by a matter of months. In fact, I'm still surprised that it hasn't been possible to retrofit a 3.5" CBD display to newer production N8s and C7s....