The Top 10 Smartphones Set to Ship in 2012

The HTC Edge--or Endeavor, depending on who you ask--is looking good. Decked out with Ice Cream Sandwich, active noise cancellation, a 4.7 inch screen, 8MP auto focus camera that can record 1080p video and a quad core 1.5GHz CPU, the handset has everything it needs to be a huge hit with consumers.

Fujitsu's throwing their hat into the smartphone arena this year by bringing an Android-powered smartphone with a NVDIA Tegra 3 chipset to market later this year. Whether or not the smartphone's wicked respectable specs will make the handset a winner is still wide open for speculation.

It's a make or break year for Research In Motion. RIM's future depends heavily on the success of their first QNX-powered smartphone, the Blackberry London. As our friends at The Verge discovered, the phone's physical design is both bold and iconic. Let's hope this handset's got the goods to save their Canadian bacon.

With it's Windows Phone 7.5 Mango operating system, 16 GB of internal storage. 512 MB of RAM, front and rear facing cameras and built-in Dolby Mobile and SRS sound management, the HTC Titan II is bound to find its way into more than a few pockets this year.

As the smartphone market heats up, so too does the competition between the world's leading chip makers. At CES 2012, Intel unveiled their first Smartphone Reference Design. When combined with their declaration of a new partnership with Motorola, we could see some compelling and insanely zippy hardware later this year.

Love them or hate them, when it comes to smartphones, the folks at Apple have a huge success on their hands in the form of the iPhone. We're pretty sure that the iPhone 5 will drop at some point this year, but what it might look like is anyone's guess.

Will Nokia be the Once and Future King of the smartphone realm? Microsoft's counting on it, and has put a lot of stock in the company's upcoming Windows Phone 7 powered handset, the Lumia 900. With a sleek unibody design and 4.3" AMOLED screen, it's bound to be wicked popular.

Returning close to five years after they opted out of the world mobile phone market, Panasonic is back and looking good. The company showed off their Android reference design this year and it is a thing of beauty. Thin, NFC-enabled, waterproof, dust-proof and rocking a 4.3 inch OLED screen? Yes please.

Building on the blistering worldwide success of their Galaxy S2 handset, Samsung's kept the hype machine running around the clock to drum up the amount of consumer demand for their upcoming Galaxy S3 handset. Rumored to be rocking a 32nm chip that offers 50% greater graphics performance than that enjoyed by the Galaxy S2. Sweet.

The Sony Ion will be the company's first smartphone offering since parting ways with Ericsson late last year. Boasting a 1.5GHz dual core Snapdragon processor, 16GB of internal memory and a 12MP camera with a Exmor R sensor, the Ion sounds amazing on paper. Whether this will translate into a real-world success remains to be seen.