The smartphone market is crowded with a variety of handsets of different quality such as the Nokia Lumia 920, the Samsung Galaxy S3 and Apple's iPhone 5.

So how do the three next-generation devices hold up in a side-by-side comparison?

The iPhone 5 is lighter than previous iPhones at 112g and comes with a 4-inch Retina display screen. The Lumia 920 falls in line as the middle sized device with a 4.5-inch screen, but is on the heavier side at 185g. Samsung's device is lightweight at 131g but still bigger than the other two devices with a screen that measures at 4.8 inches.

The Nokia Lumia 920 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset. It is powered by a 1.5 GHz Krait dual-core processor, an Adreno 225 GPU and 1 GB RAM. The Samsung Galaxy S3 has the Exynos 4 chipset. It is powered by a 1.4 GHz quad-core processor, the Mali-400 GPU and a 2 GB RAM. Apple's handset has an A6 chip with a dual-core 1.2GHz CPU and PowerVR SGX 543MP3 GPU with 1 GB RAM.

The primary camera for the iPhone 5 is 8- megapixel (MP) and the secondary 1.2MP, and the phone can record video and images simultaneously. Many of the features are similar on the Galaxy S3 that packs an 8MP primary camera and 1.9MP secondary one.  Lumia's device dominates with a 8.7MP primary camera with PureView sensor sensor similar to the Nokia 808 PureView smartphone along with a 1.3MP secondary camera.

Another important feature is battery life, with iPhone 5 lasting only with a talk time for up to 8 hours on 3G. Internet usage works for up to 8 hours on LTE and up to 10 hours on Wi-Fi. The Samsung Galaxy S3's battery is able to hold up to 12 hours of talk time that vary on the networks available. The Lumia 920 is equipped with a Non-removable Li-Ion 2000 mAh battery with a talk time of around 10 hours with 3G usage.

Each of the devices comes with other unique features or changes that set them apart from the competition and their predecessors.

Apple's iPhone 5 has a new Lightning port that requires different functionality than its predecessors. The iPhone runs on Apple's iOS 6 and works on 2G, 3G and 4G networks and has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and USB capability. The device may be a better bet for social networking as it has Twitter and Facebook integration and gives access to the storage capabilities via the iCloud cloud service. 

The Samsung Galaxy S3 allows supports for SD cards and gives users the chance to output HD content to a television set via an HDMI cable. The functions over 2G, 3G and 4G networks and has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC and USB capability. The Android-powered device may be particularly suitable for work use as it features Dropbox with 50 GB storage, Document viewer (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF), Calendar plus Google Search, Maps and Gmail.

The Nokia Lumia 920 runs on Windows 8 and works over 2G, 3G and 4G networks. It also has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC features along with 32 GB and 7 GB SkyDrive storage options. It is a high[powered device with a number of specific apps and a PureView camera, but may fall short against the features from its competition.