Abstract
Mobile phones play an important role in our lives, especially smartphones. With the tremendous growth of the mobile device market, the possibility of using them in criminal activity will continually increase. Android is one of the highly competitive platform in the market. Android used by many manufactures to run different models, causing a strong diversity. Thus, the difficulty of physical image acquisition of android based smartphones arises, especially, when the source code of latest Android version is released too late. As a consequence, the available smartphones with latest versions memory cannot be acquired using available smartphone forensic tools. This paper gives a comprehensive perspective of some of the mobile device forensic tools that offer physical acquisition. A comparative analysis of these tools is performed based on different parameters which includes: cost, integrity, data recovery, usability, ways to export data forensic phases support, and supporting generic android smartphones.