As far as I know, all hardware oriented ciphers can be implemented in software, but some ciphers are easier to implement efficiently in hardware than others. The AES algorithm was developed by people who had been working a lot with smart card security, and AES is therefore supposedly especially suited to smart card implementation. Stream ciphers based on Linear Feedback Shift Registers are naturally hardware-oriented.

First you need to determine your security requirements, and then I guess you will just have to pick one with appropriate key length etc. and try it - only you can decide which is "better" for you...