Top 13 BEST Smartphones of 2020 (Mid Year) - KT EDITZ
What are the best smartphones in the world right now
What are the best smartphones in the world right now it's a big question but today we've got some answers I've got five honorable mentions phones that didn't quite make the top tier and then 13 phones that I absolutely love.
| Top 5 Smartphones | 5. iPhone SE 4 . Google pixel 3a 3 .Google pixel 4a 2 .Oppo find x2 pro |
| Gaming Smartphones |
No. 5:- iPhone SE
Number five in this list of runners-up is the new iPhone se to be clear I like almost everything about it it's got the build quality and the performance of a thousand dollar phone and it's 399 even the camera is really quite good it's just that the battery life isn't and it's not just a case that battery isn't the strong point to the phone it's more the you know it could actually cause you a bit of a problem and if you're going to use your phone for two to three years it's only gonna get worse over that period so if you're considering the SE e I personally think there's better options but we'll come to them.
No. 4:- Google pixel 3a
Number four is a phone that looks pretty unremarkable on paper you could read through the phone's entire spec sheet and not a single thing would jump out at you is wow that's really cool but the Google pixel 3a is one of the nicest phones to use for the $300 you can get it out now clean Google's software with a pretty decent OLED screen but with this phone Google has kind of shifted the balance for what they think is important to a phone away from really high-end materials this thing's made of plastic and away from a screen that fills the entire front of the phone for this the camera I was just messing around with it a few weeks ago taking photos of my cat and it's so impressive that I came back wondering if even my $1400 Galaxy S 20 ultra could have done this the reason it's only an honorable mention is because this is their mid-range phone from last year.
No. 3:- Google pixel 4a
Is soon to be replaced by the Google pixel 4a so if you bought it now you might be a little bummed in a couple of months but that brings me to the pixel for which is the company's top-end flagship from last year and it might be a bit of a surprise I'm even mentioning this at all because when it launched for $800 it was underwhelming and the whole thing was undercut by poor battery life if a phone can't get through a full day of usage then as far as I'm concerned it could have the coolest features on the planet it could tie your shoelaces for you but I can't recommend it however in a bit of a surprise turn of events after a few updates pixel for battery life improved in my testing that doesn't happen very often to be clear and add to that there in most regions you can now get the pixel for for like $499 and I think it's actually quite a viable alternative to the iPhone se .
No. 2:- Oppo find x2 Pro
Number two is a bit of a sad story we're talking a smartphone that has an incredible set of cameras really really good performance and a market-leading display this is the Oppo find x2 Pro and under different circumstances this could well have been a smartphone of the year the catch is that it's been pretty much invalidated by the existence of the oneplus 8 Pro barely a month after the find x2 Pro oneplus dropped a phone with almost identical specs similar design and a software skin I think most people will prefer and a much lower price tag and that turns this opera phone into basically a luxury alternative to the oneplus this phone has a beautiful vegan leather finish I want more companies to do this it feels like a supercar the cameras they can zoom further but from a practical standpoint I just don't think is worth the extra money .
No. 1:- Oppo is the Reno 3 pro
Then the final runner-up is also from Oppo is the Reno 3 pro I use this phone for like two whole months this year which is far longer than I usually use mid-range phones you could think of this as a nearly flagship camera stuck on a mid-range phone's body I just would have liked to see a higher end chipset inside of it.
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Flagship Smartphones
Okay those are the good smart phones and that leaves us with the best smartphones and I've categorized them for the different kinds of buyer with one overall champion at the end it's a first of all if you're anything like me and you're almost a little bit sick of smartphones overtaking the size of your face you just want a compact flagship there are three good options just as a disclaimer I say the word compact in a fairly loose sense the word because most good phones now are not small phones but these three should be pretty manageable for all hands.
1. Galaxy S20
So first of all galaxy s 20 and this is pretty much d compact phone I've been asking for four years it's got the latest everything in fastest chipset Ram storage the camera this is quintessential Samsung and the screen is in the top five displays on a phone right now we're talking quad HD plus AMOLED 120 Hertz panel and the batteries great if you get the Snapdragon version and that's the one caveat if you're in a region like the UK or India where Samsung serves the Exynos version battery life Falls from great to pretty good
2. iPhone 11 pro
Alternatively iPhone 11 pro and I mean I could say err comparing the specs and the features but this really boils down to the question do you want an iPhone or you want an Android if you're open to either I would say try the galaxy s 20 it's got 5 g and the 120 Hertz display will make it feel faster but rest assured if you go for the iPhone 11 Pro it's up there too .
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Gaming Phones
3. Galaxy s10
finally the last compact phone is actually the galaxy s10 E now I generally try to stay away from recommending older phones because they're just going to become outdated faster but because this category of compact flagship phones doesn't get too much love this is still one of the better options for now closer to $500 good camera great screen and this just feels like it was made for your palm incredibly comfortable to hold okay .
2. Nubia red magic 5g
Gaming phones and to be honest this to that wind by an absolute landslide the first one is the red magic 5g which is surprisingly affordable and quite possibly the fastest smartphone on the planet it's also got a 144 Hertz display that's the kind of refresh rate you see on high-end PC gaming monitors and just generally a bucketload of features for gamers but I've made a more in-depth video about this phone already so I'll link it on my head so .
1. Xiaomi's black shark 3 Pro
The second of these gaming phones is Xiaomi's black shark 3 Pro somehow even more outlandish we're talking a 7.1 inch quad HD plus 90 Hertz AMOLED display a phone with a five thousand milliamp hour battery a 65 watt charger and dedicated trigger buttons that hide themselves when they're not in use I remember when I first found out about the existence of this phone and it took me a grand total of a minute to scrap the video I was currently working on and focused all my efforts on getting this and reviewing it and I can confirm it's a pleasure to use as well providing you know it fits in your hand but at this point I should clarify that technically any of these flagship phones can play games just fine buying a gaming phone is for people who are happy to take a bit of a hit in the camera department for starters and be people who play games either competitively or just for long periods of time otherwise you might not even see the benefits at all you'll just be that person who holds a TV to their ear to make a phone call I've had a few people ask me should I save a bit of money and buy an older gaming phone like let's say the asus rog phone - and the answer is probably not the way I see it if you want to game seriously on your phone the number one priority is having the best performance so if you're picking up a gaming phone from last year there has an older chip then all of those optimizations are paying for like liquid cooling or physical fan inside they're a bit redundant you'd get better performance if you bought just the cheapest current phone with the latest chip even if it didn't have all those things.
Photography Smartphones
Huawei p40 Pro
Okay my main problem with gaming phones the reason I don't use one is that they tend to sacrifice on photography but if you did want to take great photos if for you your smartphone is just as much about its camera as it is about connecting you with people then the Huawei p40 Pro is the best photography experience I've had on a phone as long as you are okay with the fact that there are no Google services pre-built on this phone if for example you're perfectly happy with Huawei's own app gallery or if you're a bit of a tinkerer and you wanted to try and sideload Google then this is an awesome bit of hardware with good battery life - but I mean you can get good battery life.
From any of these phones I've put on my top list but what if you wanted great what if you wanted to wake up in the morning download 10 movies spend the entire day watching them and then finish that all off with a session of gaming well there's two great options - 11 Pro Max and samsung galaxy s 20 ultra again though Snapdragon version they're both seriously expensive and just big phones but as far as phones with massive batteries are concerned there's still two of them all balanced offerings Lane be clear you can get phones with bigger batteries in these two but a good smartphone experience is all about balance what you don't want is a mediocre smartphone with a power bank tape - its back on the subject of iPhones though and I thought long and hard about whether or not I should include this but I decided it's important to have an affordable iPhone category and this sounds like a pretty strange idea but here's the thing if there was one undisputable smartphone king at each price point my job would be pretty easy all I need to do is to just find out how much someone was willing to pay and then be like ok this is the best phone you can get with that but people have different preferences things that for them are based requirements in a phone that they choose and the one I see the most is I need it to be an iPhone I have a lot of people I know personally who don't ask which phone should I buy they asked which iPhone should I buy because they want Apple features like FaceTime and I message etc so if you're in that group and you don't have the budget to buy the absolute top-end iPhone 11pro then you're probably picking between three options.the $399 iPhone se the $599 10r and the $699 iPhone 11 a long story short I'm gonna make this easy for you pick the 11 the SE is probably not going to cut it battery wise and compared to the 10 are the 11 is far faster and has a much better camera system if you want a budget just generally and you don't need an iPhone then I would say real me sits in for those you don't know real me is yet another subsidiary of BBK electronics like Oppo like vivo like oneplus but the difference is that real me is new and because it's new the company's trying to make a name for itself and to do that they're pricing their phones at a staggeringly affordable price so for around $250 this one has first of all a quad camera setup that would sit fine on a $400 phone a 1080p display which somehow also has a 90 Hertz refresh rate and upper mid-range chipset specializing in gaming and great battery life don't get me wrong you'll know when you're using it that it's not a top level flagship but for this price it's not even close real me 6 is up there there's also the poco x2 really just nice phone and again for a budget-friendly price we're talking 120 Hertz display we're talking 4,500 million power battery it's just that you'll struggle to buy this phone outside of India so I haven't officially added it to the list okay before the overall winner let's talk about the best all-rounder phones the phones that don't necessarily specialize in one thing but ones that do everything well and there's a few here I already mentioned the iPhone 11 pro and Galaxy S 20 ultra these two they nail the fundamental pillars of what makes a good smart phone but there's three more galaxy s 20 plus which is really similar to the ultra in the things that matter but just slightly smaller a bit more manageable and more affordable than to be honest even though yeah the 64 megapixel main camera there should be less capable than the 108 2 megapixel one on the ultra in practice it's not really there are cases where the ultra looks better but there are plenty of cases with a normal s xx and as twenty-plus look better but the fact that they trade blows is telling within what shammies me 10 pro and as far as i'm aware this is the most expensive mainstream phone they've ever made and for some context the me 9 pro last year was like $600 this is a thousand but before that you get pretty much just insane specs across the board I said to give you an idea you've got snapdragon 865 108 megapixel quad camera setup you've got 4,500 milliamp hour battery with an insane at 65 watt charger included in the box 5g dual speakers everything plus it's all wrapped in something I really appreciate on phones a soft touch matte finish it does miss out on an official IP rating which is kind of confusing considering the massive price hike over last generation but I don't think that alone should stop you considering this phone and then finally in this category is one plus eight pro and apart from having a headphone jack this is 100% and everything phone every feature that you think at 20:20 flagship should have this probably does and it does so cheaper than its competitors you could put it side-by-side with the s20 ultra as an example and some people might actually say they prefer the oneplus even though it's four hundred dollars less but it's not the ultimate value King people have also asked me about the Galaxy Note 10.1 personally I would err on the side of caution with that one I just think the cameras and the power of the s20 lineup they've come a long way but the note m+ still isn't old enough to be cheap either okay that leaves me with my current smart phone of the year and just before I get to that there's a couple of phones that I've been seeing online that look really interesting that I haven't managed a test yet there's the Xperia one - which is this super widescreen cinematography focused phone and it supposedly uses technology from the company's own alpha DSLR cameras I think this is an awesome concept but just bear in mind it doesn't mean it's gonna be great just take the red hydrogen one as an example there's this funky new LG velvet smartphone which kind of makes it seem like LG has gone right back to the drawing board in terms of design I'd say it looks decent I think is meant to be inspired by water drops but what's confusing to me is that this would have been a perfect chance to start using a hole-punch camera for the front as opposed to this kind of ugly looking knotch and then finally is Motorola's edge plus which is yet another thousand-dollar flagship phone but one that looks like it has very little missing it's even got a five thousand milliamp hour battery and a headphone Jack so if the software's good this could actually be top level and now my overall smartphone value champion is a firm that I was expecting to be impressed by and I was it's the one plus eight but with one important asterisk which I'll come to the phone as one plus is typical caveats they loses wireless charging and an official water resistance rating but the important thing is that using it feels indistinguishable from the very best phones out there and top level chipset top level display this is the most comfortable phone I've held in a long time it feels just as premium as the thousand-dollar Huawei P 40 Pro and Xiaomi me 10 Pro but actually has sleeker less bloated software than both of those offerings the one area you'll be reminded that you didn't just sink a thousand dollars into your phone is the camera where oneplus has basically reused the sensors from last year's black ships I was initially kind of annoyed by this but I mean look at the iPhone se that uses a camera sensor from three years ago just with improved software and it's a similar story here the camera won't blow you away but it's actually quite good the asterisk the important thing to bear in mind here is that with oneplus phones in particular pricing varies massively by region to the point where I don't think it's even fair for me to say that the 1+8 is the best value regardless of where you are let me give you an example in the u.s. 1 + 8 is the exact same price as the iPhone 11 but here in the UK it's the equivalent of one hundred and thirty dollars cheaper and if you go to India it is literally three hundred dollars cheaper so while in the u.s. you could look at both these phones and think ok I've got a slight preference for iOS I'm gonna pick the iPhone that makes much less sense in the UK and it makes much much less sense if you're in India where I think the oneplus delivers unquestionably higher value areas if you enjoyed this video do consider subscribing that would be incredible having said my name is Erin this is mr. who's the boss that'll catch you in the next one.
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