Can a Cheap 2020 Smartphone beat a 2018 Flagship?

when I was growing up I never really had a whole lot of disposable income so whenever it came to picking what phone to buy I'd be faced with the exact same dilemma I'd have let's say a few hundred dollars do I buy a new mid-range phone what do I buy an older flagship phone and this question is just as important today if you had $400 now you have a choice you could either by 2020 phones like the Samsung Galaxy a 71 the sharmini note 10 light or the Oppo find x2 light but if you hopped over to ebay you could also find for the same price older 20:18 flagship phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 the Xiaomi me mix 3 or the Oppo find X all in new condition as well so now that I've sourced all of them which option actually makes more sense well for starters if you care about this one point goes to the older phones in terms of the unboxing experience this kind of makes sense I mean even though the mid-range phones are newer you would just expect to get more stuff with a phone that was intended for a higher price point so on the Samsung that means a whole jigsaw puzzle of adapters and some nicer quality AKG earphones versus the cheap ones you get with the a 71 if you went down the opera route then this means an arguably call it case and a headphone jack adapter and it's a similar story which show me the me makes three has a nicer case and actually even comes with a wireless charger of its own so the flagships are getting a point for this but what about the phones themselves well there's actually quite a few things that are comparable like sizing yes top-end phones tend to be bigger but newer phones are also bigger so the size kind of balances out and memory flagship phones tend to have more memory but at the same time every couple years all phones see a bump in how much memory is considered necessary so in almost every case both the RAM and the storage capacity you get is bang on identical between these two cups of phones so it's squaring up to be quite a fair fight but now is where we start to see differences I think the first thing you'll notice when you pick up an older flagship is that there's a certain quality to it it's partly high-grade materials but it's also partly the fact that flagships cut less corners you get a whole load of subtle features that add up to a better feeling phone like a really high-end vibration motor for gray haptic feedback little things for peace of mind like can I pee water and dust resistance rating in a lot of cases or wireless charging I could pick up the Galaxy Note 9 use it for 2 minutes and tell you straight away that it is a premium experience even if it is a premium experience from a couple years ago but with a mid Ranger in some shape or form you lose some of this quality like Samsung say 71 is made of plastic versus the glass of the note 9 or charmese note 10 light is made of glass which is good but their flagship is still a level above that that combines ceramic with 7000 series aluminium and in a similar vein the Oppo find x2 light feels well built but it doesn't have the same density as the find X these are subtle differences but I would say they add up to something more noticeable and it's actually not just quality I would say 9 times out of 10 a flagship phone has some sort of I'd have a better name for this cool factor at least one defining characteristic that is used in marketing to try and justify people paying the thousand dollars that they initially had to for a lot of these phones so for the note 9 it's the S Pen brilliant little tool providing us someone who wants a stylus shell me is a slider phone you put a bit of pressure on the screen give it a pull and help pops the front camera ready to take a selfie and then Oppo along a similar line has both its front and back cameras on this motorized pop up system this was considered too epic when it came out by comparison mid-range phones are practical less showy I mean when you're building a phone for a four hundred dollar price point you can't afford to be as crazy with it your focus is instead and just getting as many of the key things in as possible so this stage we're at 3 points of the flagships and zero to the modern mid-range and there's more if you enjoyed this video by the way though a sub to the channel would be incredible we're trying to hit 5 million by the end of 2020 see if we can do it anyways I even go as far as to say that you'll get better display quality if you go for older - this isn't 100% clear-cut because I'm 100's gelik see a 71 s display looks modern and I would take this little hole punch any day over the pretty chunky bezels on the note 9 I want to tell you this screen is better but it just isn't if you look a little closer it has that slightly over sharpens look you get from cheaper phones whereas the note always displays image in what feels like an organic way and this is important for example when you're taking photos on the note 9 what you see on your phone is an accurate representation of what the camera is actually capturing whereas if you did the same thing on your Galaxy a 71 and then transfer that file to your laptop you might not actually see quite the same thing the two Xiaomi displays I would say are pretty similar in quality but you see this trend again when you look at Oppo the find x2 light screen is not bad at all but the find X is in almost all aspects bolder and to top all of this off chances are if you buy an older flagship phone you're getting a phone that's also more powerful these 2018 flagships are all packing top shelf Snapdragon 845 chipsets these 2020 offerings they're all equipped with newer but middle of the line equivalents and we're just not on a stage where those have quite overtaken the best that 2018 had to offer so if you take a look at these benchmark scores every one of these flagship phones scores higher than 2,000 points in terms of overall multi-core performance every one of these mid ranges scores less but this is where we start to see those mid ranges gain back some territory because there's a very important caveat to those numbers that these older top-end chips they take more of a toll on your battery they're based on an older 10 nanometer fabrication process versus the newer ones based on eight or even seven I sometimes like to think of it in terms of cars if you buy an older flagship phone you're gonna have a really big bulky but powerful engine under the hood but with a newer mid-range you're getting a smaller but sleeker and more energy-efficient engine and for most people one that will still perform good enough but I'll call this on a draw and while we're at it I would also say that cameras are a draw see here's the thing humans are a little biased when it comes to looking at the past we're not very good at remembering how good something actually was only really remembering how it made us feel so because the galaxy note 9 camera was amazing at the time because it made us feel impressed most people will just assume that it's tons better than the current mid range because of course those haven't evoked that same emotional response but the reality of it is they trade blows pretty much every flagship phone from 2018 had just two cameras and a fairly low resolution cameras at that 12 or maybe 16 megapixels on the mains now compare that to these phones which all have no less than four cameras and main sensors that look a hell of a lot better resolutions of 64 64 and 48 megapixels and just larger sensor areas these mid-range phones are stacked in the camera department so what does that mean for photos well take the two Samsung phones the mid-range one comes with a newer more advanced image processing engine so I can actually sit with it in a darkroom and still capture detail in the bright sky if we move over to the oppas you can see that these newer bigger image sensors they are capturing more information we can crop in here and you can see that the find x2 light has noticeably less noise and it just picks up more of the textures on objects providing you're in good lighting and if we jump over to show meas don't underestimate the benefit of having just more cameras you'll get an ultra-wide on these mid ranges to take sweeping shots like this and quite often a macro camera to to get you closer to subjects but as I've been using these side-by-side for the last week or so is becoming quite clear to me that there's a lot of not so obvious things that flagship phones have that actually made the camera experience the higher quality camera experience you've got almost without fail a faster shutter speed because these phones are more powerful and they're capturing fewer pixels because of their lower rest cameras so for this shot right here the flower was moving pretty fast in the wind but even then the older note 9 could still capture it fast enough to fully preserve its details you can see the a 70 ones isn't quite as crisp as it should be and optical image stabilization pretty much every flagship will have it pretty much the no phone made for $400 will have it and it does exactly what it says on the 10 uses optics to stabilize your camera itself to kind of offset the movements you're inevitably going to make when taking a photo and there's no better way to show the benefits of this then trying to take a night mode shot so I'm standing in the dark right now and by default the newer a 71 can see more of the texture of the floor this isn't surprising as a better camera sensor but because of its stabilization the galaxy note 9 can capture this night mode photo for longer than the a 71 without blurring it so when you look at the end result it's actually managed to get more light in there and therefore more DEET and optical image stabilization also means that video looks way better good stabilization is as important as resolution for video and mid ranges just don't have it also the second camera that you do get on these flood ships is almost always a proper two time zoom camera whereas for a lot of these mid ranges one of those four cameras is just a depth sensor so for being fair I would really say this is more a comparison of three versus two cameras as opposed to four versus two but I think the overall battle of cameras it could go either way I'm gonna call it a draw so now that we've covered almost all the key pillars of a smartphone it's looking like in obliteration and that is the first part of our conclusion that as far as the core phone experience goes you are getting more if you go for an older flagship but the 20/20 mid-range comes with three key perks that aren't immediately obvious number one is battery I already mentioned that these newer phones have more power efficient chips but add to that that the trend in 20/20 just seems to be it also have massive battery cells so you've got more physical battery in a phone that's going to use that battery slower and there's something else C batteries degrade over time they degrade when you use them but what a lot of people don't realize is that they degrade even when they're not being used so when you buy an older phone from a few years ago unless they've specifically told you that the battery has been replaced chances are you're buying a phone that already has two years worth of battery degradation and that's a huge deal because Walt on this side I'm quite likely getting a phone that could last me through two full days of use on this side I'm getting a phone where I might have to be conservative just to get one full day of use as a matter of fact this Galaxy Note 9 I had to charge it by 3:00 p.m. on the first day I was setting it up it's not great the second thing is software if we say that these flagship phones are getting two years of major Android updates and these mid ranges are just getting one which is a rough trend return to see then would still mean that the mid ranges are getting a whole extra year of new features and support so all these phones right now are on a pretty level playing field but by the end of 2021 it's definitely possible that these mid ranges might leave the older phones behind but here is what I would say the decision ultimately hinges on the third perk while you can get for $400 an older flagship phone more than likely to get that you're going to be shopping on eBay or some equivalent so you miss out on peace of mind you can quite easily limit the chances of things going wrong by only shopping with trusted sellers and going with ones with lots of feedback but with almost all of these sites after 30 or 60 days you'll have a very tough time returning anything or getting any customer support at all we're in a minority we are tech people we're the kind of people who we'd be willing to take a risk if it means we might get better features but for the vast majority of the population I would estimate that their top priority above screen quality and camera quality is I want my phone to just work I don't want problems so for people like this the value of having a printed warranty a customer support helpline a physical store that you can go back into and talk to people about it with is pretty important and this you don't get when buying on all the flagship phone unless you find a way to buy it in store but it probably won't be as cheap as it is online if you like this video then I've got a video here that I think you'll love and I should probably caveat this by saying this applies to Android phones only if you're picking an iPhone Apple has a very different way of positioning its mid-range phones so the comparison is different anyways my name is Aaron this is mr. he's the boss and I'll catch you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 4,496,399

Rating: 4.9302826 out of 5

Keywords: smartphone, smartphone 2020, best smartphone 2020, 2020 phone, best 2020 phone, best phone, best phone 2020, refurbished mobile phones, phones from ebay, android, tech, mkbhd, unboxing

Id: oiB8JmBh2vw

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/hsynkk]

Interesting!

!remindme 20 hours