Smartphone envy. It’s a real bummer. Is it your fault? No. The tech giants pumping out new models every year spend millions of dollars convincing you you need one. Their so-called “flagships” are meant to be the best of the best – peerless, perfect, and luxurious – and with a price to match.
But if we disregard the frills, bells, and whistles – animated emojis, for example – just how important is face-tracking? How necessary is a fingerprint reader? How much screen space do you really need? How important are aesthetics for something that spends most of its time hidden in the palm of your hand?
As the race towards bezel-less screens, thin-as-paper bodies, and novel but (mostly) pointless features continues, I can’t help feeling we’re being sold a lie. Let’s face it: technology is cheap. You can buy a smartphone for under $200 that does most of what a $1000 flagship can do, so why waste the extra cash? Wouldn’t you rather take the cheaper phone and go on vacation instead?
Certain things are important, however. A good camera, fast operation, and pretty screen are usually what sets good phones apart from bad ones. So, let’s take a look at these features, and then you can decide if you need to bleed your bank account dry or can simply buy a cheaper brand and pocket the extra cash.
Six app settings that are devouring your mobile data
Find out NowCamera
Where do you view your photos? Online? On your phone? Unless you’re blowing up photos to hang on the wall, the number of megapixels isn’t important. The sub-$200 Honor 7X has 16MP, which is more than enough for printing (and more than iPhone X’s 12MP).
When and where do you take photos? If during the day, or with flash, your camera’s aperture needs to be around f2.2, like in most sub-$200 phones. But for low light shots you need a “brighter” aperture of around f1.8 to avoid “noise” – a kind of grainy effect caused when the sensor’s sensitivity increases to capture more light. The flagships win for low-light photography, but you need to do a lot of it to make the extra spend worthwhile. Or just reduce noise using image processing software.
One other aspect where flagships shine is in Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS). This helps to counter unwanted camera shake that can cause blurry photos (when holding it in your hand, for example). Not all cheaper models have this, but unless you’re shooting in low light or have particularly shaky hands, you’ll still get great photos.
Screen
High Definition screens are the norm nowadays, and the Honor 7X even has an 18:9 edge-to-edge display despite its sub-$200 price. Nevertheless, the brightness, colors, and viewing angles will vary depending on the screen technology, with OLED being the choice of flagships, and LCD being the choice of cheaper phones.
So is OLED better than LCD? Not always. While colors and blacks might be punchier, OLED uses more power than LCD, meaning batteries might not last as long. And as Google quickly discovered with their flagship (the Google Pixel 2), “burn-in” can be a problem.
And as for screen size, you can get any size you want for under $200. Most phones tend towards bigger screens nowadays, and you definitely DON’T need a flagship phone for a five- or six-inch screen.
Most of us are happy to have LCD TV screens at home that are much bigger than our smartphones, so is it worth spending more for OLED? Probably not.
The 5 best smartphones for under $200
Find out nowSpeed
The speed of your smartphone is determined by three things: processor, RAM, and Operating System (OS). Processors and RAM are cheap as chips nowadays, so you’ll find fast octa-core processors and 2GB+ RAM in most sub-$200 smartphones.
Operating Systems are a bit different. iOS on iPhone and Android on Google work so well because the hardware and software are designed by the same people. There’s no such thing as a sub-$200 iPhone, and outside of Google’s own hardware, Android’s stability varies – probably because other manufacturers like to tinker with it.
But as Android is always improving with each release, performance issues are less common. And it’s not worth spending hundreds more when flagships themselves can suffer performance issues – some of which are intentional (I’m looking at you, Apple).
It’s easy to buy into premium branding and forget that your smartphone is just cheap components assembled into something useful. For some people, that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with liking nice things, whether that’s the satisfaction of owning a flagship phone, or the extra novelty that makes it more fun. But for everyone else, there’s plenty of choice at a fraction of the cost.
