Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Budget Phone Blueprint!”.
On and on one of the most interesting questions in tech right now is, if you were a smartphone maker and you were making you’re making a new budget phone to sell for 400 bucks. Basically, you get to choose one thing to make special one. One amazing feature about your phone and then the rest, you have to save money on the question is what feature do you choose matter of fact, let’s play a little game, let’s say you have 17 to build your own smartphone not to buy but to sell, and You have a bunch of things that you need to spend money on. You know it’s a more complex list than this. Obviously, but for the sake of the game, simple, you have limited money for five bucks.
You can make something excellent special for three bucks. You can make it average and then for one dollar you make things poor just trash, so my gut reaction is to make a great screen like you got to have the thing you look at be excellent and then good specs. I guess give me average battery life and design, but then that’s already 14, so that leaves poor software, poor marketing and poor camera. Ah, i want at least an average camera.
I mean – maybe that’s just me, but okay, how about great screen average specs average battery average camera, then that leaves poor design, um poor marketing and poor software and poor software is rough. It’S a fascinating choice and obviously the prices. You know in our little game, don’t line up with reality and there are way more things you have to choose as a smartphone maker, but you can see the list of trade-offs is a lot. So i asked this on twitter earlier today and almost everyone responding uh spends one dollar on marketing, because who cares about marketing your phone? Nobody wants to blow extra money on the phone for marketing, but they’re they’re answering from the perspective of what phone would you buy when this is supposed to be? What phone would you try to sell the most units with and not everybody wants to make the marketing trade off and spend the extra money and give up the cut to carriers and all that comes with the marketing.
But you can see, that’s also a shift in the trade-offs as well. I think, if you did a poll of what most people care about in a phone they’re buying, they would say software and camera are both pretty important. So as you’re considering how many you sell, you kind of have to trickle down and start to lose features that aren’t those important things anyway, this this is the poco x2.
This is the phone that got me thinking about all this. In the first place, it’s the successor of maybe one of the most hyped phones of the last two years, the original pocophone. But this one is again not coming to the us as this phone, but it converts to about 300 a little more than 300 us dollars, which is a great price for a smartphone there’s, also the poco f2 and poco f2 pro, which is closer to 500 bucks.
But i definitely want to get my hands on it. It looks impressive and the specs look sweet and yet another example of how you can make those choices in a budget phone. But i’m looking at the poco x2. The display here is clearly where they’re spending some money seems like the four to five dollar option. You know it’s a 120 hertz 1080p display just about as good and as fast as you’re going to find in a phone this cheap. It gets plenty bright too.
It’S big and it translates to just the phone feeling super smooth all the time which is great in any budget phone and then on specs. This phone has a snapdragon, 730 g, six or eight gigs of ram mine has six ufs, 2.1 storage. So you know i’d say they spent about their three bucks on specs. Here you know it’s not super high end. Obviously it’s not the 865 or anything, but it’s also not trash. It’S average specs.
What you’d expect to find here and then the battery is a 4 500 milliamp hour battery. So that’s nice that they’re not trying to go super thin or anything crazy, like that looks pretty decent on paper. But, let’s remember that’s powering a large 6.6 inch. 120 hertz bright display.
So that’s something to keep in mind, but they did include a 27 watt fast charger in the box. So again it’s feeling like a 3 for battery, then for hardware and design this one’s interesting. You know they don’t really need to get too fancy, since they already have this nice screen to lean on so essentially, what we have here is a redmi k30 like it’s the same phone literally now it actually says designed by poco on the back, but it’s not. It’S designed by xiaomi, i don’t know why i mean i understand rebranding, and i know you want you can say poco anywhere on the phone, but designed by poco is a bit weird. Either way, that’s what we’re working with and it’s got the metal rails. The glass back, it’s got a nice weight to it and it doesn’t really creak or flex at all when you twist it like some other budget phones that are plastic do and the camera bump too is pretty manageable. It’S not zero, so it does still rock. If you try, but at least it’s in the middle, there is no wireless charging. Even though it’s a glass back – and they say it’s splash proof um, but there is no official ip water or dust resistance rating, because you know these things cost money, but look hardware. Design also includes things like uh, your headphone jack at the bottom, nice uh, the vibration motor bad in this phone, not good, and also things like the fingerprint reader.
Here it’s on the power button here on the side which i like, if you have the choice between a crappy, in-screen, fingerprint reader or something else, if you don’t have the tech just do it this way, just do it on the proven side of the phone where You have to touch it anyway to unlock it. I like this overall that mixed bag feels like another three for hardware and design and then speaking of that camera bump on the back quad cameras. There is a 64 megapixel main camera, an 8 megapixel ultra wide and then you add a depth camera and then another 2 megapixel macro camera. Why? Who keeps asking for these 2 megapixel macro cameras? Is this? Do you just want to be able to say you have quad cameras and that’s like the cheap one that you can throw in to say you have another camera and no one gets mad, but like no one uses it.
So why even put it there? I don’t. I don’t know another another depth. Camera truth is, though, this phone’s primary camera actually impressed me for the price: it’s not pixel level or iphone se level good.
Those are special, but the photos i took with it were usually fairly detailed. Had nice dynamic range and sharpness now as soon as you get to less than ideal lighting noise, especially in the shadows, cranks way up, and it never really knows exactly how to deal with reds felt the most inconsistent, sometimes it over saturates them. Sometimes it makes skin tones weird, but overall they definitely didn’t skimp on the cameras. They’Re, not the trash cameras. I’Ve seen in some other budget phones so i’ll feel like that’s another three then there’s software, the software is myui 11 and just being honest, i’ve never really liked this skin and there’s nothing happening here.
To change my mind with that now the nice thing about android is you can change a lot of this, but it does take some work, but some of it is nearly impossible to fully abandon, also fun fact. The dual hole: punch cutout for the selfie camera is actually two cutouts with a software oval drawn around and between them. Also, software, as we know, has an effect on image, quality and the camera. So that’s like kind of tied to that just saying now it’s hard for me to say what they spent on marketing, because i’m not them and i’m also not in the market that they are trying to sell this phone to.
But if you just drop a one in there, this phone that actually adds up to the 17 that we were budgeting with at the beginning, so yeah there’s a lot of varying budget phones out there right now, this being one of them. This sparked my my conversation in my head about it. That sounds a little crazy, but that’s uh. That’S the high refresh rate one. If you want the budget phone with the higher fresh rate screen, potentially at the expense of some other things.
This is the one option you should be looking at, but the whole point of that game i tweeted out earlier is there’s a wide variety of all these different budget phones, because there’s a wide variety of different answers that people give, and this is why the iphone Se was such a massive disrupter in this budget world. That’S a 400 phone and when you fill it out, you go down the list, it kind of seems to mess with the balance a little bit and even though apple doesn’t have to spend anything extra on the software. That software is super valuable for many people super important having an iphone for that price.
That’S a big deal so when it seems like you’re going over the allotted 17 points, that’s when it’s a good indicator that you’re actually getting a good deal. I also look through some other people’s some notable responses. Renee ritchie’s, he basically built a pixel 4a kinda um go big on the software and the camera, and then you know whoops. The battery is gon na be kind of trash.
Sorry uh, mr who’s. The boss spent extra on a great battery uh, but then maybe you have some concerns about the software and also by proxy, therefore also the camera a little bit this guy victor, i saved his tweet said the software is what makes the phone usable, so he spent More on the software understandably, but then, if you look at his list now you have trash specs and how usable is a phone after a year or two if the specs are trash. I like this one, the dave2d method, spend all the money on marketing and then don’t actually ship a phone and superstaff straight up asks for more money to make a better phone. So obviously it’s a hard challenge and there is no right answer, but i would love to follow up. Maybe if there’s a smartphone company out there willing to share this sort of information on like how much do these different parts cost remember when there are companies leaving out nfc and their phones or phones like this, continue to leave out wireless charging like? How much does each part cost and what are the trade-offs for really putting together a phone of a certain price? Obviously they probably can’t say how much the carrier partnerships are worth, but that’ll be interesting. Either way, i’m curious.
What would you spend on each part of your ideal phone i’ll leave the the 17 question down below the like button? If you want to give it give it your best shot in the comments, i’ll hang out there and maybe give a thumbs up to the ones you think you would actually buy either way. That’S been it! Thank you for watching catch. You guys in the next one peace .