Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Can a CHEAP 2022 Smartphone beat a 2020 Flagship? 😱”.
Every single year, new smartphones are getting better, but at the same time, old smartphones are getting cheaper. So for around 400. Now you actually have two choices. You can either get yourself a cheaper mid-range 2022 phone or you can just go for a top-tier flagship from just a couple of years ago, but which one’s actually better. So we’ve got three brand new mid-rangers, the samsung galaxy a53e oppo find x5 lite and xiaomi’s redmi. Note, 11, pro, plus all these phones are available for around 350 to 450 i’ll put a little green sticker on each just, so you can keep track of them, and these are up against the 2022 flagships from the same companies, the samsung galaxy s20 ultra the oppo Find x2 pro and the xiaomi mi 10 pro marked in red, which have all now fallen in price and can be bought for that same 350 to 450 ballpark figure.
We’Ve got 10 categories to test. Let’S see how far tech has truly progressed. So the very first experience that you’ll have with any phone you buy is the unboxing and there isn’t really a clear winner for this.
Every company just has a different way of doing things like if we take the mid-range phones. Samsung’S a53 is an incredibly bland affair. You get the phone and that’s pretty much it no case, no charger, literally just a cable, but then the oppo find x5 light in the same price bracket is exuberant. You get a nice quality tpu case you get a cable and not just a charger.
A fast 65 watt charger and then the xiaomi takes that even further by swapping out that 65 watt charger for a 120 watt, brick. That is insane you would expect to pay 50 for this one thing alone. So while i would say that the flagship boxes they do have that premium quality to them their unboxing experiences, they were designed to indulge customers as opposed to the utilitarian approach of the mid-rangers.
It’S not necessarily that you’re getting more stuff, it’s about the same on average. So we’ll give the unboxing experience a draw, but the flagships do get one easy win right out the gate and that’s the build quality, see processors improve every year, cameras improve every year software improves every year and so new devices they have a big leg up in These categories, but just in terms of the the quality of materials plastic, is plastic, and while i am glad that affordable phones, they are getting the matte finish treatment. Nowadays, you will still be able to to feel the cheapness of material, whether it’s across the entire back of the phone like the samsung and the oppo, or just the side rails, like the xiaomi plastic, doesn’t give you that that premium reassurance that you get from the Dense glass and plush leather found on upper end devices, not to mention the flagship’s clickier buttons and sharper feeling vibrations.
I don’t actually think it’s a cost thing like a sheet of reinforced gorilla glass to put on the back of the phone. It’S only gon na cost. A company like three dollars, i think it’s more the fact that most of the companies who make affordable phones, they also make flagship phones which sell for more and thus have a higher profit per unit. And so these companies have a strong incentive to purposefully not make their cheaper devices feel too nice. So we’ll give this point to the flagships, but just bear in mind that, even though it does feel cheap plastic isn’t a bad material, it’s light, it doesn’t interfere with signal and it’s pretty resistant to shattering. So i wouldn’t dismiss a device solely because it’s made using it, but there is another thing that flagships tend to have it’s a little hard to define. It varies from phone to phone, but almost every single one has some sort of cool factor, a differentiating, gimmick. The thing that’s going to be used in the marketing material to make you want to hand over twice as much cash as you would for a perfectly good mid-range product, like for the s20 ultra samsung debuted, its 100 times, camera zoom xiaomi’s mi 10, pro touted its 108 megapixel quad camera setup with 8k video recording, while oppo has gone down the route of ultra premium materials and design whatever it is mid-rangers, regardless of what year they’re from they will never have.
These flourishes the market for affordable phones. Is it’s so competitive that if there was ever room to add in something cool or something fun, you’d always be better off, just not adding that thing in and keeping the price down instead, and so these fans tend to end up extremely functional everything. You need nothing. You don’t, and if you are enjoying this video, then a sub to the channel would be affordable, because it’s free.
This isn’t always a bad thing, though one time where that functional philosophy can really come in handy is when it comes to the headphone jack, see with a focus on luxury. It’S it’s just kind of an assumed thing, with flagship phones that you’re going to be using expensive wireless earphones. So you don’t need a headphone jack right, but affordable phones. They don’t assume who you are. You want to use wired earphones.
You can do that. You want to use wireless earphones, you can do that too, but the reason that i’m actually giving this category a draw is that, even though the headphone jack is great mid-rangers, they do miss out on the other features that also go with this assumed luxury lifestyle. Like wireless charging and a full ip68 water and dust resistance, although they are mostly still going to be fine if they get wet so so far, we’ve got one point to our 2020 mid ranges three to our 2020 flagships, but now we’re on to the really important Stuff, once the honeymoon phase with your phone is over, then the novelty factor of its more toy, like gimmicks has worn off, is all about the practicality. Can you take photos and videos reliably? Can you watch videos, even if you’re sitting in bright sunlight? Can you play games without lagging out? So, let’s start with performance and while the bright side phone chipsets are improving pretty fast like these newer phones, they are powered by newer and more efficient streamlined processors. However, because these mid-ranges are designed for the mass market for, for average users, you will find that the mid-range chipsets take big shortcuts in places that they think an average user won’t notice, the main one being graphics performance, which does make sense, because, while an average smartphone User might well dabble in a game of pokemon, go or plumber crack they’re much less likely to be a hardcore, gentian impact player, and if they are, they can pay for that extra graphics by buying a higher-end phone, and so just for a point of reference.
I’Ve ran the antutu benchmark on each one of these phones, and you can see that while the new mid-ranges are all very close to that 400 000 point mark, the old flagships are all pushing over 650k. That makes them about 70 percent more capable. Now i will say that in most basic tasks, this difference will only present itself in minor ways like photos taking an extra second to process web pages and apps loading just a fraction slower your keyboard, taking a moment to appear when you need it. But i also do need to reiterate that this is not a small performance gap. If you’re the kind of person who does play a lot of intense games or who does like to smoothly transition between multiple heavy workloads, then you will notice that mid-ranges, like the samsung a53 they’re, pretty easy to overwhelm, and what doesn’t help is that you also tend To get less ram on the mid-ranges, while the flagships on this table come with 8 12 and 12 gigs that compares to 8 6 and just 4 gigabytes easy win for the 2020 flagships, and it’s not just that. Apps and games are going to run smoother on the old flagship they’re. Also going to look better thanks to the displays, don’t get me wrong. Screens are improving year by year, and this two-year gap is about the amount of time that it would take for a piece of display text seen in a flagship to make its way to a mid-range phone. So, for example, 2020 was the first year where every flagship started to come with high refresh rate 90 or 120 hertz panels and take a look at this table. Every single phone now has a high refresh rate screen, but the affordable phones. They are still missing out on that premium level of brightness, mostly capping out at around 800 nits compared to 1200., not to mention that flagship screens. They also just tend to be a little larger, being catered to the power user.
Who just wants the most of everything you almost have to have a big screen to be able to fit in all those other components behind it? But now is where the mid-ranges start to pull back, because one of their key saving graces is software support and that might sound a little counterintuitive. It’S normally flagship phones that get the best support and the most updates, but the very nature of having a phone. That’S just two years more current means that, even if you let’s say get one year of total support, less that’s still gon na.
Take you one extra year forward from now and in the case of samsung, a little more than that it seems like samsung’s made it priority number one recently to make sure that all new phones get major software support. So, while they’re old s20 ultra is due three years of android upgrades in total, which is on the upper end already this new a53, even though it’s not a flagship, it’s actually gon na get four years of upgrades. That is an enormous difference. The x20 ultra is going to top out to android 13.. This thing’s gon na take you to android 16 and that’s not the only benefit.
To being more recent see whichever category of phone you get here, it’s more or less a given that you’re getting somewhere between a 4 000 and a 5 000 milliamp hour battery capacity, and so because there’s a negligible difference in battery size. It’S more about how! Well, that cell can hold its charge where newer is also better batteries degrade over time simple, as that, really they degrade fast when they’re being used daily. So if you’re buying your older phone, pre-owned you’ll have lost a sizeable chunk of battery health, but they also degrade even when they’re not being used. So, even if you’re buying a 2020 flagship phone boxed and sealed the fact that it was manufactured two years ago and the fact that it’s been sitting on a shelf somewhere for that amount of time will also make it not quite as enduring as one that’s fresh Off the belt this year, not to mention the added battery drain on the flagships that just comes from the beefier chips they contain, but there’s an even bigger factor at play.
Here, a new phone is going to be covered. By warranty i mean yes, you can buy officially refurbished older flagships direct from manufacturer which will be covered, but you’ll pay a big premium for that, and so i imagine that most people going down this route will probably be ebaying it and when you do so, the Very nature of buying something that has been used for a period of time. It multiplies the potential number of things that could go wrong with it. This is a rare case, but just for example, the first me10 pro that i bought it wouldn’t switch on.
I tried plugging it in i tried resetting it. Everything it just was dead, and so, even though, with an older phone, you almost need more cover in most situations, you’re, not looking at more than like a 60-day potential return window. If something does go wrong. Okay, final category, before we decide who wins, this is the big one, which is the better set of cameras in this two year time gap have camera sensors and the software algorithms that power.
The majority of our experiences now improved enough. It’S certainly not looking good on paper i’ll tell you that i mean if we just take these two xiaomi phones, for example, while they may look comparable, they both have a 108 megapixel main sensor and a multi-camera setup. Anything more than a cursory glance will reveal that the hardware on the cheaper phone is still very far behind.
Even with the same resolution. The sensor size on the mi 10 pro is way greater. It swaps out the 8 megapixel ultrawide for a 20 megapixel ultron and while our budget friend over here has no zoom lens at all, the me10 pro has two of them, one at two times magnification, which is better for portrait mode shots and then one at 3.7 Times, which is there, if you wanted to properly magnify something, and sadly the progress that xiaomi have made with software, isn’t close to making up? For that disparity, not to mention the more capable image signal processor that comes as a part of having a flagship chipset. You can get like for like shots, it’s not impossible, but it’s all those little things that are considered too specialist for a mid-range phone. You feel their absence coming from a flagship, the usual lack of an optical image, stabilization system, which allows for more fluid motion and more stable, photo capturing the nicer quality vibrations.
When you tap that shutter button, how quickly most flagship phones are actually able to capture the shot, as well as how they’re able to just limit the levels of graininess, thanks to having bigger sensors, that let more light in i could go on for a while. But the point is based on my experiences with this set of phones. I think we’d need a four year gap before the cameras on mid-ranges started surpassing flagships two years. It just isn’t quite enough now the final thing that i’ll add in here just before we pick our winner is the eco angle as much as companies love to toot the horn of looking after the environment with their lovely inventions like boxes that come with nothing inside The most eco-conscious thing that you can actually do is to just buy an older refurbished phone it’ll mean less energy, dumped, less electronic waste, less toxicity in the air and soil fewer raw materials used. The list goes on, but i’ve not put this as an actual category, because it doesn’t really affect the phone experience itself. It’S just you’ve got to decide how much is the environmental impact a factor for you? Okay.
So if we count up our points, you can see that the modern mid-range has four. The older flagships have six, and this pretty much embodies our conclusion, which is that for the most part buying an older flagship you’re getting a better phone tech is progressing, but not quite fast enough that it can bridge the gap between mid-range and flagship in just two Years, you’re getting more power, better hardware, improved sensors and just all around a higher quality experience, but even though they are better phones buying a newer mid-ranger will be less hassle. Your battery is likely to be strong and stay. Strong you’re gon na have software support for a very long time, and even if something does go wrong, also having a proper warranty should make it a non-issue.
So your overall decision should depend on how much you in particular care about the finer quality enhancements that a flagship brings and your personal tolerance to the inconveniences that also come as part of that bundle. By the way, this completely blew my mind. What do you think you’re looking at right now a photo of a kettle right wrong? This is an artificially generated image by a new piece of software called dali. It uses incredibly sophisticated machine learning to create a photo realistic rendering of anything. This sounds like science fiction, but you can actually type in everything from cats playing chess to an astronaut riding a horse and it will literally create it. It is fascinating – and i learned all this thanks to this video’s sponsor morning – brew, which is not what it sounds like: it’s not an app or a website or a coffee.
It is an email newsletter. So here’s the idea, you pop your email address into their site and then once every morning monday to sunday, they send you a five-minute summary on everything, important in business, finance and tech and i’m a strong believer in its ideology because it’s being sent to you, it’s A really easy default option, a way of substituting checking instagram first thing in the morning to actually learning something that you can talk about with people. You can sign up to morningbrew at morningbrewdaily.com, mr who’s, the boss, or just hit the link in description below it’s free.
It takes less than 15 seconds and it’s an easy way to stay on top of things. I’Ve been subscribed for at least a year now, so i can vouch for it. Go sign up below to watch me test some of the cheapest gadgets on the internet.
That video is here or to see if tick, tock life hacks are real or nobody is here. My name is aaron. This is mr who’s.
The boss, .