Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Smartphone Awards 2018!”.
Welcome to the smartphone awards, so there were a ton of smartphones that have come out in 2018 from january and ces straight all the way through all the launches and events until december now, and all these phones have different strengths, different weaknesses, different goals, different designs, different Things they do well and not as well they’re all similar in some ways, but they’re all different. So naturally, at the end of the year we got to break it all down and reward the very best of them. So there will be a bunch of categories and for each category there will be an overall winner and then there will be if there’s a worthy one, a second place sort of a runner-up and if there’s some more good stuff, there’s an honorable mention so without any Further ado, let’s get started. First, category is best big smartphone, so nowadays most smartphones are already pretty big right, they’ve gotten bigger year after year. All these phones in 2018 are way bigger than the phones from 2015, but this award goes to the one that takes the best advantage of all that extra space.
That makes the most use of being big both with hardware and software and the winner for best. Big smartphone of 2018 goes to samsung galaxy, note 9, and this one’s honestly a no-brainer if you’ve got to have a big phone. The note 9 has absolutely one of the best big phone feature sets. You can possibly get it’s the absolute best display in any phone, a six inch amoled and the huge body holds a four thousand milliamp hour battery. It keeps the headphone jack, it has expandable storage. It has dual cameras, there’s no notch, and it has room for a stylus that doubles as a remote control, but it’s not just about having big hardware.
What really wanted over, for the note, is having all this software that takes advantage of it. All all the s-pen features the multi-window support. This phone is a power user’s default. It’S the big phone of the year, no doubt, and then the runner-up, for best big phone of the year, is going to go to huawei mate. 20 pro. This was the last phone.
I reviewed this year kind of snuck in at the buzzer, but they killed it. It’S not quite as big as the note 9, but it still has a 6.4 inch amoled. It has a 4 200 milliamp hour battery and it has triple cameras instead of the usual one or two all at different focal lengths, there’s no pen which is actually fine for most people, but there’s also no headphone jack and it does have a notch. But still this is one of the most complete big phones of the year, both in hardware features and software.
Alright, so the next up category is best small smartphone, the best compact phone of the year, you see small smartphones, are kind of a rare breed nowadays, all throughout everyone’s lineup phones have just gotten bigger across the board, but you can still do great things in compact Packages not as compact as phones used to be a couple years ago, but still there are some great small phones out there, also by the way. I think this is the closest contested category. Some really good ones here, but the winner for best small smartphone in 2018, is gon na go to iphone 10s. This one’s got a 5.8 inch display, like i said, not a super small phone, but to win this award, you have to do everything in the small phone that the big phone does and iphone 10s truly does pretty much everything. The iphone 10s max does just with a smaller display and smaller battery, there’s, basically no other drawbacks.
Obviously it’s one of the fastest chips with that a12. It has the same dual cameras as the bigger phone same ram, and you know what you’re getting with ios. There’S not many people out there regretting buying this phone by the way i’m gon na leave my my list of all the reviews of the phones. I talk about down below so spoiler alert, that’s kind of like a winner’s section, but that will be below anyway. A very close second place, a runner-up to best compact smartphone of 2018, is going to go to the pixel 3 5.5 inch display.
So it’s even smaller and some might even say. The pixel 3 is an even more appealing buy than the bigger brother, the pixel 3 xl. The only thing you’re losing out on here is you have a smaller display and a smaller battery, but you even keep the stereo front-facing speakers and the dual front-facing cameras and then runner-up right behind. That is going to go to samsung galaxy s9 back to a 5.8 inch display, and this thing has a lot going for it already great design. We all love that already three thousand milliamp hour battery the only points you got ta dock, for it are having one less camera than the galaxy s9 plus and for having a little bit less ram. But as of you noticing, those things are both pretty small. Okay. Next up best camera, so for some people like me, having a great camera is super important in a smartphone.
If you take a lot of photos and videos, it’s just encouraging to know that you’ll be able to capture the moment in as high of a quality as possible. I happen to like to take a lot of photos on my smartphone, so this is a category that i’ve spent a lot of time analyzing and it’s come out crystal clear. This is probably no surprise if you’ve watched the videos, but the winner for the best camera and a smartphone in 2018 is gon na, go to the pixel 3 and pixel 3 xl. There is one camera in this phone and the amount of software magic google’s done with this one is nothing short of amazing. There were, of course, plenty of other good phone cameras this year, but google’s hdr plus and software magic plus night sight and all the incredible shots. I’Ve gotten with it, put it clear and far ahead as the favorite camera ever in any smartphone. It’S so good. In second place, though, i have a camera that does slightly lesser photos, but that i’d say does much better video and audio, and that is the iphone.
10S iphones have been sort of the king of video and smartphones for a little while now and the 2018 iphone is no exception to that rule. If you’re trying to do a lot of video on your smartphone, you should get the iphone, and i’m going to give my honorable mention for cameras to the huawei mate 20 pro for an excellent use of three cameras, obviously with three unique different focal lengths. I really like the super wide angle camera, especially for a lot of things now, of course, lg and others also did the whole triple camera thing, but this one happens to be the best quality of those three cameras. All right next award best battery life – and this is this – is an important one for most people, because i feel like a big complaint. A lot of people have about their current smartphone. Is it just doesn’t last long enough, so it’s good to see some smartphones focusing on not getting super super thin, but actually giving you a long, lasting battery life plus you’ll get extra points in this category for things like fast charging and wireless charging and the winner Sneaking in at the end of the year for best battery life, i’ve had actually ever in a phone, but of course of 2018 is the huawei mate 20 pro this one? I don’t want to say it shocked me, because i knew it would be good.
I just didn’t know it would be this good, so it’s a 4 200 milliamp hour battery 6.4 inch display, but the aggressive memory management combined with the actively changing resolution and fast charging and wireless charging. All this combined meant, i literally never think about battery when using this phone, i could be using it for six straight hours in a day and end the day with 40 left or something ridiculous. It’S really impressive! What they’ve done with this phone and all that in a phone? That’S not even that thick kind of sorcery well done.
Huawei runner up for best battery iphone 10r turns out combining the best soc in any phone with the apple a12, with a particularly low resolution. Is a recipe for a super long lasting battery life? This is the longest lasting iphone. I’Ve ever tested and happens to be a bunch of colors and other sweet stuff too, but 10r very good battery, and then honorable mention will go to red hydrogen one, this phone.
It is obviously pretty thick, but it’s packing a 4 500 milliamp hour battery, making it officially the biggest battery cell i’ve ever held in my pocket, or at least in a smartphone anyway. It does have pretty fast. Charging doesn’t have wireless charging, but it just lasts for an eternity on battery. So that’s a good sign. Okay, next up the design award – and this is an interesting one – because for a lot of the year we got these complaints of every phone kind of looks the same.
Are we at peak smartphone, and this is kind of when they’re all doing glass backs dual cameras and a notch like every single phone? But i found that the most interesting looking most innovative, designed looking phones this year came from a lot of boutique manufacturers trying to avoid the notch. So they knew that if they could say they made a totally bezel-less phone with no notch before apple, then you’d have a big hit on your hands and that spawned this whole genre of these crazy, looking phones that were trying their best to be bezel-less, but then Put the front-facing camera and the earpiece and all those sensors behind the screen, or in some other places it was really interesting to see anyway. The point i’m getting at the design of the year for 2018 is going to go to the oppo find 10.. This was i mean what a head turner of a phone this year, they decided to go with a full-on motorized slider that holds the front-facing camera and ir sensors and full facial recognition system. It pops up every time you unlock the phone and i don’t think anyone can really speak to the long-term durability of a system like this yet, but the result is definitely a really fascinatingly beautiful phone that could totally end up in a museum in a few years. Also, there’s a pretty good chance in the future, we’re going to laugh at what we had to do to get these bezel-less designs back in 2018.
But i’m going to give honorable mentions to the xiaomi mi mix 3, also a slider and the nex s, which was just the single pop-up camera: okay, next category best budget phone in 2018. This is an important one this year, because if you haven’t noticed pretty much, every phone that came out over this calendar year of 2018 has been more expensive at launch than the one that came before it. I used to say it often: good phones are getting cheap and cheap phones are getting good now, uh.
Half of that is still true, but basically a great budget phone is becoming more and more rare, but they do still exist. So the winner for best budget phone of 2018 goes to you guessed it. The xiaomi, pocophone f1.
This thing turned a lot of heads when it came out: it’s not available everywhere still and it’s not the only good phone in this price range, but it just got so much hype and then it does a lot of things. Well, snapdragon 845, six gigs of ram four thousand milliamp hour battery and it’s pretty well built and it’s around 300 bucks give or take with a bit of shipping. But even knowing numbers don’t mean everything like this phone performed pretty well, the skin wasn’t too overwhelming. But you could just flash another rom on it anyway, and on top of that, it went and took down the iphone 10 in our blind camera test. So it’s just just got a lot going for it.
You guys already know i’m so busy with flagships. I don’t get to spend a lot of time with budget phones unless they really pop up on my radar, but this one really earned its time in my pocket and i hope we see more phones like it next year. I’M going to do honorable mentions in this category as well, and that would be for the nokia 7 and the honor 8x get it honor. I had to all right next up is the award i hate to have to give, but i have to give it it’s the best, the biggest bust of 2018.. We all have disappointments. Okay, i get it like.
There’S mistakes mistakes get made sometimes two or three or eight or nine things go wrong or maybe it just didn’t live up to the hype or you just didn’t see something going the way it did. You can probably already tell what i’m getting at. No doubt the bust of the year for smartphones in 2018 was the red hydrogen one. It was so frustrating because i wanted this phone to be so good. The whole video, if you watch it, it’s just let down after letdown, which is only so bad because i love so many other red products and what they do as a company. But that being said, i’m still crossing my fingers for those modules or hydrogen 2. Whichever comes first, but that’s all coming in the future next year, this was the bust of 2018., all right next up the most improved award. This goes to the phone that just improved the most year over year now for as much as phone’s gotten more expensive over the last year, not a lot of them got significantly better to warrant that difference in price. Like you know, the new iphone looks like the old iphone. The new samsung looks like the old samsung.
That’S part of the whole tick tock design strategy, but you have to reward the ones that really take a big leap forward. So the winner for most improved smartphone of 2018 goes to razer phone 2 and they earned this award in a pretty new gaming phone category. By basically attacking all the things that were weak about the first razer phone and keeping all the good stuff, so they sort of repositioned it from a hardcore gaming phone to a flagship that happened to be great at media and gaming. So they added a glass back for wireless charging.
They dropped in a glowing rgb logo. The cameras are improved, they kept the front-facing speakers, they kept the awesome 120 hertz display, but made it brighter and then made the whole thing water resistant like last year. I wouldn’t have necessarily recommended the first razer phone to most people, but this one is much more complete, much more daily drivable, it’s kind of like going from a prototype car to a full finished production version with all the trims like it’s much better. So this is uh, it’s always sort of had the specs, it’s just much more daily drivable now so then, last but not least, the biggest award of the night. Literally it’s the mvp, the smartphone of the year. You can see it as the best phone, the most complete phone, the most impactful phone, either way, there’s only one voter and that’s me so.
The winner of the mvp, the smartphone of the year for 2018, goes to the oneplus 6t. Now this one’s truly deserved, but if you scroll back up through the awards, it’s not really the best at anything. Actually, it’s arguably the fastest android phone, but there’s no award for that. But it does pretty much everything very well and then makes a couple sacrifices in the right place to bring the price way down. So in a world where phones are approaching 900 1000 eleven hundred dollars the oneplus 6t. This phone brings a lot of flagship performance and kind of flagship design too down to literally half the price. It’S hard to go wrong and now that this is also in stores too, this is a phone i’m recommending to a lot of people and they’re enjoying it too. Now it’s going to be a tough app for them to follow next year, but we kind of always see it coming because we see the phone they release early in the year. Then a couple months later, there’s the t version. That’S way better, but i got ta say: they’ve done a great job with the 6t this year.
So then my runner-up for the mvp is going to be the samsung galaxy note 9.. This is what you might call the most complete phone of the year. Not a lot of phones make it feel like you’re getting more than you paid for, especially at a thousand dollars. But if you want something that checks every box note 9 checks.
Every box is basically the only flagship left with no notch with a headphone jack. With a stylus built in and then with that incredible display, with a variable aperture camera and with all around high-end specs, it’s just it’s checking every box and then my mvp honorable mention will go to the huawei mate 20 pro still not available in the us and Still not the best reputation of a company in the us either, but this phone did a lot of things right. So i’m talking best battery life that i’ve ever used in a smartphone which is really impressive.
You get the triple cameras of different focal lengths so again, high quality, very versatile. You have to color power button and a great design and great overall performance, uh, not a whole lot, not to like easily my favorite huawei phone of all time and one of the best devices to come out in 2018.. So there you have it it’s the smartphone awards of 2018.. Like i said earlier, there was a little bit of a sentiment that we were sort of all getting the same smartphone over and over. But really when you look at it, there has never been a better selection, there’s something for everyone genuinely like whether you’re into smartphone, photography or video or you’re working on a budget, or you need a compact phone or you’re really into something that’ll. Last, you all day with a big battery, even phones that aren’t like winning awards that are on this table. If you brought this lineup of phones to six years ago, these would all be incredible choices, so it’s kind of a good time to be alive. So, thank you for watching this annual awards show it’s been a pleasure to host for 2018 hope you enjoyed i’ll catch, you guys in the next one peace. .