BEST SMARTPOHNES IN 2021

Good, I've even got a special trophy made just for it okay let's start with the design. what is the most impressive phone from the outside there are a couple of close contenders I've spent almost the entire year raving on about Samsung's s21 ultra how it's striking but at the same time somehow also understated? 

I was really close to giving this to Xiaomi because while they do make somehow do I put these polarizing designs they do also have a couple of standouts like the me11 light which is so thin that it barely feels real and the mix 4 with its completely even uninterrupted screen made possible by an actually decent in-display selfie camera but the winner of best phone design of the year. 

I'm going to give to the Vivo x70 pro plus this phone is supremely comfortable to hold they've designed a finish that 

you literally cannot get fingerprints on even if you try to the buttons feel distinctly luxurious and while I wouldn't say I particularly love this glossy section on the back it can also double as a mirror to be able to take rear camera selfies.

 Now we can't have a best without a burst so welcome to a bonus round of who has made the ugliest phone of the year and there are a few strong candidates Asus zenfone 8 was notably devoid of character kind of looks a bit like a wish.com phone this smartphone for snapdragon insiders yes that's the real name made by Qualcomm the chipmaker themselves also feels very much like a prototype. 

But the winner of the ugliest phone of the year has got to be this special edition version of the honor 50. The only way I can think to describe this phone is it's a bit like someone just vomited the alphabet all over it but there's another side to design because as well as making a phone look and feel premium the other challenge that a lot of companies are starting to face is the size constraint how do we fit all the things that people are starting to want into a phone while keeping it compact. 

There's one phone that I think has done this better than any honorable mention to the Asus zenfone 8 which boring design aside is 90 of the capability of the big ones achieved into 60 of the footprint a lot of things had to be re-engineered to make this possible.

Also, props to Samsung's z flip 3. as a tech person this is a hard phone to recommend to someone it's a thousand dollars but it has the specs of a 500 phone however excuse my french it just feels flipping fantastic super-premium really nice materials and the fact that it folds in half means that we're not just talking about fitting in your trouser pockets this can fit into your shirt pocket.

But the winner of the best compact smartphone of 2021 I'm giving to the iPhone 13 mini no gimmicks no one particularly groundbreaking feature it's just the complete latest iPhone experience smaller and now thanks to huge battery improvements this 13 mini last longer, than last year's full-size iPhone 12. Speaking of battery though there is a limit to how much you're going to be able to get from a small phone if endurance is a high priority you are going to need to look bigger and the winner of this category is not the phone I expected to see battery life is a very complex specification most reviewers including myself we just generally try to keep it simple by referring to how many milliamp hours of capacity that a phone has but the truth of it is it depends on display technology how well the phone regulates temperature massively on software and how efficiently it's able to allocate resources. 

But also things like battery voltage and so in 2021 we've ended up in a situation where even though we have phones like the galaxy s21 ultra and the xiaomi 11 ultra with 5 000 million power capacities oh hell even the rog phone 5s pro with a 6 000 million power capacity they're all beaten by a phone with less than 4500 the iphone 13 pro max this phone's battery life is so unbelievably healthy i have sometimes finished days using it with over 70 left i mean you can technically get a phone that lasts even longer you know those ones that are effectively just a dialer with a power bank taped to them but this is the best battery life in a form factor that's somewhat palatable then hey if you find my videos palatable then the sub to the channel would be prized what if you don't want something palatable what if all you wanted was an absolute beast a speck monster a phone designed to play the most demanding games you can get on a mobile platform well you're in luck gaming phones have never been as competitive as they are.

Now in 2021, they're getting so good that it's almost frustrating that developers aren't making games that properly take advantage of them!

Anyways three main companies are fighting in this space you have red magic who's making such high-powered hardware-rich phones for literally 500 but you do genuinely wonder where their profits coming from ridiculous value but the phones do feel a little rushed with arguably half-baked software then you have the other extreme with Asus whose rog phone 5s pro hits 1500 but hey if you have 1500 and you like games there is nothing quite like it, in fact, this thing basically takes a 2021 flagship and tops it in almost every regard it doesn't have a 5000mah battery it has 6000. it doesn't have a snapdragon 888 it has an 888 plus it doesn't have a 120hz refresh rate it has 144. and we're not talking 8 or 12 gigabytes of ram 18. also quite important for a gaming phone a reliable accessory ecosystem whether that's earphones or controllers or external calling attachments you have options but in my opinion, the best gaming phone sits somewhere in between these two with the Lenovo legion dual 2. 

It avoids the software pitfalls of the red magic it gets very close to the performance of the Asus and it starts at 700 kinds of funky-looking though. 

And finally just before we get to the best overall phones in each price tier i just want to touch on foldables because while i don't think these flaccid book style open closed phones are the final destination they do still feel a bit like a half-baked idea in some senses 2021 is the first year where i have seen some mainstream conversation about them so, it's time to analyze if a foldable is what you want the only company it makes sense to buy from is samsung there is microsoft who makes the surface duo nice looking but far too many compromises to recommend it there is huawei but no google services makes it a really dicey option and there is royal the company who actually made world's first foldable but i wouldn't trust their software support as they're primarily a display company their foldables are more of a tech demo than actual consumer-ready phones so that leaves us with two choices samsung's z-fold 3 or samsung's z-flip 3. and between them i would award best foldable phone to the z-fold 3. it's the only foldable that does deliver a tangibly expanded experience compared to just a normal flagship the potential for extreme productivity is here you've just got to decide if you're in the minority who's willing to look past all its compromises to be able to take advantage of it. 

Alright so those are all the specialist phones done the winners for people with specific needs but now it's time to look at the overall winners so we're gonna have best budget phone best mid-range phone best flagship phone best super phone and then finally the overall best value phone across all of these categories the one that will be taking home this very fancy trophy that i've had made for it alright so, i'm classing budget phone is anything around or under 300 and to be honest every realistic contender in this segment is either a spin-off company of xiaomi or oppo and it's not hugely surprising the main profits to be had in the smartphone market are not here honorable mention too the real me eight this company is quite consistently bringing out some of the most extreme price to performance ratios i've ever seen and also the poco x3 pro and the just announced poco m4 i know there's a lot of different names here but these two are pretty special however the winner of best budget phone on the market is xiaomi's redmi note 10 pro i genuinely think and i don't say this a lot for budget phones this is a beautiful device and for about 250 it is shockingly well-rounded good battery life good stereo speakers fluid 120 hertz display and importantly for me also a really good camera for the price my only slight reservation is that xiaomi have literally just announced the redmi note 11 pro which is china only for now but based on past history i would expect a global release probably early next year now then we've got the mid-range category the 300 to 600 sweet spot all phones i recommend here are phones that feel complete even though they're half the price of the top tier. 

And in this category, there is one clear winner which is almost a shame because of how many good options there are like the one plus Nord 2 which is a 400 phone that you could very easily mistake for a 700 phone screen battery camera the polish just makes it that little bit more premium that said there have been a reasonable amount of people who have said that their Nord twos have exploded we are only talking a handful but that's still enough to suggest that it might be a fundamental problem with this particular handset so I'm gonna hold off on saying you should buy one. 

The poco f3 though if 400 is all you want to spend I can't recommend it enough it's got the flagship feel.

And finally;

The real me gt this is the highest-end phone realm makes and so given how much this company manages to pack into 200 phones you can probably imagine that for 500 this thing is stacked but specs aren't everything and based on the experience of actually using them.