Flagship Smartphones: Overrated?

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Are you getting enough of a bang for your buck?

Let’s face it – we are all attached to our gadgets, in varying degrees. Our smartphones, in particular. Most of us are so reliant on them nowadays that it’s hard to even imagine a life without them anymore, and with good reason.
When smartphones first came into being, they were luxury products that were well above the affordability ranges of most people. Even when the form factors of smartphones started to change after the advent of the iPhone (which, mind you, was not the first of its type – there were other touchscreen-only phones available before it, but the iPhone was the first one to go so big), the price paradigm, unsurprisingly, remained unchanged. If anything, Apple seemed to have cemented the destiny of smartphones to be the overpriced sci-fi-like tools of the elite, not affordable by paupers without being saddled with a multi-year contract with a mobile operator. Want it off-contract (as we do with phones in Bangladesh)? Prepare to pay upward of $600 at the very least.
Things got even crazier when other manufacturers entered the game with smartphones of their own. However, Apple had already set a bar with its premium pricing, and the other manufacturers, perhaps in fear of appearing ‘cheap’, chose to stick to the premium pricing plans for their flagship hardware. These manufacturers also made mediocre lower-end smartphones to cater to markets which were not willing to pay nearly as much.
By this time, China had decided that it had manufactured enough smartphones for other nations, and they started making and exporting their own original and knockoff smartphones based on their learnings, ranging from sub-par to downright amazing handsets that anyone would be proud to own, with something catering to every budget. It didn’t take very long for the ever-industrious Chinese to realize what features customers with shallow pockets would actually want to have on their sets, and they put that knowledge to good use.
Before long, the Chinese started to add little touches of convenience that the bigger brands would be very late to catch up to, if at all – starting with the ability to stick multiple SIM cards in a phone and have them all on standby simultaneously, eliminating the customers’ need to buy and carry two separate phones. The Chinese knew better than anyone that not everyone buys phones as fashion accessories, and instead of making every phone a svelte slab you can slice bread with, they boldly stuffed giant batteries into many of their phones, letting them survive for days even over heavy use, putting utility before beauty. Some phones even eliminated the very basic annoyance of having to plug in earphones to access the FM radio, allowing people to blast their favorite radio hits from the absurdly loud speakers (yet another great feature which many high-end manufacturers neglect to include to this day) of their phones.
Needless to say, the unique feature sets of these phones, combined with their ridiculously low prices, made them immensely popular among customers looking to economize. However, the most interesting twist to this story is one of twofold development.
Google (sorry, Alphabet’s) Android is the primary choice of operating system for almost all of these sets. The developers of Android had spent years optimizing their code, trimming fat and squashing bugs while adding amazing new features (which were being aped by Apple’s iOS in a most ironic reversal of past events). Translation: Android now runs far smoother and further on low-specced devices, while consuming even less battery.
And secondly, mobile hardware started to grow more advanced at quite a fast rate, and what was state-of-the-art and super-expensive even last year came to be classed as low-spec for this year’s run of sets. While this doesn’t sound like much, consider this – after pushing a certain threshold, some upgrades become rather superfluous. A 720p display may not be the choice of phone elitists anymore, but it is more than adequate for most users, because it is miles ahead of the grainy 360p/480p displays of yesteryear, beating the ‘threshold of comfortable usability’ by a mile. By next year, the chances of 1080p displays being listed as low-spec are not low at all.
What does this mean? People can get way more for much less now, and the gap between the elite flagship smartphones and their cheaper counterparts is steadily shrinking.
I switched to a Chinese-made Symphony Xplorer H175 after my Samsung Galaxy S6’s screen died. The H175 cost me Tk 10,500. Do I miss the vibrant 1440p display and the incredible camera of the Tk 65,000 (at the time of its purchase) Galaxy S6? Yes, I do. But anything else? Not really. Rather, the snappy performance of the H175, combined with its microSD card slot and gigantic 4,000 mAh battery (which offers me more than 6-7 hours of 720p screen time on a single charge, as opposed to the S6, which conks out after a couple of hours of use), has left me pleasantly surprised, and I can safely say that it’s good to finally have a phone that can keep up with my kind of brutal usage. And the best part? It’s so cheap that even if it dies on me after its one-year warranty period is over, I can easily get a new set for a similar price (I keep all my stuff auto-backed up on the external SD card), perhaps something with a 1080p display and an even larger battery, instead of being stuck with something that costs many times as much. I can upgrade to my heart’s content.
Moral of the story? Unless you are terribly image-conscious, love to bleed money after seeing fancy marketing gimmicks, and show off your super-expensive tech, don’t get the flagship handsets. When buying a laptop, it’s usually very easy to tell the difference in performance between a cheap one and a more expensive one, but that isn’t the case with phones. If you are a practical person, before you buy your next phone, do some research. You can get any feature you want on your phone for less than half the price of a flagship – be it a waterproofed chassis, a great camera or a fast CPU.

 

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