Techie Ramblings

Category: Phones

  • OLED or LCD on a smartphone?

    Look at the specifications of any midrange or flagship smartphone today and I can guarantee with a degree of certainty that it will have an OLED screen. Look at the budget segment of the smartphone market and all but a couple of exceptions will have LCD screens. It wouldn’t be a stretch then to assume that an OLED is the premium option, which it is but would it also be correct to assume it’s the better option? Lets delve in.

    OLED benefits

    An OLED (or Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen is the newer technology that many of today’s more premium phones are equipped with. They have unmatched contrast, in part due to the design of these screens in that there is no backlight, each pixel is individually lit and can be turned off entirely to create a much darker black. They consume less power, again due to the individual LED’s being able to turn off (a big driving factor for “Dark mode”). They have excellent colour accuracy. They can have very fast response times due to the speed the LED’s can change state. OLED screens can be flexible, create the market of folding smartphones we’ve seen over the last few years.

    OLED Drawbacks

    The cost to produce an OLED panel is high, due to the organic compounds in the OLED’s having a short shelf life and a complex manufacturing process. Over extended use the OLED’s luminance, or ability to produce light decreases. This leads to a problem we refer to as “Burn in”. When these OLED panels display a static image for extended period of time they get dimmer, whilst the other OLED’s around it that were not left in that state keep their brightness, leading to a shadow of the image being permanently on the panel. On phones this commonly occurs on the status bar, or home screen. PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) is the method in which an OLED panel controls its brightness. An OLED is either in an on or off state, there is no in between. Therefore to appear dimmer the OLED will turn on and off hundreds of times a second to trick our brains into seeing a less bright image. Some people can perceive this flicker and it causes them headaches and eye strain in a term that’s now commonly referred to as “PWM Sensitivity”. Durability is also a concern with OLED panels, depending on the quality used they can be quite susceptible to impact damage and deterioration over time.

    LCD Benefits

    An LCD (or Liquid Crystal Display) is a more mature technology used in everything from digital watches and train departure boards to TV’s, computer monitors and mobile phones. It’s more complex in how it works compared to OLED with it’s RGB LED’s, but essentially there is a backlight which shines through colour filters to create an image. They are cheaper to manufacture because the manufacturing process is simpler and uses readily available materials. They are not susceptible to burn in. They do not have issues with PWM due to the fact the backlight brightness can be directly adjusted by simply lowering or increasing the voltage. LCD’s can achieve a higher peak brightness due to the backlight technology. LCD panels also generally have a very long lifespan.

    LCD Drawbacks

    On higher brightness settings LCD panels can draw a lot of power due to the backlight. Also due to the backlight the contrast between black and white is limited, this varies by quality of the LCD used. LCD’s can also have poor response times, again this varies by quality of panel and isn’t as prominent in modern LCD displays but essentially the light filters cannot respond fast enough to the input they receive and a “ghost” image can be displayed for a fraction of a second but enough to be perceivable.

    Which is best for a smartphone then?

    That was a lot of information, but its important when making a comparison to have all the facts. How do we go about comparing both of these technologies just for the application in a smartphone? We have to bring real use cases and user requirements into it. We also have to appreciate that not all LCD and OLED panels are created equal. There is a vast difference in quality between the best and worse panels for each of these technologies.

    There are extreme ends of the user spectrum here for which the decision will be very easy: For a user with PWM sensitivity, or someone who needs to display static images for an extended of period of time they need a phone with an LCD screen. For a user playing high intensity games, or a professional photographer demanding colour accuracy they need an OLED screen.

    A couple of niche features OLED panels can provide may also sway your decision too. If you need an always on display or want the deepest blacks when using dark mode, only an OLED can provide that.

    Personally I fall into the category of LCD being a better choice for me. While I don’t get headaches or eye strain from an OLED screen I can detect the flicker, especially in my peripheral vision which can get annoying. I also keep my screen timeout set at 10 minutes, and often display text or an image for reference while I’m working on something, so not having to worry about burn in is a plus. I also appreciate the lower cost, my current personal phone (HMD Pulse) cost me just £60 new and sealed, whereas my work phone (CMF Phone 1) cost £165, and aside from the OLED and faster chipset it’s missing features that the HMD Pulse has. The cost of replacement is also a benefit to me too, it’s reassuring to know that if I break the screen I can replace it for £15 delivered whereas on some of the premium flagship phones a replacement OLED panel can be £200-300 just for the part, considering most users can’t fit a screen themselves it becomes worryingly expensive.

    What should the average user do then? Assuming you don’t have any of the specific requirements I’ve mentioned above. In reality you don’t have much choice. In today’s market as I mentioned in the first paragraph budget phones get LCD panels and more expensive phones get an OLED panel. Unfortunately it seems this trend is only increasing and in some cases budget phones such as the CMF Phone 1 and Samsung A15 and A16 have now got OLED screens.

    In an ideal world I’d like to see customers presented with a choice: The same phone with the only difference being a choice of an LCD or an OLED. Even more optimistically the LCD variant would be slightly cheaper too, passing on the reduced manufacturing cost. An LCD is arguably the best choice for most people, and the environment. It only takes a quick search on 2nd hand online marketplaces to see thousands of phones being sold as spares and repairs due to OLED burn in and broken panels.

    How many of these phones would still be in use if they didn’t have this fault, and if when broken the screen could have been replaced cheaply? In a room of average people none of them would be able to discern or tell you the difference between a quality LCD and an OLED, it seems like the ingenious marketing departments of the smartphone companies have struck again.

    Below I’ve taken two photos of four phones displaying the same image at maximum brightness.

    From left to right we have a Samsung Galaxy Y (2011, TFT LCD), HMD Pulse (2024, IPS LCD), Samsung Galaxy S3 (2012, Super AMOLED), CMF Phone 1 (2024, AMOLED).

    As you can see there are differences here, and in particular the older devices have lower max brightness levels. However even in the case of the 2011 Galaxy Y other than its miniscule size you can’t look at the display and say it looks awful. On the newer phones the bezels are smaller and the screens are much bigger but the difference between the two is marginal and these two aren’t even close to being equal. The Pulse has a PPI (Pixels per inch) of 265, whereas the CMF Phone 1 has 395.

    What I’m getting at here is that specs on paper can look like a night and day difference but in reality the differences are barely noticeable. Buy what works for you best and don’t get sucked into marketing tactics!

  • Samsung S3350 (Chat 335)

    Image Credits webuy.com

    There was actually another device in-between this one and the Tocco Lite. It was a Nokia X3-02, and on paper it should’ve been better than this one. However there was a problem with it not being able to connect to WiFi and another issue I can’t remember that meant it had to be returned, because I only had it for around a week I’m not going to do a full post for it.

    Onto the Samsung S3350 AKA Chat 335. I used this phone throughout my time at College. Aside from the key feature that it was actually possible to type on unlike the Tocco Lite this had one notable, major improvement on it. WiFi. No longer was I limited by my minimal credit, when I was somewhere with WiFi (admittedly not too many public places had this yet) I could browse Facebook or the web.

    You only need to take one look at the picture above to see that this phone is a blatant Blackberry knock off. 2010 was a strange time for the mobile phone market. On one hand you had the iPhone 4, the Galaxy S and the Nexus One whilst on the other hand Blackberry still had a large market share and people were still buying feature phones like the Chat 335 and Nokia devices running Symbian. We were not yet in a world where a smartphone was a requirement, mobile banking wasn’t an option, mobile data prices were still high and the height of portability for me was a laptop. For one I wouldn’t have been able to afford a smartphone and it simply wasn’t a requirement for me.

    This phone was still annoying enough that you wouldn’t want to use it unless you really needed to. I think I may have used the inbuilt internet browser a couple of times, and most of the time you were met with the dreaded “Out of memory” message when trying to load a page. It did however have a micro SD card slot and a 3.5mm headphone jack so it got plenty of use as a media device. I also got quite good at texting with the full keyboard, although I remember occasionally using my girlfriend at the time’s Blackberry and that was worlds ahead of the Chat 335 in terms of quality and functionality.

    Without any comparison this was a decidedly budget and basic device. I actually recently re-purchased this device to revisit so I can review it without memories clouding my judgement. It has a capacitive home button, which allows you to scroll around the menus. This is overly sensitive and doesn’t work well at all. The keyboard often doesn’t register a button press, which compounds the issue with the inaccurate scrolling button when you try to correct it. It lacks a reasonable amount of RAM to load any website beyond Google. The camera was poor, even for the time. On the flip side, just using it as a feature phone and not expecting it to be a smartphone it’s OK. The keyboard is still better than the best T9 keyboard, or a resistive touch screen. Despite being small the display is clear and readable. The battery lasts a long time and the device is very durable.

    While this phone would never have won any awards even back in 2010 it was an acceptable device. It kept me in contact with friends and family, and kept me occupied through moments of boredom. This was my last feature phone before I moved onto a smartphone! Aside from where I’ve done digital detoxes and used a “Dumbphone” from here on out it’s all Android and iOS devices from here on.

  • Samsung GT-S5230 (Tocco Lite)

    Image credit www.njuskalo.hr

    This was my first phone that had a touch screen, and it was purchased as a replacement to the W300i.

    This phone was my introduction to Samsung devices and it runs TouchWiz 1.0. This was the basis of One UI which is now on version 7 on Android 15. Technically this is where it all began. Launched in 2009 this phone was a budget phone, on a proprietary operating system. It has a resistive touch screen and no physical keyboard. In some ways it looks very familiar to the smartphones we know. However don’t be fooled, this is very much a feature phone with a touch screen. The operating system was very limited, with no method to install any apps other than what it shipped with. You could however set up your homescreen with widgets for the first time, although it’s uses were limited.

    My only real fond memory of this phone was the camera and MP3 player. There was still no 3.5mm headphone jack to be seen on this device, but it had the option to expand the storage with a Micro SD card, offering at the time seemingly limitless storage. The camera was much better than the VGA camera I was used to on the W300i, and to this day I still have some memories from around 2010 in photo and video form taken on this camera.

    That’s where the good part ends. The touch screen on this phone was a nightmare to use. Being resistive stacked the odds against it but having parts of the user interface requiring you to press and drag (scrolling) was just a recipe for disaster. You would often accidentally click into menus and accidentally call the wrong person, it was haphazard at best. Typing was no better, in portrait orientation the phone would display a T9 keyboard and you had to orient the phone in landscape to get a full QWERTY layout. Neither were fast or accurate and I would often resort to a phone call instead just to avoid having to endure it. The fact that my next device was a phone with a full QWERTY, physical keyboard should speak volumes about my experience with this.

    Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) the device was not durable at all. As a teenager, doing things that normal teenagers do this device didn’t last long at all. When dropped the back cover and battery had a habit of ejecting themselves from the phone, and the soft resistive touch screen wasn’t up to much abuse. I can’t remember the incident that caused it’s untimely demise but it isn’t hard to imagine.

  • Sony Ericsson W300i

    Image credits cellphones.ca

    There are only around 3 or 4 phones in this list that I consider to be the perfect devices for the time period and my application and this was one of them. I don’t really consider the NEC between this and the 3200 as one of my devices because of the short time period I owned it, so side by side with the Nokia 3200 getting this device in 2006 was a major upgrade.

    Over the 3200 it had Bluetooth, WAP, an excellent loudspeaker, a headphone adapter to take any 3.5mm headphones, memory card expandability, had dedicated media buttons and of course was a clamshell with a secondary screen for notifications and media information when shut.

    With this phone I could retire my terrible 128MB AA battery powered MP3 player, it had 256MB of internal storage and could be expanded by a further 2GB. I think I may have had a 1GB card for this. This was a marked point where phones began to consolidate the need for multiple devices into one. Later in the phones life I did get an iPod Nano but this phone still got used for media when a loudspeaker was required. The loudspeaker was particularly good quality compared to other phones of the time, and if I was with friends it was always the W300i that got used to play music as it was clearer and louder than the others.

    To date the W300i is my longest serving device, it lasted me a whole 4 years which took the majority of the way through high school. The battery lasted well throughout my ownership, in the absence of social media sharing music, funny videos and pictures took place through Bluetooth so it also took a beating there. The device was very durable, surviving countless drops, bangs and falls onto every imaginable surface. It survived years in the pocket of a very active teenager and never faltered. Until the fateful day it met its demise. I still remember it clearly, it was 2010 and we were in the midst of a very severe winter. We’d had at least 6 inches of snow and I’d just walked a girlfriend home. I was wrapped up well with a down coat, hat and gloves and my phone had just vibrated. I pulled the phone out to check and with the gloves on, fumbled opening it and it fell into the snow while open. Being white and the snow being deep it completely disappeared so was in the snow for a good couple of minutes before I found it. The phone survived initially, I folded it back up and put it back in my pocket. By the time I was home though it had died, the snow that had made its way into the hinges melted and destroyed the phone.

    To this day the W300i reminds me of a simpler time. Happy times with friends and the chaotic times of Bluetooth file sharing and hacks, taking over each others devices and generally causing mischief. A time when phones weren’t as important, weren’t as expensive and they didn’t hold the key to our entire lives.

  • NEC E228

    This was a phone I only owned very briefly in 2004. My Father (parents separated) wanted to make sure he could keep in touch with me and that I could call him whenever I wanted (I often ran out of credit on my pay as you go SIM) so he got me this on contract. The reason it didn’t last long with me was that being on contract I was terrified of it running up a massive bill. Ultimately we returned it after a brief period.

    Compared to the Nokia 3200 this was a much more advanced phone. For starters it had 3G connectivity, so network speeds were much faster. The screen was a lot bigger and of a higher resolution. I also remember the speaker being much louder and the Polyphonic audio being much better. It also had a front facing camera, not that I ever explored the feature but I imagine it could make video calls.

    It was a strange device though. In comparison to other mobiles of the time it was massive, unnecessarily so and felt strangely hollow and light. Similar to the cordless telephones that a few people still have around today. I also remember it consuming battery fast. The Nokia’s I’d become used to could easily go a week between charges with light to moderate use, this one needed charging at best every other day. I assume the early 3G modem was the cause for this.

    Overall not a device I was very fond of, partly due to it being a difficult point in my life and the memory of this phone is probably associated with that. However, objectively speaking this was a very advanced device for its time, it took me until around 2010 to get another device that matched the functionality of this one.

  • Nokia 3200

    Image credits imei.info

    The Nokia 3200 was the first phone I owned from new. My timeline is fuzzy going this far back, but the device was released late 2003 so I must’ve got this after around 2 years of using the hand-me-down Nokia 3210. I don’t know if this was a gift or I’d purchased it with my own money, not helped by the fact I can’t find any details online about its original retail price.

    By all accounts this was a massive functional upgrade over the 3210 which had been released just 4 years prior to this. It has a colour screen, a camera (albeit basic, however still a big upgrade over nothing!), a GPRS data connection with a rudimentary web browser, polyphonic ringtones, the ability to run Java based applications, infrared connectivity, an FM radio, MMS messaging and a torch.

    I have very fond memories of this phone. We didn’t have internet at home at this point, and this had internet access. Unfortunately I was on pay as you go, and data was still very expensive at this point so I had to be very careful how I used it or I would burn through my allowance in no time. I remember being lured into buying poor polyphonic ringtones that mimicked popular songs at the time and java games from various stores online. I can only imagine what a minefield it is today for children to navigate in the world of in app purchases if I was convinced to buy these! I remember using the included headset to listen to the FM radio, and spent a lot of time playing the “Bounce” platformer game that was included with the phone.

    Image credits gsmfind.com

    This phones party piece however was it’s customization options. The front and rear panel of the phone unclipped easily and the coloured insert of the phone could be removed and replaced. In the box were 3 holographic insert options; blue, green and orange, my favourite being the blue one. Also included in the box (isn’t it a start contrast how many extras manufacturers used to include, considering now we don’t even get a charging block!) was a paper cutter. You could take any card or paper and make your very own insert for this phone. I remember making inserts from magazines and game covers. I don’t think this level of customization has even been exceeded on a phone before or after this one.

    It was not all sunshine though, this phone did have two major drawbacks; it’s size and it’s keypad. The size issue was a common one for the time period, as phones still had very limited media functionality smaller was better. It was a competition of who could have the smallest phone, and while this one was nowhere near the smallest it was still minute by todays standards. The low pixel count and small LCD limited usability, any web page would lose any kind of formatting and layout it was intended to have. The size also exaggerated the issues with they keypad as it was harder to hold. The main issue as mentioned was the keypad. A truly dreadful design that really highlights the downsides to manufacturers trying to be different for the sake of it. If you revisit the image at the top of this page you’ll notice that each physical button has 2 numbers on, they were essentially rocker switches. Combined with the fact these buttons were tiny to start with typing was a horrific experience. You could forget typing with fingers, you had to use your fingernail to stand any chance of accurately inputting. Texting was laborious, and as people in my circle started to text more I found myself reverting back to the 3210 which had full sized buttons.

    While I’d love to own this device again just to relive the memories they’re now very hard to come by in complete condition and I think the saying of “Never meet your heroes” rings true here. Especially with large adult male hands I think trying to use this device today, even just playing around with it would tarnish the memory I have of it.

  • Nokia 3210

    Image Credits https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com

    This was my introduction into mobile phones and I hold it in very high regard. At first this phone belonged to my Mother, and I have strong memories of getting hold of it from her whenever I could to play a game of Snake while we waited in a doctors waiting room, or being dragged around department stores.

    Once my Mother’s contract had ended she replaced the device, and this was handed down to me, with a o2 pay as you go SIM as my very own first mobile phone. At this point in my life, around 2001 I had very little need for a mobile phone, other than being contactable for my parents when I was playing out and I may have sent a couple of text messages.

    This didn’t stop me using this phone and exploring every feature it had. I remember the green backlight and backlit keys, which were very similar to a Casio F91-W’s in colour, and actual usefulness. It had an inbuilt ringtone maker, which you could painstakingly type out a sequence of numbers for different notes, and breaks to create your very own song. I think my proudest ringtone was the 007 theme tune, in all it’s Monophonic glory. Aside from Snake and the ringtone maker this phone was very basic, it didn’t have any type of connectivity aside from calls and text messages.

    I remember keeping this device around while I had my next couple of devices, but I can’t work out what actually happened to this phone. I don’t think it was every sold but perhaps it was lost in a later house move or maybe it was passed on to another family member.

  • My Phone History – A Series

    My relationships with mobile phones, and smartphones has been a somewhat strange one. From my pre-teen, pre-internet years I remember poring through the Argos catalogue comparing the phones they had for sale. As a youngster I didn’t have access to money outside of a trivial weekly pocket money allowance, so this never really amounted to much.

    However as I grew older and my disposable income increased this strange desire to keep switching and changing smartphones grew too. I’ve never been able to really get to the bottom of the reason why over the years I’ve bought and sold so many smartphones. For a while I kept swapping cars, but I grew out of that and reached the point that as long as my car is functional I’m perfectly happy with it. Other areas of my life don’t match this behaviour either. I keep my computing devices and other tech items for as long as they’re functional, I don’t obsess over clothing, only really buying more when I need to replace something. It’s just a strange fascination with phones.

    This all reached a breaking point a few weeks ago, when I was caving in to the itch of changing phones merely a month after just changing devices. Fortunately this has never cost me much money because I always resold the other device and often purchased them 2nd hand in the first place. In fact I would hazard a guess, this has only cost me the equivalent of what the average person spends on their phone contract each month. However the constant setting up, and potentially losing data, and worrying about resale value was wearing thin on me and I decided to make a change for the better and break the cycle.

    Regardless of the above I do still have a passion for mobile phones of all shapes and sizes, and have decided to start a series documenting each of the phones I’ve owned over the years. Below is a list of those devices, in the best chronological order I can remember and I plan on making a post on each of these. These posts won’t be in-depth technical reviews, more an overview of the device and my thoughts about the device at that point in time and how it fit into my life.

    • Nokia 3210
    • Nokia 3200
    • Sony Ericsson W300i
    • Samsung Chat 335
    • Nokia X3-02
    • Samsung Tocco Lite
    • Samsung Galaxy Y
    • Samsung Galaxy S3
    • HTC One M8
    • iPhone 6
    • iPhone 6s
    • iPhone 7 Plus
    • iPhone SE
    • Xiaomi Redmi Note 4X
    • Samsung Note 9
    • Google Pixel 4
    • iPhone Se 2nd
    • Motorola G8 Power
    • Samsung M51
    • Nokia 105
    • Pixel 3a
    • iPhone 13
    • Nokia G11
    • Pixel 6a
    • Samsung S23 Ultra
    • Pixel 7a
    • Samsung A14
    • iPhone 15 Pro
    • Nokia 110 4G
    • AGM M7
    • Unihertz Jelly Star
    • Pixel 8
    • Samsung S24 Ultra
    • Samsung A55
    • Samsung S24
    • CMF Phone 1
    • Oppo Find x8 Pro
    • HMD Pulse

  • A case against Flagship Smartphones

    Flagships are overkill.

    Yes I said it. I mean really even midrange devices are overkill at this point. I get that the main feature which scales with the price is the camera but even on a flagship it’s subpar in comparison to even a entry level, old DSLR.

    So if we’ve ruled out the cameras what are the actual benefits of a flagship? Lets break them down and give the reasons why they’re not as important as we think, and how very clever marketing techniques have been used to convince us we need one.

    The processor, or chipset.
    I am currently using a Samsung A14 4g. Widely regarded as a slow and generally terrible phone, and yet here I am as a tech enthusiast and professional and I’m having zero problems with it’s performance. It’s responsive, can handle the tasks I need a phone to perform and has been playing casual games brilliantly. Granted if I want to play full titles I’ll play on PC or a console, but who really wants to play full blown games on a 6.5″ touchscreen when we have big TV’s and proper gamepads? A flagship phone has laptop or even desktop levels of performance, but ask yourself if you really need this level of performance? Most of us are communicating and consuming media on our phones, we don’t need all that power.

    Storage.
    This is a strange one. The budget phone technically wins here. Admittedly the flagships have faster read/write speeds on their storage but when it comes to sheer quantity the budget phone generally wins hands down. Why is that? In general flagship phones pricing structures start with a base storage of 128gb. Then there are versions with more storage that you can purchase for heavily increased costs. The budget phone however will generally have a fixed internal storage of 64gb or 128gb, the ace in the budget phones sleeve however, is that they still have micro SD card slots so can cheaply be expanded by however much you want.

    Display
    This one is a bit of a subjective point. But again coming back to the Samsung A14 the LCD panel on it is excellent. I really do not need anything better. I can’t see the individual pixels, it gets very bright and the viewing angles are great. This might not be the case for all budget phones but at least the ones I’ve experienced recently have all been great. In fact I’d go as far to say that in some cases an LCD panel is better for most users. There is no burn in with an LCD panel, and generally they’re a lot cheaper to replace. You may not get the latest gorilla glass, but when a replacement LCD and glass costs £20 it’s nearly the same price as a screen protector for some flagships.

    Construction
    The previous point leads nicely into this one. There are some differences here. Flagships will generally be made of metal around the sides, glass on the back and offer some sort of specially coated glass for the screen. The budget phone will be plastic all around with generic glass over the screen. 99% of people nowadays will throw a case and screen protector on their phone. The case will be made of a rubber or synthetic leather and the glass will be tempered glass with little to no oleophobic coating. Why do the materials of a phone matter when you will never see it or touch them? Arguably the budget phone wins here. If the housing is plastic, do you really need a case? Plastic won’t crack like glass and is more resistant to fall damage than metal as it absorbs impacts better. If the screen is cheap to replace on the budget phone, do you really need a protector? You can just use the phone as it is, and if worst comes to worst you completely break the phone it might cost you £100 to replace, whereas a battery replacement on a flagship alone will cost you that and a screen can be upwards of £300. You would be surprised at the added bulk and weight a screen protector and case adds to your device.

    Cameras
    As touched on earlier, there will be no contest between the cameras on a flagship versus the cameras on a budget phone. The flagship wins every time. Even a flagship from 5 years ago still beats today’s budget phones. But again, as I mentioned before the very best flagship today will still be beaten every time by the cheapest, 2nd hand DSLR that will set cost around £70. With that you have a near unlimited amount of lens and filter options. The flagship will undoubtedly be riddled with non optional AI enhancements that frankly ruin most of the pictures they touch, and anyone that knows their stuff will know they’re edited. It’s personal preference but to me they look like a poor Photoshop so I’d rather go without. Call me old fashioned but I prefer my photos to have shadows and look true to life. The budget phone will most likely be a similar story with the AI. However you won’t be trying to create a masterpiece with a budget phone. You use the camera when you have nothing better on you, or to capture information. To that purpose a smartphone camera excels. Photographers want to be able to control their focus, aperture, lighting and exposure time which smartphones can only emulate. Sensor size also comes into play here, with a smartphone there is a limit to how big this can be. A dedicated camera will always be able to capture more light and raw information, doing away with the need for AI completely.

    Update policy
    Currently the latest selling point of flagships is their newly extended update policies. Some brands are now offering 7 years of OS and security updates for their latest releases. This is great for sustainability but how many of the original owners are going to keep their devices this long? Flagship owners generally fall into two categories; tech enthusiasts who change their devices often or people that get them on contract and renew when that contract ends. At most that will be 3 years and most tech enthusiasts will upgrade every year. How many of those devices will go sat in a drawer for the remainder of their 4 years of updates? At best this benefits the 2nd or 3rd owner of the devices who will purchase them on the used market. However budget phones aren’t like they used to be. 2 to 3 years of OS updates is common nowadays and up to 6 years in the case of Samsung’s A16. Contrary to what their marketing departments would have you believe there is no hard cut off on your device when the updates stop. Android versions 3 to 4 years out of date can still get all the latest apps and google play security updates so this isn’t a device killer. Technically a win for the flagship here but I’d argue it’s not the selling point it’s advertised to be. It’s definitely a nice to have feature if longevity is a major factor in your purchase, but then again cost comes into play which I will delve into further down.

    Charging
    Flagships brag about their ultra fast charging. Some go up to 120w wired and 50w wireless. The budget phone might get 25w over wire and no wireless charging at all. Lets apply this to real life. The average phone user charges their phone once ever 24 hours, overnight. The average phone has a 5000mah battery (no difference between budget and flagship here, they all have around this capacity) and an average person would have their phone on charge overnight for at least 7 hours. The charger only needs to be a 1a charger for the battery to be full by the time the user wakes up with time to spare. That equates to 5w charging speeds. If for whatever reason somebody didn’t want to or wasn’t able to charge overnight, the average charging speed of a budget phone is 25w, at max speed that would take just over an hour to charge from empty to 100%. I’d argue that isn’t a major inconvenience.
    In my experience with the Oppo Find x8 Pro, even using the 80w charger the battery still takes just short of an hour to charge, because once the battery gets to a higher percentage the charging speed slows right down to protect the cells from damage. Arguably there’s not a lot of difference here. Wireless charging is a bit of a niche criteria for a phone. Some people swear by it, personally I have no need for it. If it was a must have for someone a midrange phone would probably be a better way to get this. Cost of repair also works in favour of the budget phone here too. A flagship phone will most likely be using split cell batteries or silicon carbon cells to achieve the higher charge speeds, or for a more compact form factor. The replacement cost of these batteries will be higher than normal. The average budget phone’s battery will cost around £10, and the repair will be much easier due to its plastic construction.

    The cost
     This is the big one and I’ve saved it till last. The range of budget phones is huge, and so is the variety in cost. There aren’t many differences between these phones, save a couple like the CMF phone 1 which has much higher specs than it’s similarly priced rivals, which it achieves through cutting out features such as NFC. Other than that it’s generally camera specs which I’ve already spoken about not placing too much value in. There are plenty of perfectly good budget phones from reputable brands that can be purchased outright for £100 or less. I’ll use £100 as the basis for comparison.
    On the flagship side it’s the same story, however purchasing habits are different here. The majority of buyers do not go for the lowest price variant of their chosen phone, due to the storage limitations the brands impose to push buyers further up their ladder. Some examples; the S25 Ultra 512gb is £1249. The iPhone 16 Pro Max 512gb is £1399. The Pixel 9 Pro XL is £1319. If I average this we get £1322. I’ll round this down to £1300 for comparison.
    Immediately noticeable is that the average flagship is 13 times more expensive than the average budget phone. Do you get 13 times the value from the product? Absolutely not. At the end of it all if you purchased both of them side by side you would have a smartphone in both hands running the latest version of the chosen operating system. They can run the same apps, and aside from a few gimmicks they can fulfill the same purpose.

    If we compare the cost of ownership it gets worse. Over two years the budget phone would’ve cost £50 a year where the flagship costs £600. It would take 13 years of keeping the flagship going to get the yearly cost down to the initial price of the budget phone. However even if that were possible (It’s not, it would have to go 6 years without updates on a 7 year promise) it would likely need a battery replacement every 3 years which on the average £100 battery charge would add another £400 to the total cost. The likelihood is the phone would also need a couple of screen replacements in that time too. OLED’s get burn in and bleed when damaged. This would add another £600 to the total cost. So over the imaginary 13 year ownership the flagship actually would cost £2300. Obviously this is dreaming because a phone will never last that period of time, but it’s a useful visualization. If we did the same calculation for the budget phone pretending it could last 13 years the cost would be £100 plus 4 batteries at £10 each and 2 screens at £20 the total cost of ownership comes to £200. The gap is increasing £180 vs £2300.
    A more realistic calculation would be that over a 10 year period you replace your phone every 2 years, selling the old one on the used market. The average flagship loses 77% of its initial value after 2 years, whereas the average budget phone loses 50% over the same time period. To get us to the end of the 10 year example we would need to purchase 5 phones and sell 4.

    Let’s calculate the flagship first.
    5x flagships equals £6500. 4x flagship sales equals £1196. That gives us a total cost of ownership of £5304.

    Secondly the budget phone.
    5x budget phones equals £500. 4x budget phone sales equals £250. Total cost of ownership is £250.
    That’s a staggering difference of £5054 saved over 10 years, just by not buying a fancy phone. You could quite easily buy a decent car with that money.
    Another hidden cost of owning a flagship is the risk of theft. A thief knows a cheap phone from an expensive one, and if you have an expensive phone to your ear you’re much more likely to be a target and potentially get hurt.
    The final cost is the mental toll. That resell value in the above examples depends heavily on the condition in the case of the flagship phone. If it’s damaged say goodbye to the hope of recouping any money. £1300 is no small amount of money to anyone except the richest among us. Can we really afford to risk this amount of money on a accidental drop on a daily basis, or even losing the device? With an average monthly take home wage of around £2000 in the UK this represents nearly a whole month of someone’s salary. Wouldn’t we all be better off with that kept in our bank accounts in today’s climate?

    To conclude; the marketing departments of phone companies must be some of the best in the world. They have somehow convinced the average person who won’t spend more than £50 on a pair of shoes that they absolutely need a £1300 phone that will only last them until the next model is released just a year later. When we look at this objectively it’s ludicrous. If someone buys a new camera it might cost them £300 but it will be dependable for at least a decade. With a flagship we’re getting cameras that will be worse than this, and a load of fad features that don’t add any true value over a much cheaper device. Can it even be argued at this point that it’s vanity with brand recognition? The Samsung A16 looks identical to the S25 unless you had the device in your hand, and all iPhones have looked the same since the iPhone 11. I really do think we’re being played here, and taken for fools.

    Hopefully this will be insightful for anyone reading this, and having all the information we technically already knew laid out in front of us is a useful tool for logical thought and rational decision making.