The new budget phones – What you get now for less

This is not a review. It’s not even a preview. This is a simple case of keeping spec sheets of phones from the biggest manufacturers side by side and comparing them to their predecessors to see where the progression is this fall.

Why do we do that anyway? Because there is something to compare. You may not have noticed, but November 24 this year was not only National Check Your Passwords Day , but also international ‘show me your budget phone’ day. Samsung showed off the Galaxy A12 and A02s , Xiaomi showed off the Poco M3 , and Lenovo showed off the Motorola Moto E7 .

In this story we look at the spec sheets of these phones from all sides, to see what has changed compared to predecessors and whether we see a line in which choices these three manufacturers make.

Format

To see the format, let’s look at the phones and their immediate predecessors. With the Galaxy A12 that is this spring’s A11, with the Poco M3 that is last year’s Redmi 8 autumn and with the Moto E7 that is this spring’s Moto E6s.

Picking out the predecessor in the line-up is not as easy as it seems. For example, there is an A10 for the A11 from last year, but it is now more than a year and a half old. At Xiaomi there is a Poco M2, but it came out two months ago and in 2019 there were no Poco models at all. The Moto E6 was not released in the Benelux, but the even cheaper E6 Play and the larger E6 Plus.

“I’m writing you a long letter because I don’t have time for a short letter,” philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal once wrote, and in today’s smartphone market you could also say: I’m making a big phone because I don’t have time to write a compact phone design.

All these models are quite large and also larger than their predecessors. All are longer and thicker than their predecessors. The Galaxy A12 is the only one that is slightly less wide, but the new offspring from Motorola and Xiaomi are wider. They are also heavier. They are around the average of the smartphone market, which is now around 162.7×75.4mm . So they are certainly not extremely large.

Screen

In terms of screen, it all gets longer and bigger. That’s in line with the rest of the market, which moves slowly from 19:9 to 20:9 and maybe a little longer.

The Poco M3 is the only one that crosses over from 720p to 1080p. Now Xiaomi is the price fighter that settles for small or no margins in favor of gaining market share, so it is more often the first to introduce certain parts for the first time in a price range.

In the price range just above, at 200 euros, we already find the first phones with a 90Hz screen with the Oppo A53 and OnePlus Nord N100, something that is not yet an issue in this price range. In all cases, these are still 60Hz screens.

Small detail worth noting: the A12 has a teardrop notch, while the A11 has a hole in the top left for the front camera. A hole in the screen is the newer technique, although it quickly appeared on cheaper phones such as the A11. Why Samsung is bringing back the drip notch is unclear – perhaps the older technology is cheaper to produce and has little added value.

Cameras

Take a guess, which camera sensor has become considerably cheaper in the past year? All phones suddenly come with the 30 square millimeter, 1/2″ sensor with 48 megapixels. It appeared for the first time two years ago, was already in mid-range phones under 300 euros last year and has now found its way into this price range

Samsung adds a cheaper camera with an ultra-wide-angle lens. The rest will stick to even cheaper sensors to firmly increase the number of cameras on the back. A small, low-resolution macro camera or a depth sensor to create portrait mode without advanced software is preferred.

Battery and charging

A major step was taken in the field of battery capacity last year. While the average rose from 4000mAh to 4500mAh last year , these phones are all 1000mAh higher than their predecessors. The Poco M3 is about 6000mAh. The Moto E7 has the lowest capacity, but Lenovo also often makes Power versions of its Moto G phones; they are more expensive than the Moto E phones, but also have considerably larger batteries.

Loading has not changed. The super fast charging of more expensive phones, often with 25W or 30W, has not yet penetrated this price range. It stays at charging speeds of between 10W and 20W and there’s no change from its predecessors.

Sound and connections

This year, Samsung and Xiaomi in this class are making the switch to a dual speaker, while the Motos remain on a single speaker. With a double loudspeaker, the speaker above the screen, intended for telephone calls, often also serves as an output for sound during videos, music or gaming.

All phones except the Moto E6s now have USB-C, more than five years after we first saw this port on phones. In all cases it concerns USB 2.0 with support for USB OTG in some cases for connecting, for example, USB sticks or a wired keyboard to the device.

Hardware

There is Xiaomi again with some new things in the hardware area, for the first time in this price range. For example, the Poco M3 has UFS storage instead of the slower eMMC. In addition, the storage with 64GB is twice as large as with the Redmi 8. The memory is also larger with 4GB. The Poco M3 also has support for WiFi at 5GHz, something that has not penetrated further in this price range.

What is also striking: none of them have NFC, presumably because it is a more expensive component. It’s been on expensive phones for about eight years, but clearly not a priority. The FM radio is included on many models. The fingerprint scanner is on the side of the A12 and M3, a trend we ‘ve seen on many more smartphones .

Conclusion

If we summarize everything, we see that especially the Poco M3 adds some new parts for this price segment: a 1080p screen, UFS storage and 5GHz WiFi. Across the board, we see that phones become slightly larger with slightly larger screens, but also get a battery with a lot more capacity. On the camera front, the larger 48-megapixel sensor has now appeared in all models.

The progress this year is therefore in the area of ​​​​the battery and the camera, with clearly higher numbers to convince users to choose a certain phone. Compared to last year, you get more smartphone for the same money – exactly what you expect from a budget phone.

The biggest pain points that remain are the limited memory and limited storage, something that only does not play a role with the Poco M3. But the fact that there is at least one new model that offers a large amount of memory and spacious, fast storage shows that it is possible in this price range – and that hopefully other brands will also have more memory and more storage in their cheap phones next year offer.