Time flies by at such a terrifying speed that it's frightening. I had just been snowboarding and went to St. Petersburg in May, but it's already the middle of June. And in general, 6 months of 2024 have flown by! Well, it's time to take a look at the landscape and try to pick the 5 best smartphones of this year.
I plan to do themed issues with price gradations, but I want to start with the general issue. I'm on a train right now, and the internet coverage here is bad. And it's a great situation to rack my brain and check which phones are still in my memory.
HONOR MAGIC 6 Pro
If you choose a flagship in the Android camp, then HONOR MAGIC 6 Pro is the hero of the first half of 2024. Here you didn't even have to think hard. Besides HONOR, Xiaomi 14 Ultra, Galaxy S24 Ultra and PURA 70 Ultra came to mind.
Despite the fact that I now use and enjoy the Huawei Pura 70 Pro, Huawei I discarded because in Russia they lack a bit of polish and shine. The app store looks very cluttered, too many pre-installed applications, or you open the system application “Video”, and there are a lot of Ozon ads. That is, buying a flagship, you still expect cleanliness and brevity. HONOR, by the way, partly suffers from it too, but less so. Another disadvantage is that PURA now runs on Android 12 and it is clear what updates to wait or not to wait for. Or else they'll switch everyone to HarmonyOS and Android applications will stop running.
iPhone 15 Pro
Thought you can't release a selection without an iPhone. However, the main reason is the price. Funny enough, the iPhone is one of the cheapest flagships on the market today. Especially if you know where to buy it. And you should buy exclusively on Avito. There, a new 256 GB device is given for a ridiculous 80 thousand rubles. It is obvious why all students and schoolchildren in Moscow are running around with iPhones. Other models are even cheaper!
Given that this situation was formed due to price wars, which are conducted by marketplaces, it is simply impossible not to mention the iPhone 15 Pro. If it were not for the attractive price, I would say that buying this smartphone is not worth it, because Apple has done its homework badly and the chipset overheats. And the promised AAA games from PC to iPhone work through the stump.
And it's better, of course, to wait for the release of the 16th model. After all, there are only 3-4 months left. However, it is unknown whether the new iPhones will have the same tempting prices.
In any case, the iPhone 15 Pro is a great smartphone for those who are tired of shovels. Well, or just wants to buy a smartphone for 5 years and settle down.
The iPhone 15 Pro's strong point is its camera capabilities. I'll check before publishing, but in the same DXOMARK ranking, it is the iPhone that is the first non-Chinese brand in the ranking of camera capabilities.
POCO X6 Pro
POCO X6 Pro is a demonstration of how much a brand wants your attention. For this price, some brands can even throw in a Helio G99. And here is the MediaTek Dimensity 8300-Ultra! This is a flagship chipset and a competitor for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
Moving on. Memory! LPDDR5X + UFS 4.0 - both are the latest high-speed memory. Plus it comes with a 67W adapter.
The screen is 1200 nits of brightness, HDR AMOLED with a tiny cutout for the front camera and 120Hz refresh rate, protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5. There's also anti-SHIM in the form of 1920Hz backlight flicker rate.
A small sag is observed on the camera part. To be more exact, the camera used here is a standard for this price segment 64 MP OmniVision camera, and in general POCO does not shine much in terms of algorithms. It feels like the parent Xiaomi does not share with POCO engineers. If you didn't know, the camera app is almost the only thing that every manufacturer makes itself. The rest can all be taken from Google. But there is optical stabilization and 4K video recording.
The 16 MP front camera is very good. Buying POCO X6 Pro, you won't get stunning quality, but it will be good pictures.
POCO X6 Pro is a real lion tiger in terms of performance and a tiger lion for those who like to watch videos from a smartphone.
TECNO CAMON 30 Pro
While the POCO X6 Pro is for those looking for flagship performance at a minimal price, the CAMON 30 Pro is for those who want a balance between performance and photo capabilities.
In terms of pure performance and component quality, the CAMON 30 Pro is inferior to the POCO. It has a 1.5 times weaker chipset and no fast memory of the latest generation (LPDDR5X + UFS 4.0). But it is still a very powerful smartphone. But the CAMON 30 Pro has a great set of cameras. Plus, TECNO is investing in algorithm development. The company has its own R&D lab. And in my ranking of photo-capable brands, TECNO beats realme quite equally. And in terms of price-opportunity ratio it even sometimes beats Xiaomi, because the latter has played in marketing and carefully doses the quality of algorithms depending on the price. And TECNO is still just trying to establish itself on the market, so it is pouring generous handfuls of technology. This will change over time. I remember how I once marveled at the shooting quality of the realme 5 Pro and how surprised and disappointed I was when it turned out that the realme 6 and even the realme 7 shot slightly worse.
TECNO SPARK 20 Pro+
Now this is my favorite, which I often mention in reviews of other smartphones. The main reason is the price and ultra-bright screen. Now for 15-19 thousand rubles, or even more expensive, as in the case of Tecno POVA 6 Neo, sell smartphones with IPS-screens, the brightness of which is around 600 nits. And here 1000 nits and you can use in the bright sun.
And if in other smartphones from HELIO G99 is already tired and want more powerful solutions, then in TECNO SPARK 20 Pro+ this chipset is more than appropriate. The smartphone has excellent performance for its money to play PUBG and other similar games.
So, the smartphone also got a 108 MP camera. This is an aged but good sensor that will give a head start to many new 50 MP sensors. Plus, the 108 MP camera has excellent detail and is great at shooting at dusk.