Smartphone Awards 2024!
(upbeat music) (audience cheering and applauding) - All right, welcome to the Smartphone Awards 2024. Every year, dozens and dozens of smartphones come out, and this is one of the most highly anticipated videos of the year where we get to reward and highlight some of the absolute best of them, and some of the worst. So we have 10 categories to go through tonight. Each one of them may have potentially some runner ups or some honorable mentions, depending on if they deserve it of course, but then every category will have its overall winner, and every overall winner will get a custom trophy that we've made, like usual.
So if you are a tech company watching this and you win a trophy, reach out, let me know. I can send you the trophy. So there are a lot of phones on this desk in front of me from all different manufacturers, some of 'em flagships, some of 'em cheap, some of 'em big, some of 'em small, some of 'em easy to get, some of 'em hard to get. But they all have one thing in common, which is they all came out during this calendar year of 2024. So let's give out some awards. So the first category, Best Big Phone.
So the idea behind this category was to sort of separate smaller phones and then the bigger phones, and then reward the absolute best big phones. But the thing about phones these days is they're all kind of big now. Phones are just getting bigger. So I'm gonna try to reward the absolute biggest ones and the ones that make the most use of having a little bit of extra space. So here's an example, the ROG Phone 9.
This came out late in the calendar year, but because it's a gaming phone, they sort of target all the things that make it good at gaming, and they also happen to make it a great regular phone. Huge 6.8 inch screen, also huge speakers, also huge battery. It's great for regular phones. It even has a headphone jack.
But it's not perfect. Nothing's perfect, but one got really, really close this year, and that's the Vivo X200 Pro. Again, a phone to come out late in the calendar year, but they basically did everything with this phone.
You can see the huge camera bump. There's some incredible camera hardware in here, another huge screen, but one phone did outdo it, and there was one big phone that kinda nailed everything about being a big phone, and that's the winner, which is the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. Samsung has got this formula down to a science.
They have made a really good use of space in the Ultra series of phones for years now. Really nice screen, probably one of the best in any smartphone. Also with this really good anti-reflective coating that kinda went under the radar, but is really good on this phone.
Really good cameras on the back without protruding too much. It also has a huge battery while still having a stylus down there. There's just a lot going on in this phone and all the software to back it up, plus it recently started getting this one UI 7 beta, which jumps into Android 15. It's getting software updates.
It's just a lot of good things going on with this phone. It's skewed with these awards sometimes to be the phones that came out later in the year. This came out in January, still deserves the award.
So then next category, Best Small Phone. This is kind of a sad one actually this year because while, like you've seen, lots of phones have been getting bigger and bigger, the small phones usually would pull up the rear. There'd be a couple small phones that sort of float around and deliver that special experience for people who want a flagship but that's not huge, the mini iPhones and the Zenfones of the world, but those are all dead now. So then what's left? What could be the best small phone among all the stuff that we saw come out this year here? Think about this. The Samsung Galaxy S24 came out earlier this year. It's not that big of a phone.
It's a 6.2 inch display. It's the smallest flagship that they made. 6.2 inch screen is bigger than the phone that won the Best Big Phone 10 years ago, which was the 5.7 inch Galaxy Note 4. So that just shows you how crazy it's gotten. The Vivo X200 Mini also came out that was still over six inches, really good phone for that size.
And I also considered the flipping phones every year. They're appealing as small phones, but then you open them up and they're huge again. Ultimately what I settled on was the iPhone 16, Best Small Phone 2024. So the iPhone 16 is rocking a 6.1-inch display. Note that it's the same body size as the iPhone 16 Pro, but with a slightly smaller screen, but I really like the way that Apple stepped up the base phones this year.
They have really good cameras, really good battery life, flagship chip performance, years of software updates, more RAM than the base ones have ever had. And yet I could have given this to the 16 Pro because of how mad I am personally about the lack of high refresh rate, but everything else about the base iPhone feels as close to the flagship as it's ever been. And I even prefer things like the matte rails and the real variety of colors.
They've just done a really good job with the iPhone 16. So in this world of so many phones being so gigantic and trying to pack as much as possible into a huge phone and being a two-handed phone, shout out to the couple of one-handed phones still left. So then that brings us to our next category of the night, Best Camera. So things are always interesting in the camera space for a couple of reasons. Number one, obviously the hardware just keeps getting better and better year after year, better periscope cameras, bigger sensors, all the optics improve. But also, this year especially, we've just seen a ton of AI stuff.
Everyone is expected to have some AI, especially in their cameras. Whether it's AI scene recognition, or AI portrait mode, or AI background object removal, whatever it is. There's gotta be AI in just about every camera.
So in that way, I can definitely say that my criteria for best camera has moved around a bit, and this feels like one of the most competitive years ever for cameras. The Pixel, we didn't do the blind camera test this year, but I suspect it would've really well again. They still have that look to them. And the Galaxy S24 Ultra is just consistently so good at photos and videos for Android phones every year.
But one really stood out to me this year. And again, it came out late during the calendar year, but the Vivo X200 Pro. Man, if you haven't heard about this phone, this has got some serious camera hardware and the reason it stood out to me is because it feels like it comes the closest to an actual real camera shooting experience and results out of anything on this table. So hardware-wise, it's already high end. It's got a really big 50-megapixel main sensor. It also has a large 50-megapixel ultra wide, and it has a 200-megapixel sensor behind that periscope zoom lens as well.
The shots that come from it have this great natural depth of field as well. The camera app is quick and full of options, and the super high resolution on that telephoto lens means that it can go from the 3.7x optical way, way in and still maintain sharpness even without doing the S24 Ultra's dual telephoto thing. Plus, I had a lot of fun playing with the portrait lens looks built in, which can shape and stylize the bokeh in a way that's really convincing, even if the subject cutouts aren't perfect. But it didn't win my award this year. Look, I'm just as tired of it as you guys are.
But if you had to take just one smartphone from this table from this year to take all of your photos and videos, the choice is still the iPhone 16 Pro. The streak continues. And yeah, I hate them winning every year just as much as the next person.
But look, ask anyone who shoots and relies on videos and photos from their smartphone regularly what they would use, and the answer just keeps coming back, iPhone 16 Pro. Obviously, it's easy to shoot with, it's simple, and it's reliable. Over and over again, it produces that similar look, and they added a lot of specific features this year to dialing in that look. So you have all these new manual controls. You have all these formats that you can shoot in, and the video is consistently unparalleled from the 4K 30 and the auto focus to the super stabilized video to the super slo-mo video.
I honestly want another smartphone to come along and knock it off its post, and I think we're closer than ever to that. But for right now, iPhone's still the truth in the camera department. Next category, Best Value. Every year, this is the most interesting and competitive category, 'cause there are so many options that come out in the value budget space. Even some that are not on this table in front of me that are super competitive, and all have different things that they prioritize and at different price points.
And that's always the question about value, isn't it? What price point are we gonna have that qualifies it as a value phone? Is it should just be anything under 500 bucks or anything under 400, maybe that makes more sense, or maybe it should just be anything that just has the absolute max value for the price that you can shove in a phone, even if it is a flagship? And that's actually what I'm doing. The fact is it's just harder though for a more expensive phone to actually deliver on much more value. The classic law of diminishing returns. How can an $800 phone give you twice as much value as a $400 phone? It just can't. So, Redmi, every year, has a ton of really competitive options.
Also, it seems like Poco is always churning out at every single price point they possibly can. But what stood out to me this year, I do wanna give a shout out to the Pixel 8a. It came out at 500 bucks and has a really good camera system in this price range, but it did kinda feel like it was clashing a little bit with the Pixel 8, but also the CMF Phone 1 came out this year, and this was a $200 phone that delivered a lot of value in a bunch of ways, but also in just fun, and modularity, and accessibilities, and this unique design.
And you don't see a lot of... You don't see any really other, I guess one other orange phone on this desk, but this was a really interesting phone to come out and was actually easy to recommend. So 200 bucks, it gets a shout out for sure, but my winner for best value for 2024, that's gonna go to the Nothing Phone 2A. So this phone launched at $350. It gave you a big bright 120 hertz screen with uniform bezels all the way around.
That's rare. Check. Flagship size, 5,000-milliamp-hour battery with 45-watt charging, check. A serviceable 50-megapixel main camera plus an ultra wide if you need it, check. Under-display fingerprint reader. It didn't benchmark super high, but their performance has always been really smooth. They do a great job optimizing their software.
And then of course the glyphs on the back, however you feel about those. This was just one of those phones that costs way less than all the other flagships here. But as you use it, at least as I used it, it consistently feels as smooth as and as well thought out as any other flagship, especially with the smoothness of the software.
So a big shout out to them for that. It keeps getting software updates. I hope it gets way more.
Nothing Phone 2A, impressive value 2024. There's a champ. So then next category, Best Battery. There's been a lot more phones pushing the battery limits this year, and this award is just for battery experience overall, which includes battery life.
So I can't help but notice when there's way more 5,000, 5,500, 6,000-milliamp-hour batteries in these big flagships than I've seen in a long time. But it's not purely just the biggest battery capacity that's gonna win you my award for this. I'm not just gonna give this to the 28,000-milliamp-hour Energizer phone. That does exist every year. It's crazy.
It's just peace of mind. Long battery life is one thing, but then lots of good battery maintenance features, convenient, fast charging is another thing. The big iPhones come out every year and they have really good battery life, but they just charge too slow. So the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra comes out this year has a 5,000-milliamp-hour battery with room for the stylus as well. It also has 45-watt peak charging and wireless charging, and it just seemed to last forever.
This is a phone you could use all day easily with this big bright screen, but that wasn't enough. That wasn't enough. There was almost a subcategory of what I would consider mega flagships that came out this year that sort of took things to the next level.
Oppo Find X8 Pro. Again, a late addition to the calendar, 5,900-milliamp-hour battery and also 80 watts of peak charging. So this can go with 0 to 100 in a little under an hour. It also could do 50-watt wireless charging with the right AirVOOC charging pad.
It's ridiculous. Still wasn't enough. The Vivo X200 Pro also came out this year, had a 6,000-milliamp-hour battery and 90-watt charging, still wasn't enough because there is one phone that crossed my desk this year, again, pretty late, that had two things that I hadn't really seen much at all during the calendar year, which was the new Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, and a 7,000-milliamp-hour battery. That's your winner, which is the Red Magic 10 Pro. This is a gaming phone, and it is entirely designed around gaming with things like an exposed active fan that sacrifices water resistance for spinning up and keeping it cool when it's gaming and charging. But the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip has been like a superpower in a couple of phones that started to show up late this year.
There's a couple other phones that have it, but it has been dramatically more efficient than the previous generation, which we love seeing. So it has that chip, maybe leave a thumbs up if you wanna see a video just about the Snapdragon 8 Elite. But then it also has a 7,050-milliamp-hour battery. And so just that combo alone makes this a two-day phone comfortably at 144 hertz, which is sick. You could also turn it down to 60 hertz and do even better than that if you want.
And when you do have to charge it up, it'll go 0 to 100 in half an hour or so, 'cause it charges at 100 watts of peak charging. So it's just got a lot going for it. It also has all the battery maintenance features.
You can cap it at 80% charging if you want. It also got bypass charging to avoid thermal damage. There's just a lot in the battery department. Red Magic 10 Pro, Battery Champ 2024. So our next category is the Best Design.
If you hang out in the YouTube comments section long enough, you'll read things like, "Smartphones are just kind of boring these days. They're all the same as last year. Have we reached peak smartphone. Is nothing different anymore?" And if you agree with that, you kinda have to ignore some of the most interesting stuff happening around the edges, some of the most innovative and fascinating design choices that we've seen in a long time, worth honoring a little bit in 2024. The CMF Phone 1 that I talked about earlier, this is one of those great examples.
A super budget phone that tries to stand out by doing something a little bit different design, like a fun design being the reason you buy this $200 budget phone over others. I actually think from its big brother company, the Nothing Phone 2A did a lot of similar things. The glyph design on the back, the transparent stuff. They had some special additions. They thought a lot about design in this phone and connected it to the software, which I think is really cool. But when I'm giving a design award, I don't wanna give it to anything that had a critical flaw.
I wanna give it to someone that just definitely didn't do anything wrong, like S24 or Pixel 9, but that would be boring. So my Design Award winner for 2024 is the Huawei Mate XT, AKA the tri-fold. Look, you guys have seen the video on this phone. There were some rumors now about it maybe not being super durable. Honestly, probably true. There was articles about maybe some bad press being covered up because it's Huawei, and this phone's coming straight out of China and they wanna kinda cover that.
Probably true. But the fact that a real smartphone company had the audacity to not just build a bunch of these but build a lot of them and ship them all and actually build features around them that actually works. I actually remember reading those articles about the spy shots of the CEO of Huawei using this unique triple folding thing on a plane. I remember thinking, "Okay, yeah, but he knows he's being photographed. That's not a real phone."
Not only did they actually do it, but this is a crazy impressive phone. It's super thin. It has the hinges. It has the battery distributed through everything. It's got the cameras on the back.
They've got software features that work with both two and three panels. There's just so much going for it. I can't not give this the award. Very deserving of the Design Award for 2024. So then next category, conveniently, Best Foldable.
So we added this new category last year just because it was becoming more clear than ever that foldables were, first of all, more plentiful than ever before, there's more options than ever before, and it feels like they're here to stay at least for a while. So let's reward the good ones. And at the beginning of the whole foldables category, it was kind of all Samsung.
They had that early lead because they dove in so early, and they still make the Z Fold 6 and it's a solid phone, but I wouldn't say they're holding the torch anymore. I would actually say this phone right here, this is the Honor Magic V3. This is kind of the mantle right now for best overall foldable hardware. There's so much good about this hardware. I mean it's extremely thin. It feels flagship.
From the lack of a crease inside to how much battery and how much camera they fit in this phone, really, really sturdy hinge, this is a great, really solid piece. There's also the triple fold. That's a crazy design as we already know, but I'm giving the award for Best Foldable of 2024 to the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. I really like what Google did with the design, and the hardware, and the software of the second ever folding pixel. They did change a lot, and it is still very usable while closed, but they trimmed up all the dimensions, they flattened the sides, they improved the hinge, the cameras are all better, and it feels, among the world of folding Android phones that we have right now, the most polished.
At least there's a lot of good Android stuff going on to take advantage of the folding screen. If you forced me to use a folding phone right now, as much as I would want the hardware of the Honor, I would pick the pixel fold. And I came close to daily-ing this phone for quite a while in this year. Really big fan of this phone. And if you've gotta have a flip because the flipping thing is different from the folding thing, I would still say Samsung carries the torch there as well. So a little shout out to the Z Flip6.
No trophy for you, sorry, but... Shout out to the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. So next category, one that's been here again for all 10 of these, is the Most Improved award. So Most Improved year over year, my first thought when putting this category together was, this might be the hardest one to give out this year. What really stood out as the biggest delta, the biggest change. A lot of times it's one that actually went wrong the previous year and sort of righted the ship or maybe took a big leap in something that was bad the previous year.
But what really had the biggest change from its previous year? I mean, you have the Oppo Find X8 Pro, which, okay, much brighter screen this year. They've got improved cameras. This new back is really nice. And also, it's got the new chip set and the new software, and it's a little more squared up, and that's nice. I don't know if it's gonna win Most Improved though. And actually, for the first time in a while, the base iPhones were in consideration for this one.
The iPhone 16, this generation did the most relative to the previous base iPhone to get it close to the Pros that we've ever seen, and that's good for us. More ram, great chip set, improved cameras, and the new layout. And obviously, it has the camera control button that the Pros have, but it also isn't that much better. I think it's pretty clear though, the most improved smartphone over last year's version, yeah, that is definitely the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. The foldable Pixel was something we'd wanted for a long time.
And the first pixel fold last year was a cool idea. We all wanted to see it and Google finally delivered it. But if we're being honest with ourselves, it didn't really excel in any way with the hardware especially. It was cool seeing Android could improve and handle the bigger screen on the inside, but I mean that thing had some pretty thick bezels in there. It didn't even fold flat.
I'm gonna say that again. It didn't even fold flat. So the second generation Pixel Fold here represents a glow up in every single way. Every square millimeter of this got better. I think a lot of us were expecting to see a second generation OnePlus foldable, but they just didn't make it.
But this is kind of the closest I think we could see to that. Much better cameras, much better, thinner hinge. The whole thing is skinnier.
The bezels on the inside are much better. It folds flat. There's less crease, The outside screen is better.
It's brighter. Everything is better. So just from inside to outside, well done, Google, well done. So the next award is gonna go to the Bust of the Year. So, okay, this is a weird one.
This is the award you hate to have to give, but I give it every year anyway to a phone that gets a shout out for how badly things went. But this is a little different from previous years and you'll see why. I'm gonna just jump right into it. I'm giving the Bust of the Year award to the Asus Zenfone 11 Ultra You get a big red trophy for this one, Asus. The 11 Ultra did not win anybody's favorite phone.
Now, if it's any consolation, this is the first year that I'm giving this award to a phone that's not actually that bad of a phone. It's fine. It's a okay phone. If you bought it, I'm sure you'd be okay with it. But the point is it's more representative of the whole category. Because the Zenfones that came before the Zenfone, well, you remember them, right? Those were actually really interesting phones.
They won previous awards. They took up some space in our heads as smartphone enthusiast, where they were actually giving us what we said we wanted, which was a flagship phone that was actually small, that was actually one-handable, that fit everything we wanted into a compact size. And then they just turned it into this, just another generic big phone. It's fine, but we lost something today with this Zenfone. It's gotten to the point where I genuinely don't know if we're gonna keep giving out a best small phone award.
Phones have, like I said, gotten bigger, and bigger, and bigger. And I gave you that stat earlier about how the small phones are all bigger than the big phones used to be. So does that mean we're gonna be giving out a best small phone award to a 6 1/2 inch screen phone in a year or two? It just doesn't feel right, but maybe by that time phones will be even bigger and it'll feel like a small phone. I don't know.
I haven't decided yet. Maybe your comments will help me. But this is the Bust of the Year. So our 10th and final category in the 10th year of the awards, it's the MVP, Phone of the Year.
There's a lot of choices. This always feels like the highest pressure award. It's also my favorite just because, what phone do I choose to carry the torch to sort of represent the entire year in smartphones with all that we've just talked about, with all the exciting features, and the risk takers, and the comeback stories, and the bust of the year, and all this stuff, which phone gets the award? And I think my philosophy here is I am rewarding overall greatness.
So there are a couple runner ups here that absolutely deserve real spotlight for a minute. Vivo X200 Pro, especially. So I didn't even review this phone, but again, it came out late this year, and this phone, this is got-it-all territory. It's got the awesome super bright screen. It's got the great chip set. It's got these incredible cameras in that shooting experience.
Great battery life, super fast charging. What doesn't it have? Maybe just the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip at this point, although it does have a pretty great MediaTek chip that's no slouch and that enables a lot of its features. But in general, you're in can't-really-go-wrong territory here. But I'm looking around, there are some other really good ones here, and I can't help but look over back at the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. From being such a big comeback story for the Pixel Fold series and being such a good phone, a foldable that I would actually daily to this day, and doing so many things right, this feels like I should highlight it.
So here we are. But it didn't win. You know what else feels worth highlighting though? This was the year of the base iPhone, especially getting way more praised than the Pro iPhones. This was the most complete base iPhone they've ever made.
It's getting Apple Intelligence and all that, but it also got more RAM, new colors. I like the matte rails. This was a really good year for not spending $1,500 on an iPhone. But also in the smartphone awards, I typically want give a shout out to the phone that I'm currently daily driving. I could use basically any phone, so maybe that means something to you. And so that would be this one.
This is the Pixel 9 Pro XL that is kinda dinged up and scratched, but this is the phone I use. I use the XL over the smaller one just because of the extra battery life, but it didn't win. We're rewarding greatness here.
The MVP for 2024 is a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. This phone is just so good at everything. Literally everything. I don't know how many of you're golfers, but let me just make a quick analogy. This phone is 2024 Scottie Scheffler.
How is he so good at everything? He's an incredibly long driver, but he's also one of the most accurate drivers on tour. He also leads tee-to-green, strokes gained. He's also making every put inside 10 feet. He has the short game.
How is he so good at everything? But that's this phone. It's kind of boring, actually, and I think a lot of golf fans will appreciate that. So is Scottie, kinda, but that's the point. it's not making a ton of headlines for any one flashy thing or any one bad thing. It's just so good. So if you wanna reward a single phone with a great screen, a great chip, a great battery, great cameras, great software, great support, great durability.
Even the anti-reflective coating on the screen is way above average. Even the vibration motor is good. Even the speakers are good. And I don't even use the stylus. So this is the phone that I actually used the most during 2024. And I think probably of the last six, seven, eight years of reviewing smartphones, this is the phone that I've come back to after reviewing a phone more than any other.
I think I use this phone for nine months out of the year, which doesn't sound like that much, but for me that's a long time. This phone, it just does everything right. It deserves this award. It might not be the flashiest. It might be the most boring choice here, but I fully think it deserves it.
This one carries the torch. I'm looking forward to seeing the sequel. But S24 Ultra, that's your phone of the year. And with that, thank you for 10 years of the Smartphone Awards. I don't get to do this for 10 years without you guys. Obviously the support and you watching means everything and it's kind of the greatest job ever, getting to test all these different phones and review them all and give my honest feedback and thoughts on them, and to have that actually count for something.
So it's motivating to me to wanna make the next one even better than ever before. So 10 down, 10 more to go, maybe. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.
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2024-12-21 14:06
