How to choose a smartphone - Good and Inexpensive

The flagships of leading manufacturers are equipped with the latest technology - here you have a fingerprint scanner, notch, intelligent voice assistant, and RAM like in a gaming laptop. There are perfect, except for one - the price. They are very expensive.

Of course, not everyone is ready to spend that kind of money for a smartphone. More often, people want to buy an inexpensive but good device with all the necessary functionality. You can buy a high-quality gadget at a reasonable price - you just need to know what criteria should be used to make a choice.

The first thing that a buyer who is looking for an inexpensive but good smartphone needs to do is to drop prejudices towards Chinese products. In terms of quality, Xiaomi, Oppo, Lenovo, and even the lesser-known Bluboo and Doogee products are not inferior to Samsung and LG. iPhone, by the way, is also assembled in China.

Criteria

The buyer needs to choose a smartphone based on individual needs: for example, a gamer should look for a device with a powerful processor and video accelerator, and a music lover should look for a smartphone with a dedicated amplifier and a digital-analog converter. To see full specs of smartphones, you can inspect the web resource http://www.china-prices.com/phone. Regardless of personal preferences, there are also criteria that you need to pay attention to.

CPU

The CPU along with the RAM is responsible for the speed of the gadget. Of course, you shouldn’t expect a high-end processor in an inexpensive smartphone.
A few years ago, MediaTek chipsets in the budget segment were better than Qualcomm (Snapdragon) products. First, they were cheaper and did not lead to an increase in the cost of the device. Secondly, they were energy-efficient. Snapdragon processors are considered more productive and are leaders in the high price category. However, today, Qualcomm offers a number of solutions that are quite affordable and have good performance. Therefore, there is no need to focus solely on MediaTek in 2019.

In addition to the chipset manufacturer, its clock frequency and number of cores are also important. The optimal number of cores for an inexpensive smartphone is four. Modern devices are able to disable some of the cores when they are not necessary.
As for the clock frequency, it is responsible for the number of operations that the device can perform in a minute. A reasonable minimum for a budget gadget is 1.5 GHz.

Storage

RAM as the selection criterion is more important than ROM because ROM can be expanded with the help of memory cards. RAM is necessary for temporary storage of data. It provides performance along with a processor. If the RAM is low, then the performance will be slow, even with the most powerful chipset.

The optimal RAM for an average smartphone is 3 GB. As for the internal memory, the RAM is 32 GB. Obviously, if the buyer is looking for an inexpensive smartphone, he intends to use it mainly for calls and surfing. These goals do not require a large amount of ROM, but you should understand that even a pair of installed applications as they are updated would quickly waste the memory space.

Operating system

In fact, today the vast majority of smartphones are available on two operating systems - iOS from Apple and Android from Google. When choosing an inexpensive device, there is no talk of software from Apple. Its devices obviously do not fall into the budget category. Only Android remains. It is extremely important to choose a model with the most current software version. If initially, the operating system is old enough, then it is likely that after a few years, a number of functions will stop working on it. And popular applications will quickly cease to be supported on such firmware.

Recently, Google released the so-called “Stock Android.” In this case, the system is not overloaded with unused (additional) software, which significantly improves the performance of low budget smartphones. In addition, the stock firmware will quickly receive updates for several years.

Battery

The users tend to buy cheap smartphones because they expect that such devices will be able to work without charging longer. After all, there is no multi-core processor “under the hood” and the screen is not so bright. It is true, the battery of the device in terms of power corresponds to its functionality.

Therefore, the buyer of an inexpensive device should definitely pay attention to the battery capacity. If the smartphone belongs to the middle price category and is equipped with moderate functionality, a 3,000 mAh battery is the best option.

Conclusion

Thus, a good but inexpensive smartphone must meet the following requirements:

• Quad-core MediaTek or Snapdragon processor clocked at 1.5 GHz or higher.
• RAM - from 3 GB, ROM - from 32 GB.
• The operating system – Stock aka Pure Android.
• Battery capacity - 3 000 mAh.

Regarding other features, it is worth noting that devices with a dual camera, NFC, and fast charging technology began to appear in the budget category. These features are useful but they are of secondary importance. Does not feel good when you have a good camera that freezes due to a bad chipset or low RAM.
In addition, most importantly, the buyer should not limit himself to the devices that are offered by local phone shops. Chinese marketplaces GearBest and AliExpress provide an excellent opportunity to purchase almost any device at a low price.