Intro:
The smartphone market in 2023 has definitely had its lows and its highs. There's the large proportion of companies who just carried on doing their own thing, making slight, fairly unambitious improvements to what they know already works, but then at the same time,
we've also had both a couple of pretty major flops and some of the biggest game changers we've seen in years, with new phones or emerging companies just coming in and dropping bombshells that we never saw coming.
So with all of this in mind, who makes the best phone for you, and who's made straight up the best phone of the year? And yes, we did specifically get wooden spoon trophies made for the losers—you'll see who's written here very shortly. Okay, let's start with foldable because this is one of those markets where I do genuinely believe we have just witnessed a game changer.
I mean, Samsung has basically been the winner by default for the last five years, being the only company to actually make a top-tier foldable that's also globally available, and yeah, they are making good phones, but you can also definitely sense the complacency with how quickly the company's foldable went from "the future of computing" with their first entry to "here's a 4% better camera than the last foldable," and also just how long it's taken them to fix some of the fundamental issues with foldable, like the crease.
Features:
For the longest time, Samsung has needed competition, and just now, I'd say they finally got it in the form of the OnePlus Open. It has a more competitive price, better cameras, nicer construction, it's got longer battery life, and most importantly, unique software that really makes the big screen useful. It's the first-ever foldable to actually compete with the Samsung and, in my opinion, genuinely just straight-up come out on top, and thanks to OnePlus also being part of the same company as Oppo, they've managed to use both companies' distribution networks to do that while also overcoming the hurdle that most foldable have failed at—making it internationally available.
And that is why I'm giving it the award for best foldable of 2023. And if anyone from OnePlus is watching this, just ping us if you want it, because, uh, last year, every single company collected theirs except for Apple.
The shakeups continue as we now go on to the best compact phone. For a few years now, I've been consistently giving this award to one company: Asus. They make this line of phones called the Zen phones, which are basically flagship specifications but bottled up into a body that's a good 25% smaller. But this time round, while the latest Zen phone 10 is still a good phone, it has had a price increase from 700 to €800, and very little has been upgraded for it.
It moves it to a tier where it's basically competing directly with the likes of Samsung's flagships, and I just don't feel quite like the camera tuning or the software support is close to this level. So what are your other options? Well, I've actually played around quite a lot with this base Galaxy S23. I think this phone looks good, I think it performs well, it's a really great size, and the cameras are a lot better than the specs make them seem thanks to Samsung's tuning. So it's a very close second. But then, who takes it? Well, I genuinely think the best compact phone of 2023 belongs to none other than Sony with the Opera 5 Mark 5.
The thing is really high spec, it's got cameras that, so long as you're willing to put a bit of time into learning how to properly use, have a really high ceiling. What I particularly appreciate is that its battery life is way longer than the Samsung's—like it will literally still be on 30% by the time the Samsung runs out—and also, the ratio, the tall narrow ratio of this phone makes it feel way smaller than it actually is. This is comfy.
What you won't get is four full years of software upgrades like you do with the Samsung, but what you will get is a headphone jack, plus top-shelf audio quality, a micro SD card slot, and even a physical camera button, which is pretty fun.
Basic:
And this leads on quite smoothly into the best battery category, 'cause to be honest, it is so good here that you could well just call it the Opera 5 Mark 5 again and leave it at that, but I'm instead going to hand it to a different Sony phone, the Opera 10 Mark 5, simply because it keeps up one-to-one with the battery life of the 5 Mark 5, but instead of being a $1,000 phone, it's a $400 phone. Now, obviously, other parts of the phone are scaled back because of that, like the camera's a bit weaker and the screen's a bit weaker, but it's just the fact that you can have this option for insane battery life both in the flagship configuration and also in the mid-range configuration—that is something that I want to see more of. And yes, the naming convention is incredibly poor.
You should never have a situation where the 10 Mark 5 is lower end than the 5 Mark 5, and you really shouldn't be calling phones "Mark 5" in the first place, but the products, the products speak for themselves, so good job, Sony. This one's yours. And on the subject of less major companies who are managing to both keep up and sometimes even outdo the big players, I think it's time we talk about the most improved phone of the year, 'cause it's not from Apple or Samsung. The big players, as a very general rule, they're in a position where they're already making great phones that are selling in large quantities, so they're in a position where they don't really need to or particularly want to mix things up very much.
But do you know who really did genuinely? Motorola. And I know it's kind of weird to treat Motorola like a small player, given that they're the makers of, still to this date, the best-selling phones of all time, but that time is not now. The company has felt like they were past their peak and kind of ready to dip out of the market at any point for years now. That's how I felt, until I saw and used the Motorola Edge 30 Ultra. It's got a 144 Hz refresh rate OLED screen, it's got a 200-megapixel camera, a high-end Snapdragon chip, 125W turbocharging—the list goes on.
But see, this is what I would also call the company's first-ever Ultra phone, and that's normally red flags all around, because truth be told, it's very hard to compete with the software support, the camera tuning, and the battery optimization that companies like Samsung offer at that flagship price point. But I think Motorola is well aware of this, and what makes this such an interesting option is that they've priced the Edge 30 Ultra accordingly.
While with most flagship phones, you'd be expected to pay $1,000 to $1,200 for this, you can quite easily find it for $700, sometimes less, and that very much brings it into the picture. So, the most improved award goes to this unexpected champ. If Motorola can now just sort their camera image processing, they could kill it.
Alright, so now, just before we bring this together, and we pick the best overall phones for budget, mid-range, and flagship, let's talk best gaming phone, the best camera. So, I can definitely feel the winds of change when it comes to gaming on a smartphone. It felt like the concept was massive in the early smartphone days, fueled by Navy, then it petered out for a long time 'cause, well, mobile game companies realized they could earn more profit making games like this instead of making games like this.
But that feels like it's changing now that phones are reaching that critical mass of power to actually just be able to straight up play console games. It all of a sudden becomes very easy to bring actually good quality titles to phones, because those games have already been made for other platforms. All of this is to say that there's a pretty strong case for gaming phones right now, and if you're in the market for one, I would say there are three top contenders: the Red Magic 8S Pro, which almost makes too much sense in a lot of ways because you're essentially getting the most densely spec'd phone possible for an upper mid-range price.
It's just missing a few quality-of-life features like water resistance and wireless charging, but mostly, this whole invisible selfie camera thing, while it looks cool (it really does look cool), it performs absolutely terribly. And so that leaves us with Asus. Asus makes two gaming phones: they make the Row Phone 7 and the Row Phone 7 Ultimate, both with top-shelf performance, both with stupendous battery life, and also both with an ecosystem of accessories that genuinely makes them feel like a lot more than just a phone that can game. And you would think, well, if you're going to go that extreme, you might as well just go all in on the ultimate. But this is one of the few cases where that's not the case.
Conclusion:
The Ultimate is over $200 more expensive than the base phone for little things like a little vent at the back that opens to let air inside the phone and a second OLED rear display. It's very cool, but it's just like the last thing that I'd want to be wasting my battery on, which leads us to gaming phone of the year: the Asus Row Phone 7.
But if I had to guess, the single question that I get asked the most about phones these days isn't about gaming phones or compact phones or battery phones, it's this: which phone currently has the best camera? It feels like that's become the platform on which all of these companies are competing now. Thanks, Milo. Well, the boring answer is, it's subjective. I know people who are really attached to iPhone cameras
