SAMSUNG GALAXY S20

Samsung launched three Galaxy S phones in 2020 – this is the most affordable. It’s smaller than the S20 Plus and the S20 Ultra, and has a slightly inferior camera, but also shares a lot of the same internal components. From £799, samsung.com

03

growing number of us, the answers to those questions are no.

Apple and Samsung are well aware of this shift of course. Samsung has been making budget and mid-range phones for years, and last year introduced the smaller, more affordable Samsung Galaxy S10e alongside the rest of the flagship Galaxy S10 range. Apple has its own smaller, more affordable handset with the iPhone SE too – a phone that first appeared in 2016 and got a refresh earlier in 2020.

It’s no coincidence that today iPhones and Galaxy phones cover a bigger range of price points than ever before, because Apple and Samsung know full well that flagships just don’t hold the same appeal any more. Saving a few extra seconds on game loading times and squeezing a few more pixels into the display resolution aren’t worth the price premium for most people picking up a new handset.

MID-RANGE VALUE

It goes without saying that customers always prefer to spend as little as possible if they can, but there’s a balance to be struck: from hotel rooms to motor vehicles, keeping to the tightest of budgets isn’t always advisable. It’s exactly the same with smartphones, where there’s a sliding scale – the more you pay, the better the phone you’re going to end up with.

What’s helped to cause the mid-range boom is that you can now get an awful lot of phone for not much money at all. By using slightly older or slightly inferior components, manufacturers are able to put together handsets that are almost as good as the flagships but that cost significantly less, with competition from Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi and OnePlus putting even more pressure on prices.

This is happening across all the key areas you would weigh up when you think about buying a new phone – the speed of the handset, the quality of the photos it can take, the amount of time you get between battery charges, the size and aesthetics of the screen, and so on. The rapid pace of smartphone innovation has meant that the very best phones are more than a lot of people need, which means an opportunity further down the ladder.

Some compromises have to be made in order to hit a lower price point, as you would expect. Mid-range phones often do without full IP68 waterproofing, for example, or don’t support wireless charging – optional extras that are nice to have but that aren’t really essential when it comes to day-to-day smartphone use. The materials are often cheaper too, whether it’s a display that’s slightly less tough and resistant to scratches, or a plastic backing on a phone rather than glass.

Even in terms of the design and feel of the phones though, mid-rangers are now able to do very passable impressions of the bigname flagships – squint your eyes and you probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. When it comes time to upgrade your phone, you’ll have to decide what’s most important to you in terms of what you really need and what you can live without.

You can now get an awful lot of phone for not much money at all