The Budget Phone Blueprint! By Marques Brownlee

You know one of the most interesting questions in tech. Right now is, if you were a smartphone maker, and you were making you're making a new budget phone to sell for 400 bucks. Basically, you get to choose one thing: to make special one amazing feature about your phone and then the rest. You have to save money on the question is what feature do you choose matter of fact, let's play a little game. Let's say you have 17 dollars to build your own smartphone not to buy but to sell, and you have a bunch of things that you need to spend money on. You know some more complex list than this.

Obviously, but for the sake of the game, simple, you have limited money for five bucks. You can make something excellent special for three bucks. You can make it average and then for one dollar you make things poor just trash, so my gut reaction is to make a great screen like I got to have the thing you look at be excellent and then good specs I guess give me average battery life and design, but then that's already 14. So that leaves poor software, poor marketing and poor camera I want at least an average camera I mean- maybe that's just me, but okay, how about great screen average specs average battery average camera, then that leaves poor design, poor marketing and poor software and poor software's rough. It's a fascinating choice and obviously the price is, you know in our little game, don't line up with reality and there are way more things you have to choose as a smartphone maker, but you can see the list of trade-offs is a lot.

So I asked this on Twitter earlier today and almost everyone responds, spends $1 on marketing, because who cares about marketing your phone? Nobody wants to blow extra money on the phone for marketing, but they're there answering from the perspective of what fun would you buy when this is supposed to be? What phone would you try to sell the most units with and not everybody wants to make the marketing trade-off and spend the extra money and give up the cut to carriers and all that comes with the marketing. But you can see that's also a shift in the trade-offs as well. I think, if you did a poll of what most people care about in a phone they're buying, they would say, software and camera are both pretty important. So as you're considering how many you sell, you kind of have to trickle down and start to lose features that aren't those important things anyway. This is the Poco x2.

This is the phone that got me thinking about all this. In the first place, it's the successor of maybe one of the most hyped phones of the last two years, the original polka phone. But this one is again not coming to the US as this phone, but it converts to about 300 a little more than 300 US dollars, which is a great price for a smartphone there's also the Poco f2 and Poco f2 Pro, which is closer to 500 bucks, but I definitely want to get my hands on, and it looks impressive, and the specs looks sweet and so yet another example of how you can make those choices in a budget phone, but I'm looking at the Poco x2. The display here is clearly where they're spending some money seems like the four to $5 option. You know it's a hundred twenty Hertz 1080p display just about as good and as fast as you're going to find in a phone this cheap.

It gets plenty bright too, it's big, and it translates to just the phone feeling super smooth all the time which is great in any budget phone and then on specs. This phone has a Snapdragon, 730, g6 or eight gigs of ram -6 UFS, 2.1 storage. So you know I'd say they spent about their 3 bucks on specs. Here you know it's not super high-end. Obviously it's not the age 65 or anything, but it's also not trash.

It's average specs. What you'd expect to find here, and then the battery is a 4,500 million power battery. So that's nice that they're not trying to go super thin or anything crazy, like that looks pretty decent on paper. But, let's remember that's powering a large 6.6 inch, 120 Hertz bright display. So that's something to keep in mind, but they did include a 27 watt, fast charger in the box.

So again, it's feeling like a 3/4 battery, then for hardware and design this one's interesting. You know they don't really need to get too fancy, since they already have this nice screen to lean on so essentially, what we have here is a red-meat K 30 like it's the same phone now it actually says designed by Poco on the back, but it's not it's designed by Xiaomi I. Don't know why I mean I, understand, rebranding, and I know you want. You can say Poco anywhere on the phone, but designed by Poco is a bit weird, either way, that's what we're working with, and it's got the metal rails, the glass back. It's got a nice weight to it, and it doesn't really creak or flex at all when you twist it like some other budget phones that are plastic do and the camera bump too is pretty manageable.

It's not zero, so it does still rock if you try, but at least it's in the middle. There is no wireless charging, even though the glass back, and they say it's splash proof, but there is no official IP water or dust resistance rating, because you know these things cost money, but look hardware. Design also includes things like your headphone jack at the bottom, nice, the vibration motor bad in this phone, not good, and also things like the fingerprint reader. Here, it's on the power button here on the side which I like if you have the choice between a crappy in screen, fingerprint reader or something else, if you don't have the tech just do it this way, just do it on the proven side of the phone where you have to touch it anyway, to unlock it. I like this overall that Nick's bag feels like another three for hardware and design, and I'm speaking of that camera bump.

On the back quad cameras, there is a 64 megapixel main camera, an 8 megapixel ultra-wide, and then you add a depth camera and then another 2, megapixel macro camera. What who keeps asking for these 2 megapixel macro cameras is this? Do you just want to be able to say you have quad cameras and that's like the cheap one that you can throw in to say you have another camera and no one gets mad, but like no one uses it? So why even put it there I don't I, don't know another depth. Camera truth is, though, this phone's primary camera actually impressed me for the price. It's not pixel level or iPhone SE level good. Those are special, but the photos I took with it were usually fairly detailed.

Had nice dynamic range and sharpness now as soon as you get to less than ideal lighting noise, especially in the shadows, cranks way up, and it never really knows exactly how to deal with Reds fill up the most inconsistent, sometimes it over saturates them. Sometimes it makes skin tones weird, but overall they definitely didn't skimp on the cameras. They're, not the trash cameras, I've seen in some other budget phones, so I'll feel like that's another three then there's software. The software is my UI 11 and just being honest, I've, never really liked this skin and there's nothing happening here. To change my mind with that now the nice thing about Android is you can change a lot of this, but it does take some work, but some of it is nearly impossible to fully abandon also a fun fact.

The dual hole punch cut out for the selfie camera is actually two cutouts with a software oval drawn around and between them. Also, software, as we know, has an effect on image, quality and the camera. So that's like kind of tied to that just saying now it's hard for me to say what they spent on marketing, because I'm, not them, and I'm, also not in the market that they are trying to sell this phone to. But if you just drop a one in there, this phone that actually adds up to the 17 that we were budgeting with at the beginning, so yeah there's a lot of varying budget phones out there right now, this being one of them. This sparked my conversation in my head about it.

That sounds a little crazy, but that's that's the high refresh rate one. If you want the budget phone with the high refresh rate screen, potentially at the expense of some other things, this is the one option you should be looking at, but the whole point of that game, I tweeted out earlier- is there's a wide variety of all these different budget phones, because there's a wide variety of different answers that people give, and this is why the iPhone SE was such a massive disruptor in this budget world. That's a $400 phone! When you fill it out, you go down the list, it kind of seems to mess with the balance a little and even though Apple doesn't have to spend anything extra on the software that software is super valuable for many people super important having an iPhone for that price. That's a big deal so when it seems like you're going over the allotted 17 points. That's when it's a good indicator that you're actually getting a good deal.

I also looked through some other people's some notable responses. Rene Richie's, he basically built a pixel for a kinda, go big on the software and the camera, and then you know whoops. The battery is gonna, be kind of trash, sorry, mister who's, the boss spent extra on a great battery, but then maybe you have some concerns about the soft, we're and also by proxy. Therefore, also the camera a little this guy Victor I saved his tweet said the software is what makes the phone usable. So we spent more on the software understandably, but then, if you look at his list now you have trash specs and how usable as a phone after a year or two, if the specs are trash.

I like this one, the Dave 2d method, spend all the money on marketing and then don't actually ship a phone and super staff straight up. Ask for more money to make a better phone. So obviously it's a hard challenge and there is no right answer, but I would love to follow up. Maybe if there's a smartphone company out there willing to share this sort of information on like how much do these different parts cost remember when their company is leaving out NFC and their phones or phones like this, continue to leave out wireless charging like how much does each part cost, and what are the trade-offs for really putting together a phone of a certain price? Obviously they probably can't say how much the carrier partnerships are worth, but they'll be interesting, either way, I'm curious. What would you spend on each part of your ideal phone I'll leave the 17 dollar question down below like button.

If you want to give it a give your best shot in the comments, I'll hang out there and maybe give a thumbs up to the ones you think you would actually buy either way. That's been it! Thank you for watching catch. You guys in the next one peace.

Source : Marques Brownlee