THE $200 BUDGET SMARTPHONE THAT IS OF FLAGSHIP LEVEL !

    Good phones are getting cheap and cheap phones are getting good. So I’m here and I've said that quote many times over the years over the past. I guess now with like the highest end phones ranging anywhere from $1500 to $2000 feels a lot more like the second half is more true than the first half.


    A lot of the mid-range where there's a lot of competition but the benefit is as those get better and better well the baseline also gets better and better. So in this article I'm going to be taking a look at how much smartphone you can get for that baseline.

     Infinix is coming out with a phone called the Infinix Note 8 for $200 flat in 2020. So this full-blown smartphone like this for $200 even like I remember when 200 bucks and below was reserved for either dumb phones or flip phones or just extremely old phones. They're like trying desperately to sell but we'll probably never see another software update again. Even today $200 is for wireless headphones. You know some bluetooth speakers basically but now there's clearly full-fledged $200 smartphones like this in 2020.

     And so my question is how good are they really? How good is this new baseline because obviously you're not expecting. You know high-end flagship internals or specs or bells and whistles or anything  but like how good is this new baseline because we've come a long way. You get 18W fast charging brick, a USB-C cable and a pair of wired earbuds. So to get them and the fast charger in a world where some don't even have a charger is pretty good.

    

     Okay so then the phone itself, I feel like what helps you actually appreciate what you're getting or how much you're getting here is just how much attention they put into having it resemble the higher end phones. Like I guess at the highest level they're all kind of trying to look like the same highest end phones. We've seen that with the notch and with adding extra cameras and stuff like that.

DISPLAY

    And at that high level it is kind of nitpicky competition stuff but at this level it's actually really appreciated. Look at this screen, a $200 phone used to have a small screen with big bezels. I mean they obviously used to not look that great. This phone has a gigantic display. It's a 6.95 inch LCD display.

 

   

     So there's tons of room here. It is a 1640 by 720 resolution. So clearly not the sharpest thing in the world but just as far as typical use, you know scrolling through social media, looking at photos, watching videos especially. That's what it's good at. This is fine.
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     There's also a stereo speaker pair. One with the top earpiece and one at the bottom. So you're not going to easily block the whole thing with just one finger and it gets decently loud. So the media experience on this phone already is actually I'd say pretty impressive for 200 bucks.

     I'm not going to nitpick about viewing angles and refresh rate obviously for this price. But it's worth noting, Infinix actually makes another phone here called the Zero Eight which for 250 bucks has a 1080p, 90Hz display.

 

        Let's get over here to the back of the phone. The back of the Note 8 here is an interesting pattern of glossy blue pyramid shapes. It's pretty neat. I guess plastic material of course. At the bottom there  is USB type C which again you actually shouldn't take for granted. There's like a whole world of gadgets that are still catching up on that front and also a headphone jack which actually still feels more necessary in this world of budget phones where not everybody is also trying to sell out 100 more dollars on wireless headphones.

BATTERY

     My favorite thing though that they mimicked from high-end phones is the gigantic battery. A lot of phones coming out now have huge batteries. This one has a 5200 mAh battery.  That's pretty sweet. They've branded it. They call it power marathon tech. I just call it a huge battery honestly and we know  when you combine a huge battery with a 720p display and a chip that doesn't take a ton of power. There's a helio G80 processor in this phone. You're looking at a two day phone. And there is still fast charging if you need it.

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SOFTWARE AND PERFORMANCE

     The software experience takes inspiration from a couple different places. I can tell though it is obviously still skinned. There's no getting around that with what they're calling XOS on top of android 10 and there are some ads in the OS as we've seen in some other affordable phones. There are some pre-loaded apps as well but that's the beauty of android. If you want to drop another launcher on here or uninstall basically any of these apps, you can easily do so.

    There's a helio G80 processor in this phone. The performance is good enough through animations and scrolling as you can see this is what 60Hz is going to feel like. You're also getting 128GB of storage and 6GB of RAM. So enough to run some games on that huge nearly 7 inch display and feels totally fine with it.

 CAMERAS

    Now for cameras this might be the area where it's most trying to look like the most expensive phones. I think it does that's why you've got the big bar back. There are a total 6 cameras on this phone,4 on the back and  2 on the front. So the four back cameras are the 64MP main camera then macro camera, a depth sensor and what they call the AI lens.

 

 

    So  mostly what you're going to be working with here are the main camera and maybe occasionally the macro.The photos you get out of this $200 phone I'd say are passable. Now of course as soon as you get into difficult lighting, this is where this one will start to suffer. Mainly in dynamic range and noise but again I don't think anybody buying this phone will mind that one bit. And the fact that this camera is so nice and snappy. Actually pretty responsive in the first place is a nice bonus.

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    The selfie camera up here at the front in your dual infinity O cutout is joined by a depth sensor as well for improved portrait mode. Again just makes it look more like the high-end phones of this past year. You know the photos are passable for 200 bucks and even a little portrait mode action will work if you're into that.

 

 

    So overall I'm actually I would say impressed. I think I've gotten in such a good rhythm of looking at all these different high-end bleeding edge phones and we also know what to expect in that sort of hardware but on another level I think it's harder to make a good phone at this price.

     A lot of good decisions have to go into making a good phone for 200 bucks and it's happening in 2020. This phone costs less than a pair of Airpods pro. That's pretty crazy so thanks again to Infinix for this.

    So this much for today and What you guys think is the most impressive piece of a good phone for $200 in 2020. What was the piece that impressed you the most let me know in the comments below and as always I will see you in the next one…

Peace Out !!!