[ Music] all right welcome to the smartphone honors 2021. so as you can see by the counter in front of me we’ve got plenty of smartphones that have all come out in the past 365 days or so or at least the given calendar year in all shapes and sizes and well it’s a fragment of attrition around here to reinforce some of the very best ones in a knot of different categories for a assortment of different reasons to sort of incentivize and present the best of the stuff that came out during this year so we’ve got nine categories and in each one of these lists we’re gonna have an overall win and that win will get a glossy super cool mkbhd volume trophy which is sugary but then also we’ll probably have a runner-up and maybe even some honorable mentions will vary depending on how close the category is candidly some of these are toss-ups but some of these are pretty conglomerate wins for certain but before we get into all of that i wishes to be take a time of stillnes and remembrance of lg assure we always crave more challenger in the smartphone room more smorgasbord more options and so it’s always a bummer to be concluded with less than before so let’s take a quick moment to remember when life was good all right let’s give out some awards so our first up category is best large-hearted telephone now we already know most telephones are pretty big that’s not a surprise but i wishes to be reward the ones that utter the best use of a lot of seat so if you’re going to go out of your highway to get a bigger than regular telephone “youve been” want a phone that makes advantage of having that extra space big-hearted screen large-scale battery big specs and exactly an overall good software event to use it all so in 2021 we got a cluster of different different versions of this but the best large-hearted phone for this year was samsung’s galaxy z crease three and i’m really glad “were having” a folding phone that’s able to win awardings like this so obviously you’ve got the big 7.4 inch display on the inside and you close it up and you still get a terribly usable display on the outside i’ve talked at length about the idea of folding phones and the benefit it can possibly afford you and clearly they’re to do better each year the technology is not perfect more but fold three was various kinds of the hard work king of all the folding telephones that came out like if you uttered me pick a folding phone to use right now full duration it would without a question be this one and it gives you the best large-scale telephone know of any phone out here immediately as you developed it so gigantic shout out to the fold three for being a real option for a great deal of beings now i’m quite conglomerate on that being the champion but i do have some honorable mentions i’m gonna sacrifice a shout out to a non-folding phone galaxy s2 1 ultra which too came out right in the early stages of this year as being pretty much the standard big phone knowledge big screen large-hearted battery big-hearted cameras big-hearted specs and great software everything about this phone hit all its stigmatizes and i too want to give a exclaim out to uh the gamer phone which has continued to either top this category or are quite right up near the top this is the rog telephone five one of the special editions with this like matte white back but they’ve done the same thing they always do vast artillery but it’s also got a screen on the back it’s got triple cameras it’s uh it’s a entire thing so for the gamers who like the front-facing talkers and the huge higher disheartened screen this is definitely still top of the index for people who are into that so then next up best small-time telephone now this is uh it’s the opposite of what we just went into clearly phone’s been going bigger and bigger and it’s more and more rare to have a really good even flagship grade telephone that’s small like genuinely small-minded and so i just wanted to wage this this is the thing that i sort of created a bunch of categories for in the first place it’s like this telephone might not get that countless apportions without this category but i do want to highlight it and so well think this is my closest scoot yet it could have gone either way between number 1 or number two but i’m gonna afford my best small-scale telephone gift my best use of not much infinite to the iphone 13 mini so we already know what this is about it’s mostly got all the same specs as a larger iphone 13 but crunched down into a smaller body iphone 13 is a flagship this one has the same cameras it’s got the same operation it’s got mostly the same screen only smaller and it’s all crunched down into a mini telephone and it fastened what we were really complaining about with the last iphone 12 mini which actually earned this award last year which was a kind of shaky battery life by precisely compiling the phone a little bit thicker and generating it a physically bigger artillery all the things we like about a mini flagship telephone are happening in the iphone 13 mini but it was close and i’m telling you it’s close because it candidly could have gone either way and i would have been totally fine with it but i’m giving the runner-up for best tiny telephone this year to samsung’s z move 3. This is a small phone when it’s folded but when you progress it you be brought to an end with sort of a ordinary sized telephone now it’s doubtful how much practicality this has i mean you kind of use it the same space as a ordinary sugar rail width telephone but the fact that you’re able to fit all of that normal sized phone down into half the sizing when it’s folded and you get the pride of closing it and you also get the ability to fit it into smaller pockets smaller containers and into smaller spaces forms this one a really merriment option i like this phone a lot like i said i wouldn’t select it personally if i had to pick one of the folding telephones but that’s because i’m not a small phone person so this one is really impelling to see and they lowered the rate all the way down to 9.99 at opening which represented wavings so another real folding phone alternative i’m likewise going to give two righteous mentions in this category for smaller telephones one to the oppo note n which was released like literally right under under the buzzer it just got in on time but this is a smaller form of mostly the z-fold three and well liked it i talked about it a lot in the video about how it might actually be a promoted kind influence and then the other is actually the asus zenfone 8 over here it’s a pretty solid phone i mean it get certainly deep in blind people smartphone camera test like it does every year but also it’s just a delightful pact width i like the design and it fits in pockets like some of these other bigger phones don’t if you’re looking for a smaller telephone certainly don’t count out the zenfone 8. So okay next up best camera who’s going to get the camera allotment and the smartphones this year i feel like i kind of say this every year but i’ve mentioned it recently on titter and i’ll say it again it’s kind of hard to vanish wrong certainly with almost any of the alternatives on this counter especially if you’re spending fee smartphone money you’re probably going a pretty good camera and significant differences come down to subjectivity but for me there really still is a clear champion for the best overall smartphone camera system because that’s a entire packet that includes not only the apps that use the camera but photo aspect low-grade illumination videos low-spirited light-colored photos overall video quality different codecs and formats available and just what you would use to shoot videos with if you had the option this one’s a no-brainer for me it’s the iphone 13 pro so the iphone 13 pro is actually a reasonably substantial jump up in the camera department from the last iphone which is also really good so it makes much better photos you might remember the really vast sensor from the 12 pro max last year that’s now the primary sensor in these telephones with the improvement in stabilization and it also has these brand-new painting profiles which are super helpful for changing the looking of the photos and baking that in of course but then also prores video i shot an part video on this direct during this year on an iphone 13 pro with 4k prores video super useful to have that available to you so just as far as overall smartphone camera package i gotta go iphone 13 pro but i do want to give my smuggler up to phone calls that’s still to this day comes be borne by i study more parties in the tech world-wide than any other that i know because of its camera and i still really like the photos it makes and reviews and that is the pixel 6 and pixel 6 pro the pixel 6 pro now also has that telephoto camera some people like it a quantity some people not so much but just as far as the the inspection of the photos the contrasty hdre computational glance that you get out of a pixel still some of my favorite photos i’ve ever take on a smartphone come from these cameras so it’s still a google telephone still stimulating great photos shout out to the pixel 6. I too want to cause two little honorable mention shout outs one to the vivo x7 0 pro plus i didn’t get to make a video on the phone this year but i’m going to give a connect in the description to a really good one about it exceedingly interesting camera setup and likewise just the overall phone is well constructed but clearly worth checking out that camera and likewise uh to our blind smartphone camera test winner the pixel 5a which overcome the pixel 6 during the first round and then exactly hindered humbling right through and eventually prevailed in the finals so i always do this it’s on the table there it is pixel 5a shout out to the blind smartphone camera test win so next category best artillery best overall artillery know this is this is for your power users this is for people who need the phone to last-place not just all day but as long as possible maybe you require to go a entire weekend on one charge perhap you know you’re not going to be near an shop for an extended 20 plus hour international flight all this nonsense you need the best overall artillery there’s a marry options now the hell is going to see do really well and i got to factor in not just overall battery sizing but now increasingly in this award charging accelerated charging convenience wireless accusing all that sort of stuff for just the best overall battery experience now that said today our win this year is the iphone 13 pro max this is the artillery experience king so again something apple did with their iphones this year is bump up the overall immensity and value of their telephones to include a physically larger battery now on paper it’s not the biggest sale actually i think it’s about a 400 milliamp hour battery or something like that but we know what apple’s wizard has is being done for the past couple times with their silicon and simply optimization and these telephones just last forever so this is easily a two-day phone for a lot of parties and if you turn off promotion and merely use it at 60 hz all the time i can feel self-confident moving a entire weekend perhaps even three days on one charge on this phone so that’s super cool to see it also has decently fast blame and too reinforces wireless accusing but the runner-up has yet again the at least held for the largest battery of any phone that i experimented that came out this year that’s the rog telephone five six thousand milliamp hour battery which is incredible to see it also has quite fast accuse but it is not have wireless charging so that’s something to keep in mind but again the whole gaming phone thing like they restrain saying these phones are supposed to be really great just for gaming and they are but a lot of the things that are good for gaming are great for the rest of the media experience front facing loudspeakers big higher fresh frequency screens immense batteries who doesn’t want that substance so shout out to the gaming phone so next up we have our pattern give this used to be uh this used to be the improve caliber bestow and then it was like the flashiest coolest pattern but now i’m exactly it’s just the design gift this is the best overall scheme and this award is uh readily the most wide open totally subjective it’s just what i like and how i feel about a phone’s design and what i think is my favorite phone pattern of the year now there’s a duo criteria that go into that just for me i i’ve said this before but i i couldn’t give this to a phone that has like a super fingerprinty glossy back but there’s a heap of things about containing a phone and simply the room the the back feels even if you’re not looking at it the space the camera jolt protrudes or doesn’t protrude things like that a good deal to consider with a good layout but it’s got to examination good at the end of the day and so my allotment winner for design for 2021 well that would be the samsung galaxy s21 ultra right here grabbing another accolade this telephone was not only one of the very best big-hearted phones but one of the very best glancing phones you can tell it’s matte blacknes so it’s got a soft spot in my mettle right off the bat but i obstructed talking time and again during the course of its year about how i really admired samsung embracing the camera bump make something unique with it and actually kind of moving it gape really good honestly it also has a great display that didn’t bow over the edges nearly as much as previous generations which was nice also the exhibition leads pretty much corner to corner centre defect perforate was penalize with me just didn’t really make any mistakes as far as design and impounding it in the hand there’s also a slight thing that happens with a lot of the phones on this table where if the camera bump is just the right width it kind of acts as a recognize to hold with your thumb depends on how large-hearted your hand is of course is just a personal thing but i really like that about this and several other telephones now nevertheless galaxy s21 ultra gets my blueprint honor for 2021 but i do have a duo runner-ups because i want to give some shout out to again things that i think went really well one oppo pinpoint x3 pro merely this simple camera bump on the back now which was sort of sloped up you are eligible to tell it wasn’t extremely jarring it only basically kind of arched its style onto the camera plateau on the back really like that too like the blue matte finish not a entire ton of spectacular colourings on this table you might have noticed so i’m a fan of when they do concoction it up i really like to find x3 pro here also oppo again with the reno 6 this one i just like the action it felt only the the soft satin soft touch back not a good deal of soft contact backed phones out here and then let’s just render a crazy design thanks for taking a risk awarding to the brigade telephone there’s not a lot of telephones like this out there i still remember shooting the thumbnail for this phone like you can there’s two usbc ports you are eligible to attack it in doubled wattage if you want or super fast but it’s a phone designed to be held mainly in countryside there’s a artillery on each side camera module in the middle love front-facing loudspeakers this was a it was a crazy telephone but like in a world where you kind of exclusively have a couple of shapes i’m glad we’re still going bizarre crazy stuff like that so i gotta at least shout that out so the next give is going to be called the appreciate give now this is a different call from last-place time this used to be called the budget best fund phone bestow and basically i imagine the word budget entails something different slightly different for everyone basically depends on how much you just wanted to deplete but i’m calling this best plan because this is just overall best bang for the buck that’s the definition it can be any price it only has to have immense appraise so now the price bestow actually goes to a phone that stirred its sibling look pretty bad in significance which is various kinds of funny but it’s the pixel 6 the standard google pixel 6. So you are eligible to ascertain why this isn’t the budget telephone of the year it wasn’t that cheap it was 5.99 but the quality you got from this phone at 5.99 with the tensor chip which played really well with this high refresh rate oled display with these really great cameras which matched the pixel 6 pro respectable battery life but too only overall neat blaming and neat wireless accusing this telephone with its immense software made the pixel 6 pro look like a bad deal it was that good and so i highly recommend this if you’re looking in the pixel row and this does my ethic give this is like a really easy phone to recommend because of the toll it launched at now again this is a category that’s changed over the years and certainly “ve got a lot” of competition there’s telephones like the poco f3 which have incredible value it’s much more along the lines of a plan phone and deserves to be highlighted just for that there’s also the samsung a52s of the world-wide there’s the realme gts of the macrocosm merely a good deal of good overall phones for less coin i keep saying this good telephones might not be getting cheap but cheap phones cheap phones are getting good all right so the next list the award you don’t want to have to give but hey i’m giving it regardless it’s the failure of the year mostly the the worst phone to come out this year maybe not the worst overall phone actually but really the telephone that shouldn’t have happened the highway it did i’ve given all kinds of different phones this award whether the government has propelled at the wrong cost or had awful marketing or exactly has only just been bad telephones in general bad builds whatever generally like i said it’s kind of hard to go wrong with a great deal of the stuff on this table whether you’re looking at camera quality or battery or appraise this is part of the thing about living in the world of smartphones is there’s so many good ones to pick from but i have to give a bust of the year and because i give a bust of the year i have to give it to the what is the 1500 uh surface duo 2. It’s the microsoft face duo 2. so i remember when the first one of these phones came out and it undoubtedly had one of the sweetest hinges which is a really nice piece of hardware one of the sweetest back folding hinges of any telephone we’ve ever determined and so there’s a little bit of hope that it might be amazing and maybe the second one would be amazing because they didn’t have cameras and i don’t know there’s just a bunch of imperfections with the software but we’ll give it some time they propelled the second one it’s more expensive than the first one and it’s worse it’s just not as good um and so i’m kind of sad that it’s not make better like i want to see a phone like this which is dual screen instead of a single folding screen run i think it’s a cool plan but as you were able to tell by the review video there’s still merely too much unfinished about it the software’s still not huge the camera is just not very good i imply to have those big cameras on the back to relinquish the full 360 fold and still not be good cameras there’s just no way to recommend that telephone to most people lots of other things on this desk i could just hand any of these telephones to most people i would just never leave a duo to to anyone i really liked now next up this is this is one of my favorite bestows to give “the worlds largest” improved accolade and often what we’ll see is firms draw lessons from their mistakes and actually listening and doing a much better account of something than the year before it’s actually happened a pair terms where a bust of the year turns into a most improved honor the next year which is pretty cool to see but this year’s most improved accolade precisely goes to a phone that did everything better than last year last year’s phone not easy to recommend this year’s phone kind of doesn’t have any inaccuracies they did a very good job so the most improved bestow is gonna go to samsung’s galaxy s21 ultra as a huge progress over the galaxy s20 ultra we all understood what samsung was trying to do with the ultra thing and when the s20 came out and the s20 ultra was the top of that way we identified the big numbers and we pictured the 100 x on the camera and we knew what they were get in here but there were some weird autofocus issues with the camera never genuinely resolved themselves and they ceased up “ve had to” add hardware in future phones for that laser autofocus but generally difficult to recommend the s20 ultra s21 ultra comes along and really hammers it simply everything again they have a great screen immense battery great cameras that actually focus and they still maintain a lot of those super big-hearted amounts and the ultra thing live on so that’s a huge betterment over last year and you know you generally you generally don’t see like big year-over-year leaps big-hearted gaps uh between phones but i do have some honorable mentions as well for most improved one is gonna go to samsung’s z-flip three is not simply did it become a much better telephone with this larger flaunt and better usability on the outside like this is one of the things that drew the phone much easier to recommend but the rate also went down that’s huge that’s incredible that you don’t often examine phone calls make it a big leap in usability and leap down in toll so i want to shout out the flip 3 and i hope i hope other phones do that again to be honest i also will shout out iphone 13 pro simply because we got a much better camera arrangement and a much better battery and i don’t know how many years late however finally got the pro motion displays so camera screen and artillery sort of the three main thing about a phone all go bumped up on this year’s iphone pros so anytime you can nail the fundamentals like that you deserve a shout out good job but we’ve got our most improved and that s21 ultra so that guides us to the final accolade of the light the biggest one actually the kinds of the one we’ve all been waiting for which is the mvp the phone of its first year now the thing about phone of the year is again now we’re float back a little bit more into subjective area entail it’s not merely straight up the best phone to come out during the year but if you think about it kind of like the the mvp give in a boasts organization maybe maybe the nba or nfl or something like that it’s a little longer about that plus the effects you have on the game plus the overall like challenges you may have overcome there’s just a little more that moves into the mvp plus a little bit of which one was my favorite so with all of that considered and looking at all the phones that came out this year in 2021 i think we got to give an acknowledgment to phone calls that came out right at the beginning of the year and was one of the ultimate best phones you can buy at its premium the part time and that’s galaxy s21 ultra from samsung it’s your mvp yet another allotment for this phone but frankly it deserves it i think it’s really easy keep forgetting about the phones that come out in like january february because this is a year age-old at this point now which is crazy to say compared to all the other telephones here but the premium did steadily fell a little bit i mean you can buy this phone now for like what 700 600 horses which is kind of insane and it’s really good at everything a big flagship phone should be good at it really doesn’t have any of the flaws maybe you might have the camera be a little bit of a downside or you might have the artillery be a little bit of a downside you are well aware with pixel it was the artillery with the gaming phones as the cameras like there’s always something there’s always something but galaxy s21 ultra on top of having a pretty great premium intend to pack it all hammered it they hammered it with this phone now i do have a runner up for the mvp the second biggest voted in this hypothetical macrocosm where i’m voting on these uh and that is the iphone 13 pro and again with this phone it comes down to okay they took the three most basic things about a phone and realise them all channel better than last-place year so overdue but they eventually included the advertisement 120 hertz viable refresh frequency and it looks great with this artillery they induced the phone literally larger to have a much better battery life doesn’t undoubtedly blame super fast but that might be nice to see and then the cameras all get better world-class cameras immense photo and video tone i wouldn’t mind ensure usbc or like having a charger in the box but the phone itself is really good and i really like using the iphone 13 pro and then i too demand to give a shout out a sort of laudable mention in the mvp category to pixel 6. i think this might be underrated as how important this telephone actually is this year patently this is the google phone so we’re looking at you know google software all the stuff that comes from having a pixel but likewise tensor having your own custom silicon and that tend is progressing and being 5.99 at opening which is an incredibly good toll for phone calls that basically has all the flagship facets you’d probably want so why spend a thousand dollars when you can have a phone for 5.99 that does all the same stuff and so i i want to give that shout out the best value phone is likewise worthy as a second runner-up to mvp phone of the year but that’s it that’s it for my gives again this is all handwriting selected by the entire judging committee which is me so if you have any problems with them let me know in the comments division because i picked them all but also we can talk about these i think we’re going to have a tumult stagecoaches phenomenon pretty soon maybe in the next day or so so follow me on titter or assemble our disagreement channel if you want to be up there and give a mic and we can talk about it but generally i think my feeling is still the same lots of really interesting phones still coming out even though they’re primarily the same shape you know you still have a rectangle slab but you get crazy weird cameras or you get gaming aesthetic or you get you know tensor processor you get amazing world-class intend like there’s a assortment of various types of nonsense available and you kind of have a hard time departing wrong with a great deal of it so shout out to huge telephones for being a great reason to be alive in 2021 that’s been it for the smartphone accolades i’ve been your emcee marquez brownlee thank you for having watching and i’ll catch you guys next year treaty[ Music]
