All right. Let’s give out some trophies.
So our first up category is Best Big Phone.
Now, we already know most phones are pretty big.
That’s not a surprise.
But I do wanna reward the ones
that make the best use of a lot of space.
So if you’re gonna go out of your way
to get a bigger than normal phone,
you really want a phone that takes advantage
of having that extra space.
Big screen, big battery, big specs,
and just an overall good software experience to use it all.
So in 2021, we got a bunch of different versions of this,
but the best big phone for this year
was Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold3.
And I’m really glad we have a folding phone
that’s able to win awards 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 very 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 getting better every year.
The technology is not perfect yet,
but Fold3 was kind of the hard work king
of all the folding phones that came out.
If you made me pick a folding phone to use right now,
full-time, it would without a question be this one.
And it gives you the best big phone experience
of any phone out here immediately as you unfold it.
So, huge shout out to the Fold3
for being a real option for a lot of people.
Now I’m pretty firm on that being the winner,
but I do have some honorable mentions.
I’m gonna give a shout out to a non-folding phone,
Galaxy S21 Ultra, which also came out
right at the beginning of this year,
as being pretty much the standard big phone experience.
Big screen, big battery, big cameras,
big specs, and great software.
Everything about this phone hit all its marks.
And I also wanna give a shout out to the gamer phone,
which has continued to either top this category
or be right up near the top.
This is the ROG Phone 5.
One of the special additions
with this like matte white back,
but they’ve done the same thing.
They always do.
Huge battery, but it’s also got a screen on the back.
It’s got triple cameras.
It’s a whole thing.
So for the gamers who like the front facing speakers
and the huge higher pressure rate screen,
this is definitely still top of the list
for people who are into that.
(phone smacking)
So then, next up Best Small Phone.
Now this is a,
it’s the opposite of what we just went into.
Clearly, phone’s been getting bigger and bigger.
And it’s more and more rare
to have a really good, even flagship level phone,
that’s small, like genuinely small.
And so, I wanna reward this.
This is the thing
that I sort of created a bunch of categories for
in the first place.
It’s like this phone might not get that many awards
without this category, but I do wanna highlight it.
And so, I actually think this is my closest race yet.
It could have gone either way
between number one or number two,
but I’m gonna give my Best Small Phone award,
my best use of not much space
to the iPhone 13 Mini.
So, we already know what this is about.
It’s basically got all the same specs
as the 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 performance.
It’s got basically the same screen, just smaller.
And it’s all crunched down into a mini phone.
And it fixed what we were really complaining
about with the last iPhone 12 Mini,
which actually won this award last year,
which was a kind of weak battery life
by just making the phone a little bit thicker
and giving it a physically larger battery.
All the things we like about a mini flagship phone
are happening in the iPhone 13 Mini.
But it was close,
and I’m telling you it’s close,
because it honestly could have gone either way
and I would have been totally fine with it.
But I’m giving the runner-up for Best Small Phone this year
to Samsung’s Z Flip3.
This is a small phone when it’s folded.
But when you unfold it,
you end up with sort of a normal sized phone.
Now, it’s debatable how much utility this has.
I mean, you kinda use it the same way
as a normal candy bar size phone.
But the fact that you’re able
to fit all of that normal size phone
down into half the size when it’s folded
and you get the satisfaction of closing it,
and you also get the ability to fit it into smaller pockets,
smaller bags, and into smaller spaces,
makes this one a really fun option.
I like this phone a lot.
Like I said, I wouldn’t choose it personally
if I had to pick one of the folding phones,
but that’s ’cause I’m not a small phone person.
So this one is really compelling to see,
and they drop the price all the way down to 999 at launch,
which made waves.
So, another real folding phone option.
I’m also gonna give two honorable mentions
in this category for smaller phones.
One to the Oppo Find N which was released
literally right under under the buzzer.
It just got an on time.
But this is a smaller version of basically the Z Fold3,
and I really liked it.
I talked about it a lot in the video
about how it might actually be a preferred form factor.
And then, the other
is actually the ASUS Zenfone 8 over here.
It’s a pretty solid phone.
I mean, it got really deep
in the blind smartphone camera tests
like it does every year,
but also it’s just a nice compact size.
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 phone,
definitely don’t count out the Zenfone 8.
So, okay, next up, Best Camera.
Who’s gonna get the camera award
in the smartphones this year?
I feel like I kind of say this every year,
but I’ve mentioned it recently on Twitter
and I’ll say it again.
It’s kind of hard to go wrong really
with almost any of the options on this table.
Especially if you’re spending premium smartphone money,
you’re probably getting a pretty good camera
and the differences come down to subjectivity.
But for me, there’re really still is a clear winner
for the best overall smartphone camera system.
Because that’s a whole package that includes
not just the apps that use the camera,
but photo quality, low-light videos,
low-light 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 pretty substantial jump up
in the camera department from the last iPhone,
which is also really good.
So, it takes much better photos.
You might remember the really huge sensor
from the 12 Pro Max last year.
That’s now the primary sensor in these phones
with the improved stabilization.
And it also has these new picture profiles,
which are super useful for changing the look of the photos
and baking that in of course, but then also ProRes video.
I shot an entire video on this channel 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 got to go iPhone 13 Pro.
But I do wanna give my runner up to a phone
that still to this day gets carried
by I think more people in the tech world
than any other that I know because of its camera.
And I still really liked the photos it takes and looks.
And that is the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro.
The Pixel 6 Pro here also has that telephoto camera.
Some people like it a lot.
Some people not so much.
But just as far as the look of the photos,
the contrasty HDRE computational look
that you get out of a Pixel,
still some of my favorite photos
I’ve ever taken on a smartphone come from these cameras.
So it’s still a Google phone, still making great photos.
Shout out to the Pixel 6.
I also wanna give two little honorable mention shout outs,
one to the Vivo X70 Pro+.
I didn’t get to make a video the phone this year,
but I’m gonna give a link in the description
to a really good one about it.
Extremely interesting camera setup
and also just the overall phone in well-built,
but definitely worth checking out that camera.
And also, to our blind smartphone camera test winner,
the Pixel 5A, which beat the Pixel 6 in the first round
and then just kept crushing right through,
and eventually won in the finals.
So, I always do this. It’s on the table.
Here it is, Pixel 5A.
Shout out to the blind smartphone camera test winner.
So next category, Best Battery.
Best overall battery experience.
This is for your power users.
This is for people who need the phone to last,
not just all day, but as long as possible.
Maybe you wanna go a whole weekend on one charge.
Maybe you know you’re not gonna be near an outlet
for an extended 20 plus hour international flight,
all this stuff.
You need the best overall battery.
There’s a couple options here
that are gonna do really well.
And I like to factor in not just overall battery size,
but now increasingly in this award,
charging speed, charging convenience,
wireless charging, all that sort of stuff
for just the best overall battery experience.
(Marques clapping)
Now that being said, our winner this year
is the iPhone 13 Pro Max.
This is the battery experience king.
So again, something Apple did with their iPhones this year
is bump up the overall size and weight of their phones
to include a physically larger battery.
Now on paper, it’s not the biggest sell actually.
I think it’s about a 4,400 milliamp power battery
or something like that,
but we know what Apple’s magic has been doing
for the past couple of years with their silicon
and just optimization.
And these phones just lasts forever.
So, this is easily a two-day phone for a lot of people.
And if you turn off ProMotion
and just use it at 60 Hertz all the time,
I can feel confident going a whole weekend,
maybe even three days, on one charge on this phone.
So, that’s super cool to see.
It also has decently fast charging
and also supports wireless charging.
But the runner up has yet again
the at least tied for the largest battery of any phone
that I tested that came out this year.
That’s the ROG Phone 5.
6,000 milliamp power battery, which is incredible to see.
It also has quite fast charging,
but it does not have wireless charging.
So, that’s something to keep in mind.
But again, the whole gaming phone thing
like they keep 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 speakers, big higher refresh rate screens,
huge batteries.
Who doesn’t want that stuff?
So, shout out to the gaming phone.
So, next step we have our Design Award.
This used to be the Build Quality Award.
And then it was like the Flashiest Coolest Design.
But now, I’m just,
it’s just the Design Award.
This is the best overall design,
and this award is easily 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 design of the year.
And now, there’s a couple of criteria that go into that.
Just for me, I’ve said this before,
but I couldn’t give this to a phone
that has like a super fingerprinty glossy back.
But there’s a lot of things about holding a phone
and just the way the back feels,
even if you’re not looking at it.
The way the camera bump protrudes or doesn’t protrude,
things like that.
A lot to consider with a good design,
but it’s gotta look good at the end of the day.
And so my award winner for design for 2021,
that would be the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra right here,
grabbing another award.
This phone was not only one of the best big phones,
but one of the best looking phones.
You can tell it’s matte black,
so it’s got a soft spot in my heart right off the bat.
But I kept talking over and over again
during the year about how I really appreciated Samsung
embracing the camera bump, doing something unique with it,
and actually sort of making it look really good honestly.
It also has a great display that didn’t curve over the edges
nearly as much as previous generations, which was nice.
Also, the display goes pretty much corner to corner.
Center hole punch was fine with me.
Just didn’t really make any mistakes
as far as design and holding it in the hand.
There’s also a subtle thing
that happens with a lot of the phones on this desk,
where if the camera bump is just the right size,
it kind of acts as a spot to hold with your finger.
Depends on how big your hand is of course.
It’s just a personal thing,
but I really liked that about this
and several other phones here.
Nevertheless, Galaxy S21 Ultra gets my Design Award
for 2021.
But I do have a couple of runner-ups
’cause I wanna give some shout outs
to, again, things that I think went really well.
One, Oppo Find X3 Pro.
Just the simple camera bump on the back here,
which was sort of sloped up.
You can tell it wasn’t suit too jarring.
It just basically sort of curved its way
onto the camera plateau on the back.
Really like that.
Also like the blue matte finish.
Not a whole ton of dramatic colors on this desk,
you might’ve noticed.
So, I’m a fan of when they do mix it up.
Really like the Find X3 Pro here.
Also Oppo again with the Reno 6.
This one, I just liked the way it felt.
Just the soft satin soft touch back.
Not a lot of soft touch back phones out here.
And then, let’s just give a crazy design,
thanks for taking a risk award to the Legion phone.
There’s not a lot of phones like this out there.
I still remember shooting the thumbnail for this phone.
There’s two USB-C ports.
You can charge it in double wattage if you want
or super fast, but it’s a phone designed
to be held mostly in landscape.
There’s a battery on each side,
camera module in the middle, fans, front facing speakers.
It was a crazy phone.
But like in a world
where you kind of only have a couple of shapes,
I’m glad we’re still getting weird, crazy stuff like that.
So, I got to at least shout that out.
So, the next award is gonna be called the Value Award.
Now, this is a different name from last year.
It is used to be called the Best Budget Phone Award.
And basically I think,
the word budget means something different,
slightly different for everyone.
Basically depends on how much you wanna spend.
But I’m calling this best budget
’cause this is just overall best bang for the buck.
That’s the definition.
It can be any price. It just has to have immense value.
Now, the Value Award actually goes to a phone
that made its sibling look pretty bad in value,
which is kind of funny, but it’s the Pixel 6,
the standard Google Pixel 6.
So, you can see why this isn’t the budget phone in the year.
It wasn’t that cheap. It was 599.
But the value you got from this phone at 599
with the tensor chip, which performed really well,
with this high refresh rate OLED display,
with these really great cameras,
which matched the Pixel 6 Pro.
Decent battery life,
but also just overall nice charging
and nice wireless charging.
This phone with its great 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 line.
And this gets my value award.
This is like a really easy phone to recommend
because of the price it launch at.
Now, again, this is a category
that’s changed over the years
and obviously has a lot of competition.
There’s phones like the Poco F3 which have incredible value.
It’s much more along the lines of budget phone
and deserves to be highlighted just for that.
There’s also the Samsung A52s of the world.
There’s the Realme GTs of the world.
Just a lot of good overall phones for less money.
I keep saying this.
Good phones might not be getting cheap,
but cheap phones,
cheap phones are getting good.
All right.
So the next category, (claps)
the award you don’t wanna have to give,
but hey, I’m giving it anyway.
It’s the Bust of the Year.
Basically, the worst phone to come out this year.
Maybe not the worst overall phone actually,
but just the phone that shouldn’t have happened
the way it did.
I’ve given all kinds of different phones with this award,
whether they launched at the wrong price
or had awful marketing,
or we’re just bad phones in general, bad builds, whatever.
Generally, like I said,
it’s kind of hard to go wrong with a lot of the stuff
on this desk,
whether you’re looking at camera quality or battery
or value.
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 it
$1,500 Surface Duo 2.
It’s the Microsoft Surface Duo 2.
So, I remember when the first one of these phones came out
and it obviously had one of the sweetest hinges,
which is a really nice piece of hardware.
One of the sweetest back folding hinges of any phone
we’ve ever seen.
And so, there was a little bit of hope
that it might be amazing.
And maybe the second one would be amazing
’cause they didn’t have cameras.
And I don’t know,
there’s just a bunch of bugs with the software.
But we’ll give them some time.
They launch the second one.
It’s more expensive than the first one
and it’s worse.
(Marques laughing)
It’s just not as good.
And so, I’m kind of sad that it’s not doing better.
Like I wanna see a phone like this, which is dual screen
instead of a single folding screen, work.
I think it’s a cool idea.
But as you can tell by the review video,
there’s still just too much unfinished about it.
The software still not great.
The camera’s just not very good.
I mean, to have those big cameras on the back
to sacrifice the full 360 fold
and still not be good cameras,
there’s just no way to recommend that phone to most people.
Lots of other things on this desk.
I could just hand any of these phones to most people.
I would just never give a Duo 2 to anyone I really like.
Now next up, this is one of my favorite awards to give,
the Most Improved Award.
And often, what we’ll see is companies
learning from their mistakes
and actually listening,
and doing a much better version of something
than the year before.
It’s actually happened a couple of times
where a Bust of the Year
turns into a Most Improved Award the next year,
which is pretty cool to see.
But this year is the Most Improved Award
just 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 flaws.
They did a great job.
So the Most Improved Award
is gonna go to Samsung’s Galaxy S21 Ultra
as a huge improvement 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 line,
we saw the big numbers
and we saw the a 100X on the camera.
And we knew what they were getting at,
but there were some weird autofocus issues with the camera.
Never really resolved themselves
and ended up having to add hardware in future phones
for that laser autofocus.
But generally, hard to recommend the S20 Ultra.
S21 Ultra comes along and just nails it, just everything.
Again, they have a great screen, great battery,
great cameras that actually focused.
And they still maintain a lot of those super big numbers
and the Ultra thing lives on.
So, that’s a huge improvement over last year.
And you generally don’t see
like massive year over year jumps,
big gaps between phones,
but I do have some honorable mentions as well
for most improved.
One is gonna go to Samsung’s Z Flip3.
Not only did it become a much better phone
with this larger display and better usability
on the outside, like this was one of the things
that made the phone much easier to recommend,
but the price also went down.
That’s huge.
That’s incredible that you don’t usually see a phone
make a big leap in usability and leaped down and price.
So, I wanna shout out the Flip3
and I hope other phones do that again, to be honest.
I also will shout out iPhone 13 Pro
just ’cause we got a much better camera system
and a much better battery.
And I don’t know how many years late,
but we finally got the ProMotion displays.
So camera, screen, and battery.
Sort of the three most important things about a phone,
all got 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’s S21 Ultra.
So, that leads us to the final award of the night.
The biggest one, actually.
The sort of the one we’ve all been waiting for
which is the MVP, the Phone of the Year.
Now, think about phone of the year
is again now we’re drifting back a little bit more
into subjective territory.
Meaning it’s not just straight up the best phone
to come out during the year,
but if you think about it kind of like the MVP award
in a sports league maybe.
Maybe the NBA or NFL or something like that.
It’s a little more about that,
plus the impact you have on the game,
plus the overall like challenges you may have overcome.
There’s just a little more that goes 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 gotta give an acknowledgement
to a phone that came out right at the beginning of the year,
and was one of the absolute best phones you can buy
at its price the entire year.
And that’s Galaxy S21 Ultra from Samsung. It’s your MVP.
Yet another award for this phone,
but honestly it deserves it.
I think it’s really easy to forget about the phones
that come out in like January or February,
because this is a year old at this point now,
which is crazy to say compared to all the other phones here.
But the price did steadily drop a little bit.
I mean, you can buy this phone now
for like what 700, 600 bucks,
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 battery be a little bit of a downside.
You know with Pixel, it was the battery.
With the gaming phones, it’s the camera’s.
There’s always something.
There’s always something.
But Galaxy S21 Ultra,
on top of having a pretty great premium designed
to package it all, nailed it.
They nailed it with this phone.
Now I do have a runner up for the MVP,
the second highest voted in this imaginary world
where I’m voting on these,
and that is the iPhone 13 Pro.
And again, with this phone, it comes down to,
okay, they took the three most fundamental things
about a phone
and made them all way better than last year.
So overdue, but they finally added
the ProMotion 120 Hertz variable refresh rate,
and it looks great.
With this battery, they made the phone literally larger
to have a much better battery life.
It doesn’t necessarily charge super fast,
but that might be nice to see.
And then the cameras all got better.
World-class cameras,
great photo and video quality.
I wouldn’t mind seeing USB-C
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 also wanna give a shout out,
sort of honorable mention in MVP category, to Pixel 6.
I think this might be underrated
as how important this phone actually is this year.
Obviously, this is the Google phone.
So we’re looking at Google software,
all of this stuff that comes from having a Pixel,
but also tensor, having their own custom silicon,
and that trend moving forward.
And being 599 at launch, which is incredibly good price
for a phone that basically has all of the flagship features
you’d probably want.
So, why spend a thousand dollars
when you can have a phone for 599
that does all the same stuff?
And so, I wanna give that shout out.
The best value phone is also worthy
as a second runner-up to MVP, Phone of the Year.
But that’s it.
That’s it for my awards.
Again, this is all hand selected
by the entire judging committee which is me.
So if you have any problems with them,
let me know in the comments section
’cause I picked them all.
But also we can talk about these,
I think we’re gonna have a Discord Stages event
pretty soon, maybe in the next day or so.
So, follow me on Twitter or join our Discord channel
if you wanna be up there and grab a mic,
and we can talk about it.
But generally, I think my sentiment is still the same.
Lots of really interesting phones still coming out,
even though they’re mostly the same shape.
You still have a rectangle slab,
but you get crazy weird cameras
or you get gaming aesthetic,
or you get tensor processor,
or you get amazing world-class design.
There’s a bunch of different stuff available
and you kind of have a hard time going wrong
with a lot of it.
So, shout out to great phones
for being a great reason to be alive in 2021.
That’s been it for the Smartphone Awards.
I’ve been your host Marques Brownlee.
Thanks for watching.
And I’ll catch you guys next year.
Peace.
♪ In our youth, who are we? ♪
♪ Can I hold you close without losing losing? ♪
♪ Can I hold ♪
%20(3).jpeg)
%20(3).jpeg)
