How To Find a Perfect Phone

My teacher once told me in school, “Your shoe reflects a lot about your personality,” which seemed weird because our school forced us all to wear the same shoe.

Today, I feel the phone has taken that place in life.

“Your phone reflects a lot about your personality.”

We can go on for the next 5–10 paragraphs of different traits that you can judge by different phone brands or the device. But that will be just digressing from the topic. I wish to help you to search for the one that suits your personality.

The whole idea for this blog came from my personal phone search for the past few days, and this twitter post by MKBHD. The whole idea was to, given the budget, divide the money into various parts of the phone if you were a company.

This got me thinking, why don’t we go through the same process and find the phone that suits our liking the best. So, here is a rough road-map that I have followed. Maybe this will help you in your search too.

Step 1: Fix the budget. Money is everything, at-least when you want to purchase something in the market. So fix an approximate budget and an upper limit, something that you will never cross ever.

Step 2: Make a list of companies from which you are willing to buy your device. Doing this pretty early will just make the journey easier. At-least make a list of companies that you don’t wanna purchase your devices from. Be it lousy custom support, late software updates, or just some country you want to boycott. *cough* *cough* CHINA *cough* *cough*

Step 3: From the above list by Marques, find the ones you prioritize. For me, it was a good display, average specs, okay camera, average battery, okay hardware, excellent software. Many times these features are correlated, so look out for that too. Like you can’t have 8K video recording or QHD screen with a low-end processor.

Step 4: Make another list of some of the features that you want in your next phone. With the word feature, I mean some uniqueness that you might like on the phone. E.g., Wireless Charging, NFC, Matt black back panel, Headphone jack :P, Pop-Up camera, Lightweight, Water-resistant, 5G support … things like that.

Step 5: Search for the phones that match your criteria as close as possible. Are released less than a year ago or to be released in less than 3 months in the future. The website that helped me a lot is GSM Arena Phone Finder. This gives you an extensive range of filers and option to pick the correct phone. Also, check multiple websites to confirm the specs.

Step 6: Next comes the part where you see the review of your choice. Here you can use YouTube channels, my favorite being MKBHD, Dave2d, LTT, and Beebom, or read some online reviews like from digit. This helps you get a virtual experience and some more clarity with which one to pick.

Step 7: And if there is step 7, it means you are already too confused and now don’t know what to do. At this point in time, I usually suggest people go to an offline store, if there is no country-wide lock-down, and have a hands-on experience of your top pick. How many reviews or guides you see, hands-on experience is incomparable to anything else. Try to avoid the salesman because more than often, they just wanna sell you than support you.

Step 8: Enjoy the new phone unless you are waiting for some sales to happen to cause a dip in the price, or waiting for its release.

PS: For me, that phone turned out to be Google Pixel 4a. Good luck with your search.

Edit. I bought OnePlus Nord instead, as Pixel 4a wasn't available in my area

Thanks for reading ❤