2024 is the year that AI has taken over the smartphone World it feels like that's all every company wants to talk about ai ai with AI Galaxy ai ai so let's see where it's made a big difference where it's made no difference at all and we actually going right Back to Basics has paid off even better welcome to the best smartphones of 2024 and while we're at it also the worst smartphones that you should not buy we've got 10 categories and it's all leading up to the one true overall Champion so given that 2024 has
been a total AI arms race who is actually winning that race well as far as apple is concerned most of their AI features are absent especially in Europe and the few that are here are good but not enough to ignore that feeling of is that it I'd say Google's AI is better I love some of the photography stuff that the Google pixel's got going on like you know that Zoom inhance feature that's practically just an upgrade button for your shots and I thought Gemini live this instant free flowing AI chat was kind of amazing but
then chat gbt has now just started doing the same thing and in my experience that's better and so ultimately Samsung takes it Samsung AI came out first it was already pretty interesting and they've only made it more stable and given it more options since then like I have actually used some of their stuff like the live text translations on a day-to-day basis so given that the s24 ultra is Samsung's kind of hero device this year this trophy has that phone's name on it I'm actually so happy with how these turned out can you see how
this isn't just a flat photo of the phone too we actually went and got the full 3D model of every phone here laser etched into these trophies front back and sides just like my haircut very fun the most improved phone this year has a very obvious answer so last year Google released what looked an awful lot like an offseason April Fool Stoke with the Google pixel fold these screen bezels in this crease for this price and the thing barely even folded flat when you opened it unsurprisingly this this was one of the worst phones of
2023 oh my God I actually forgot how bad this crease was but this year the new Google pixel 99 Pro fold is well it's infinitely better at everything apart from the name like what is this the software has come a long way as you'd expect between a gen one and gen 2 product and they've actually Justified paying the extra to buy a foldable this time but also the hardware the crazy bezels are gone it's thinner it's lighter it's faster it's brighter if someone were to tell me they went out and bought this thing I wouldn't
be holding in a laugh anymore and that is a compliment I like this thing and as usual if any company wants these Awards just message us and we'll send them and now we're on the subject of foldable phones what's the best foldable in the world ever well honestly I'm kind of bummed about this last year we saw something special with the OnePlus open affordable with zero camera compromise amazing battery and software that actually made even people who'd completely written foldables off reconsider however they did not upgrade it this year yeah well they they kind of
did they made this OnePlus open Apex Edition which does sound very cool it has more storage it has a dedicated VIP security chip which can quickly cut an app's access to your camera and microphone and this fancy new red color but it's powered by last year's chip it's really hard to recommend that you pay full whack pricing this year for something that really should be heavily discounted by now and so I spent quite a lot of time deliberating between the Samsung Galaxy zold 6 and the Google pixel 9 Pro f eventually deciding that it's just
personal preference between the two the pixel is thinner and it feels a bit more like a normal phone when folded and then the Samsung has about 50% more power but neither of these phones are actually taking home the trophy so funny story I actually did some very detailed testing until I decided which phone won I got as far in the process as to actually make a trophy saying that the Samsung Galaxy Z fold 6 was the winner but that's because there was one phone that I hadn't tested until that point and that is the honor
magic V3 I got this thing a couple of weeks ago but we won't be needing this anymore for starters this thing is so pretty the faux leather back the texture trim on the spine it's got small bezels on both the outside and the inside basically no crease oh yeah and the phone is paper thin it really is a spectacle but then where this starts to get almost confusing is instead of that size reduction being achieved by chopping out everything on the inside it's just better this has got a far bigger battery than Samsung it also
has stylus support it charges faster they even fit in a proper Periscope zoom camera so the true winner of the foldable category the only thing that's a little bit less developed is the foldable software Samsung can do a bit more with a little bit more polish but this Hardware feels so much better that frankly I don't really care with these smaller flip phones though I think it's actually between Samsung and Motorola I think Motorola's razor plus is actually the prettier phone like the cover screen is more impressive and it feels like they've thought more purposefully
about what you can actually do with it but ultimately Samsung just has better fundamentals it is the significantly more powerful phone Samsung software skin is more reliable and you get way more updates plus you get Samsung's very optimized image processing which does also make this the better camera now it's not just OnePlus who's bowed out this year because the other iconic line of phones that's notably absent is the compact Asus Zen phones and it seems strange year after year Asus released these super compact but high-end phones and year after year people labeled them as the
gold standard for their diminutive size but I think the Crux of it is this when most people are shopping for a smartphone the primary limiting factor is budget we want to get the most product for that budget but you can't do that if you're also working with a size constraint there's a reason that the iPhone minis failed so what's left then well I really like the Samsung Galaxy s24 it's a very light very small allrounder you get Samsung's AI which as we've seen is the best but the battery and the cameras while solid aren't great
for this Flagship tier so then youve got the Google pixel 9 Pro which has good battery life and great cameras Google's really neatened up their game in 2024 especially with their Flagship phones but I would go as far as to say that none of those beats the xiaomi 14 kind of reaching the limits of how far I can stretch with a suit this tight this thing isn't quite as mini as the s24 but it's not far off and it has topnotch cameras it's just so fun to shoot with cuz it Doesn't for once feel like
you're getting the sloppy camera seconds from the Ultra phone like it definitely does with the Samsung Also the battery does last a really long time for such a small phone so here it is on the plimp xiaomi did well me that was disgusting now there are two things that I would flag software wise you get four years of software updates here as opposed to seven on Samsung and not everyone loves xiaomi's hyper OS operating system it does feel a little bit like a knockoff iOS but if that doesn't matter to you then it is fast
and it is customizable the second thing though is that slightly awkward fact that xiaomi has actually already released the xiaomi 15 but they just have this extremely delayed process getting those new phones to the west but what if you just want a phone that lasts forever well 2024 has actually been a particularly good year for this Android 14 has improved basically every Flagship phone's battery life by 10% plus and apple specifically made battery one of the key key things they focused on with the iPhone 16s but if you're asking who does it the best then
that would have to be Vivo now I never got around to making a dedicated video on this bad boy but let me tell you vivo's flagship phone for 2024 the Vivo X200 Pro is an absolutely mind-blowing phone its specs Feel Like A Cut Above the Rest and that's only Amplified when you use the thing because it's so damn optimized but I'm going to talk more about this later for the purposes of right now just know that this thing isn't one of those mediocre mid-rangers strapped to an absolutely Bonkers siiz battery it's an incredible phone in
its own right with a 6,000 Mah cell that actually uses that insane amount of juice very efficiently too so this was a pretty easy one for me and I just want to mention while we're on the topic there are two ways that I could have done this whole trophy thing and I spent a while going back and forth on which one was the way to go cuz the thing is Vivo is pretty tricky to buy in the UK and the US which are two of our three top viewing regions so some part of me was
thinking should I just stick to rewarding the phones that you can easily buy and get your full customer support maybe but eventually I decided that I don't see these videos as just a buying guide this this is an awards ceremony So eventually I decided it would feel silly to not celebrate the phones and the Innovation that I actually feel deserves it just because they're not made for certain markets all right final few categories now before we get to the overall winners and of course tonight's big loser what is the best phone for gaming can we
get some rgbs in here well I would say there's three runners up there's the obvious yearly phone from red magic which is lost in the SE somewhere which like all red magic phones has absolutely beautiful Hardware especially for the money but they need to improve their software and their front camera before I can Crown them the best then also the iPhone 16 Pro Max and the Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra they both have really good screens very fast chips good cooling basically all you need for a Flawless gaming experience in most cases but there is a
clear leader of the pack if you so desire it is the Rog phone 9 Pro for two reasons this has the brand new Snapdragon 8 Elite chip inside of it which is topend nextg I don't know quite how they got it in here so soon but you can think of this as next year's Flagship chip it's like a proper 30% faster than the chips in the rest of these phones but it's also Rog have really mellowed out over the years the software is less iny face gamer than it used to be while actually hiding more
gamer Fe features than ever before the design has got that cool gamery Edge to it like this pixel display is the best that they've done so far without looking Tucky the cameras are the best they've ever been you get a proper 50 megapix main camera a pretty good three times optical zoom camera and a serviceable ultroid camera so if you do want to properly sink your teeth into Mobile gaming it's not close this thing is amazing my only slight beef is that they have had to tone down the speaker quality a bit from their old
phones to make the bezels around the screen smaller but we can't have everything this is a banging phone okay so that's gaming what is the best camera of 2024 you would expect this to be easy I compared what I thought with the two best smartphone cameras the iPhone 16 Pro Max and the Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra and I found that the iPhone 1 so iPhone right well that was before I tested the vi X200 Pro the way that I would describe this is technically speaking the iPhone is a fantastic camera I don't think I've ever
taken a photo or video on this thing thinking that sucks it shoots exactly what you think it's going to but when I use this phone the oh that's not good I promise these are really durable trophies my wife comes to save the day I just break things okay let's put what's left of this trophy on the plint we'll have to get a new one of these made but the point I was making is when I use this phone it makes me feel like I can capture things that I never thought I could it just bleeds
style it's got a big main camera sensor it's got a 200 megapixel zoom camera which means you can get a lot closer to things than you think an absolutely amazing portrait mode that makes me feel like I could do this as a career and even the video quality is probably the best that I have seen on Android so even though the phone is not as widely available as others you got to give credit where credits due or I guess in this case broken trophies I either want this in the west or I want Western companies
to be more like this the only downside of shooting with Vivo of course is that you've still got to keep an eye on what you're shooting you don't even need to do that with our sponsor the insta 360 X4 because look at this if I attach this camera onto the invisible selfie stick and then I place it in the middle of this basketball CT wa I always forget how tall this thing is then I don't need to think about anything anymore it records an 8K resolution it records in 360° so you can capture every single
part of this game all at once and then if I later decided that I wanted a completely different Viewpoint of that same scene I can tap on Josh's face instead of mine and voila the camera follows him all the way around instead but here's the coolest part if you really decide that you want to flex today you can swing the camera around your head to capture these frankly insane matrix-like bullet time shots in which the camera and all equipment around it disappears oh and there's an exclusive holiday deal so it's 15% off the X4 it's
a free bullet time handle like this and it's a free invisible selfie stick all from the link in the description so that's all the subcategories let's talk winners so the best budget phone of 2024 as per usual there's been a billion of them all the usual contenders there's great phones from redmi there's great phones from real me great phones from Poco but there's one phone that to me feels special and that is the cmf phone one cuz here's the thing it's got the specs that you'd be looking for at this $200 price nothing feels lacking
when you're using it but it combines that with a pretty big practicality upside the thing is modular and it has an entire ecosystem of accessories just to go with it and yeah not in a super slick everything's magnetic and wirelessly communicates kind of way but it's the best it can be given the price and it's far more than anyone else is doing it means you damage your phone's back you can just swap it out you want to add in a phone stand just screw one in you want a wallet you can have one completely secured
to the rear of your device oo I feel like this trophy's turned out particularly cool but while the best budget phone was a pretty easy decision the best mid-range phone was not sleepless nights I tell you sleepless nights you know that Meme I bet he's thinking about other girls yeah that's me but all I could think of was xiaomi Samsung no no no Google OnePlus oh nothing anyway there were a couple of options that were easier to eliminate like the Google pixel 8A which is a little underpowered for what you're paying doesn't have that great
a battery and also just looks kind of bad for a 2024 mid-range phone with these thick and uneven screen borders the nothing phone 2 is well it's last year's phone and they haven't made a nothing phone 3 yet but now it gets tricky because I think this phone the OnePlus Nord 4 is absolutely amazing it's been a long time since I've used a metal body phone this thing takes me all the way back to the HTC 1 days and those were good times it's one of those phones that you pick up and you're just like
yes you get it this works it's thin it's light it's fast pretty much everything about it feels Flagship and and it stands shockingly close to phones like the Samsung Galaxy s24 plus but at less than half the price the only thing that puts me off giving it the trophy is that the ultra wide camera is really quite soft and there is no zoom camera but genuinely if this company had just invested another $30 in this camera system this would have been my favorite phone for sure so this ended up for me being a decision between
the Samsung Galaxy s24 Fe which is Samsung's slightly scaled back s24 plus phone and then the xiaomi 14t which is pretty similar it's xiaomi's mid-range equivalent to their Flagship 14 series of phones and honestly when you put these two side by side the s24 Fe does feel pretty lazy by comparison it does have a faster chip and it does have wireless charging which the xiaomi doesn't but it just feels like xiaomi has put a lot more care into their device the 14t has got a higher resolution screen a larger battery faster charging more RAM even
just comparing the screen bezels xiaomi feels definitively ahead not to mention this is the standard 14t which is quite a lot cheaper than Samsung once you get to the 14t pro which is more similar it absolutely smokes it also I was expecting Samsung zoom camera to be significantly better than xia since this is a three times optical zoom and this is a two times optical zoom but when I tested it and I found that it wasn't I looked up the specs only to find that xiaomi zoom camera has a 50 megap resolution Samsung's has eight
which just feels really rough for something of this price and now just before the over overall phone of the Year someone has to take the L last year it was Apple with the iPhone SE and Google with their first pixel fold both very prolific devices that the whole industry knew were coming this year we have something that I don't think anyone saw coming really so hmd the company who you most likely know for their Nokia phones they decided this time around to make something called the skyline and um horrendously mediocre device I mean first of
all whose idea was this design who decided that the combination of a Sharp angular body and then a rounded screen was the way to go you literally picked the worst parts of both decisions and merg them together into a phone that looks even worse than the sum of its parts the thing literally looks like you started cutting out the approximate shape of a smartphone and then halfway through realized that you couldn't actually be bothered the cameras sound good on paper but the tuning is bad you have to work to get great images out of it
and you don't get like the 7 years of software support of Samsung or even the four years of shiai you get two here and if that wasn't enough it gets pretty laggy fairly often it's got this horrible tiny vibration motor put it this way I'm not surprised that you can already get this thing for like 30 to 40% off even though it's only been out for a few months hardly manages to deliver which is why we need to give it its own wooden spoon okay so what is the best flagship phone of 2024 if you
just truly want the best of the best well honestly I think the OnePlus 12 is absolutely amazing for slightly less money than the rest the Google pixel 9 Pro XL is very good for people who are a bit less into gaming and more into AI supercharged photography but this has felt like a particularly great year for Samsung software they've gone quite suddenly from having one of the weakest software skins to one of the strongest and so even though not every piece of Hardware they've made this year has been a hit their topend s24 Ultra does
come out as a very immediate top Contender some of their Samsung AI stuff is actually useful battery life is amazing the S Pen is physically baked inside and also this anti-reflective display theyve put onto it is amazing don't underestimate it and all of this is happening while I would go as far as to say apple has floundered even though yes the iPhone camera does come out on top aside from that the battery improvements were not significant basically no other Hardware changed and the key new thing is Apple intelligence which is both very early right now
and also coming to last year's Pros anyway also I don't really like iOS 18 I feel like the two key things that have changed are one the control center which makes zero sense to me I just don't understand how Apple decided that the key thing their users want in the next update is a full screen music widget even though they have a music widget here and then you scroll down another page and you've just got an expanded list of the same controls that you also still have on your homepage page why and then you got
the new photos app which is just beyond confusing and slower to navigate and so while obviously choosing a phone nowadays is highly based on ecosystem if we just put that to the side who made the best phone this year I would say Samsung until I tested this Vivo I wish the body of this phone was a little less sticky but apart from that vivo's origin OS is so fast so smooth like I said before the camera is shockingly good it's like the best parts from every phone camera put together and the battery is amazing when
I use this phone it genuinely feels like I've just inserted a cheat code and have Early Access to next year's device it it feels naughty and so it brings me great pleasure to announce that the overall champion of 2024 is in fact the Vivo X200 Pro the bad news is it's not easy to get hold of in countries like the UK and the US the good news is that if this phone really appeals to you then the Oppo Find X 8 Pro is really similar and much easier to get it's the same parent company making
both and so the core DNA behind them is pretty much identical to find out how we've turned this room that we're sitting in right now into the perfect living room click here and I will catch you in the next one
