Top phones for around $400 1) Pocophone F1 - $434 LINK Chipset – Snapdragon 845 (Adreno 630) (This chip has a second generation 10nm processor, allowing for more efficient travel between the transistors. This means that this processor would be both faster and more energy efficient than say, a 14nm process) Uses DynamIQ cluster architecture, which combines multiple CPU cores into a single cluster, this extends on the big.LITTLE architecture which was designed for more power efficiency whilst still driving up performance.

The Snapdragon 845 has ’s Hexagon 685 DSP, a co-processor used for AI and machine learning. This special chip was introduced to handle the computation of large vectors, something that general-purpose chips struggle to compute as quickly. The hexagon 685 DSP can handle thousands of bits of vector units per processing cycle, whereas a standard CPU could process a few hundred. What this means, is that the DSP is capable of juggling various execution units on a single instruction, which helps to better support on- device AI processing, richer images, voice, and even XR and gaming experiences. Not only does it improve the on-board features we use daily, but the new architecture used in these chips, improves overall performance even when idle. The choice of chip for this phone, at this price point, was definitely a good decision for Xiaomi.

Memory – The Pocophone comes in 2 variants, the first comes with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage, and the other option offers the same amount of RAM, alongside 128GB of storage. This storage is also expandable via MicroSD card.

Camera – The rear facing camera on the Pocophone offers a 12MP and 5MP Dual camera with an f/1.9 and 1.4um pixels, which offers Dual-LED Flash, Panorama and HDR a standard. The camera offers a 20MP image resolution with a pixel size of 0.9um, and an aperture of f/2.0, whilst also having a HDR feature. IR face unlock is another feature present on this phone, which isn’t often seen at this price point.

Hardware Accelerated Face detection, Multi-Frame Noise Reduction. Active Depth Sensing and Hybrid , are some of the best features the camera on the Pocophone has to offer.

Video – The Pocophone offers 720p at 960FPS, 1080p video at 240FPS and 2160p at 30/60FPS. A recent update also gave the Pocophone the capability of 4k 60FPS video recording.

Other features/Battery and Display

This phone has an impressive 4000mah battery life, on par with the Galaxy S10 flagship. The screen size is a good-sized 6.18 inches, with a 2246 x 1080 FHD+ screen, with 403 ppi. Qualcomm have engineered this phone for an all-day battery life. With the Qualcomm Kryo CPU built on ARM Cortex technology, and Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 4 capable of charging your phone up to 50% in as little as 15 minutes, this phone allows you to use your phone for a lot longer before needing to charge again. This phone also supports wireless charging, something a few other contenders don’t offer. Alongside IR face recognition, it comes with a fingerprint sensor mounted on the back of the phone.

2) View 10 - $421 LINK Chipset – Kirin 970 (Mali G72) – Much like the Snapdragon 845 present on the Pocophone, this chipset also uses a 10nm process. Both the snapdragon 845 and the Kirin 970 have 8 cores, but the snapdragon’s cores are clocked higher. With the 4 big cores clocked at 2.8 GHz, and the 4 little cores clocked at 1.77 GHz, it beats the Kirin’s clock scores which fall at 4 of the big cores operating up to 2.36 GHz, and the little cores operating up to 1.8 GHz. The Kirin 970 also uses the big.LITTLE architecture present in the Pocophone. The Honor also boasts “GPU turbo”, a supposedly capable of providing a 60% performance boost, while saving 30% power.

Memory – The Honor Play comes with 128GB of internal memory, and 4GB of RAM. This is the standard for most phones, so nothing shocking here. The Honor Play does support the use of a MicroSD card, allowing for expandable storage, however.

Camera – The rear facing camera on the Honor uses a dual camera, with a single camera in the front. The rear facing camera is 16MP with an F/1.8 aperture and PDAF, while there is also a second telephoto 20MP black and white lens. While the rear facing camera seems to have more megapixels than the one on the Pocophone, the Pocophone has higher megapixels on the dual second camera, with a higher pixel size.

The pixel size on the Honor’s rear camera, comes in at around 1.13um, which is quite a bit lower. The front camera on the Honor, however, has a 13MP camera with a pixel size of 1.13um, and an aperture of f/2, which is significantly better that what the front facing camera on the Pocophone provides. The Honor only has LED Flash, as opposed to the Dual flash seen in the Pocophone, but offers similar features such as Autofocus, HDR and face detection, as seen in nearly all phones.

Video - The Honor Play stresses about its AI camera, which recognizes in real time, around 22 different categories of subjects, including different shooting scenarios and automatically adjusts the shooting parameters accordingly.

Other features/Battery and Display

This phone offers a 3750mah battery, and uses Super Charge 3.0, notably the fastest quick charging standard. In a comparison done by notebookcheck.net, Huawei super charge led the way with an impressive 46.57mah/min, with Qualcomm only achieving 30mah/min, contradicting Qualcomm’s self-proclaimed 50% in 15 minutes projection.

But despite this charging speed being better, the battery is slightly lower than the Pocophone’s 4000mah, but the differences between the battery performances in these phones, are realistically little to none. The Honor has a 5.99” inch screen, and uses an LTPS LCD screen with a 403ppi, the resolution comes in slightly better than the Pocophone at 2340x1080, but the difference here is minimal, and wouldn’t have a significant affect. The phone also has a rear mounted fingerprint sensor.

Conclusion – the Pocophone comes ahead in first place due to utilising one of the newest Qualcomm processors, and its use of Hexagon 685 DSP, allows it to overtake its competitors at a very good price point. The current price different between the Pocophone and the Honor is minimal, both phones can be found for around the same price, but with one being a stronger contender, the Pocophone. 3) Chipset – Snapdragon 670 (Adreno 615) – Much like the snapdragon 845 found in the Pocophone, this chipset also uses the Hexagon 685 DSP. This phone also has an octa-core CPU like The Honor and Pocophone, but has its own way of using the big.LITTLE architecture, it has 2 clusters of cores, but one cluster contains 2 cores and the other 6, unlike the traditional 4 to 4. The 2 big cores are clocked at 2GHz, whereas the 6 little cores are clocked at 1.7GHz, this is already notably less than the Honor Play in second place.

Memory - The Pixel 3A also comes with 64B of internal memory, alongside 4GB of RAM, much like the Honor View 10, unfortunately, unlike the previous 2 phones, the Pixel 3a offers no expandable storage, creating an issue for those who need more storage.

Camera – The camera on the Pixel 3A is impressive, but lacks a lot of the features seen in the flagship, that really made camera a contender. Firstly, PVC (Pixel Visual Core) an advanced image processing unit which was custom designed by google to be a co- processor for their camera, is usually used to handle application-level resource requests, and Is optimised for high performance when in use, using around 6-8W for short 10-20m seconds bursts before going back to its idle state and dropping to a milliwatt of usage. This phone relies on both hardware and software to achieve its high performance, which may be why it isn’t being used on the Snapdragon 670. The lack of the feature means that the processing of HDR photos, takes around double the time of which the Pixel 3 flagship does. Not only does this phone not use that feature, but it also omits the spectral + flicker sensor, which was used to avoid flicker in certain light conditions.

Despite this, the camera is fairly impressive using the same specs as the flagship Pixel 3, the rear camera uses a dual-pixel 12.2MP camera, with a 1.4um pixel width, and an f/1.8 aperture, but google relies heavily on post-processing to increase photo quality. The front camera has an 8MP sensor, with a 1.12um pixel size and f/2.0 aperture.

The camera specs are very close to that of the Pocophone, especially the rear camera, but googles processing generally puts the edge to most competitors. Some of the most notable rear camera features include, Auto-Focus with dual-pixel phase detection, optical + electronic image stabilisation, Super Res Zoom, HDR, Top Shot and night sight. The range of features alongside the processing added to photos, make’s the rear camera on googles phone, the best we’ve seen so far.

Video – The video shooting on the Pixel 3A is similar to most phones of this price point, 1080P at 30, 60 and 120FPS, 720P at 30, 60 and 240FPS and 4k at 30FPS. Despite this being quite good, it falls below the video shooting capabilities of the Pocophone, and the Honor View 10.

Other features/Battery and Display

The battery on the Pixel 3A falls significantly short of first place, offering a 3000mah battery, 25% less than the battery on the Pocophone and 750mah less than the Honor. Google offers 18w fast charging which charges relatively quickly, but still underperforms when compared to Huawei’s Super Charge 3.0. The Display on the Pixel 3A is definitely a selling point, instead of the traditional IPS LCD seen on most phones of this price point, google redeem themselves by using an FHD+ 2220 X 1080 OLED Screen, with an impressive 441ppi putting their screen in joint first place. OLED Screens offer a better black level which also result in increased power saving.

The maximum theoretical download speeds offered by the Pixel 3A cap out at around 600MBits/s, whereas the Honor View 10 supports a theoretical maximum of double, at 1200MBits/s. This phone doesn’t offer wireless charging like its first place competition, and doesn’t offer any form of waterproofing, but so far, none of the competition does. It also has a rear mounted fingerprint sensor.

Conclusion – The Pixel 3A is a good quality phone with an impressive camera, and a remarkably better screen than its competitors, but its chipset is clocked more slowly and misses a lot of features, such as MicroSD expansion and 4k 60FPS Video capabilities, that first and second place do in fact offer. Despite the OLED screen saving power, the notably lower battery capacity and charging speeds, put the Pixel 3A in third place. 4) Galaxy A8 (2018) - $349 LINK Chipset – Exynos 7885 (Mali-G71 GPU) The A8 has a chipset with similar performance to the Pixel 3a. This phone also has an octa- core CPU like The Honor and Pocophone, but has its own way of using the big.LITTLE architecture, it has 2 clusters of cores, but one cluster contains 2 cores and the other 6, unlike the traditional 4 to 4. The 2 big cores are clocked at 2.2GHz, whereas the 6 little cores are clocked at 1.6GHz, this is already notably less than the Honor View 10 in second place.

Memory - The Galaxy A8 also comes with 32GB of internal memory, alongside 4GB of RAM, much like the Honor View 10. An improvement on the previous Pixel 3a is that the Galaxy A8 offers expandable storage, which is good for those who need more storage.

Camera – The camera on the Galaxy A8 is impressive, but lacks a lot of the features seen in the Pixel 3a. Despite this, the camera is fairly impressive using a 16MP resolution sensor with a f/1.7 aperture. The camera has PDAF, LED flash and 1080p video at 30fps.

Because of the similar performance between the Pixel 3a and the A8, it is the camera that results in the A8 being rated lower in this comparison.

Video – The video shooting on the Galaxy A8 is worse than most phones of this price point, 1080P and 720p at 30fps.

Other features/Battery and Display

The battery on the Galaxy A8 falls significantly short of first place, offering a 3000mah battery, 25% less than the battery on the Pocophone and 750mah less than the Honor. Samsung offers 18w fast charging which charges relatively quickly, but still underperforms when compared to Huawei’s Super Charge 3.0. The Display on the Galaxy A8 is definitely a selling point, instead of the traditional IPS LCD seen on most phones of this price point, Samsung redeem themselves by using an FHD+ 2220 X 1080 OLED Screen, with an impressive 441ppi putting their screen in joint first place. OLED Screens offer a better black level which also result in increased power saving.

The maximum theoretical download speeds offered by the Galaxy A8 cap out at around 600MBits/s, whereas the Honor Play supports a theoretical maximum of double, at 1200MBits/s. This phone doesn’t offer wireless charging like its first-place competition, but does offer IP68 waterproofing. It also has a rear mounted fingerprint sensor.

Conclusion – The Galaxy A8 is a good quality phone with a middling camera, and a comparable screen to its competitors. Its chipset is clocked more similarly to the Pixel 3a and has MicroSD expansion and 1080p/720p at 30fps capabilities. Despite the OLED screen saving power, the notably lower battery capacity and charging speeds stop the A8 2018 from getting in the top 3, with the 3a nudging it down to 4th due to its much better camera.

5) Plus - $320 LINK

Chipset- Snapdragon 636 (Adreno 509) The Snapdragon 636 SoC is manufactured on a 10nm process. This chipset doesn’t use the big.LITTLE architecture, and simply gives us 8 cores running at up to 1.8GHz. This is the slowest of the group, putting the in last place.

Memory – The Motorola G7 Plus comes with 64GB of internal memory, alongside 4GB of RAM, the same as most of the phones in this list. The Moto G7 Plus also offers expandable MicroSD storage, up to 512GB.

Camera – The rear camera array has two separate sensors. The first is a 16MP resolution sensor with a 1.22um pixel size and an f/1.7 aperture. It has optical image stabilisation and supports PDAF. The second sensor is a depth sensor at 5MP resolution. This camera is better than the Galaxy A8 but not better than the Pixel 3. It isn’t enough to redeem the slower chipset.

The front camera is a 12MP resolution with 1.25um pixel size.

This camera setup supports up to 8x digital zoom, HDR, RAW output and Google Lens integration.

Video – The Moto G7 Plus records video up to 4k at 30FPS, it can do 1080p much like most other phones at 30/60/120FPS. There is optical image stabilisation which will smoothen video. This is simply average, netting it no points.

Other features/Battery and Display

The battery on the Moto G7 Plus is considered to be good for moderate to heavy use. The battery is 3000mah, almost identical to the Pixel 3. The Pixel also uses big.LITTLE architecture which is said to reduce power consumption, ultimately saving battery life. Big.LITTLE isn’t used on this SoC and the use of LCD technology means that the power savings of black pixels on an OLED are not present. This results in a notable reduction in battery life.

This phone has a Full HD MaxVision display, with a 6.2 inch screen and a 1080 x 2270 resolution with a 403ppi which matches the Pocophone. This phone uses Gorilla Glass 3 to provide protection against drops. It offers 2 amp fast charging over the USB-C standard.

Conclusion – The Moto G7 Plus has the weakest chipset, which is marginally slower than the Pixel 3a’s SoC. With the same battery and charging options as the Pixel 3A, minus the OLED screen and big.LITTLE technology, the battery efficiency on this phone falls short of the Pixel and A8. Whilst this phone can take legible photos, it cannot hold a candle to the Pixel 3a’s flagship equivalent camera setup. Overall, this phone is good, but the bottom of the pack here due to the aging SoC and poor battery life in comparison.