Five years ago I was all about the latest and greatest flagships that were on the market. I hardly batted an eyelash at anything that cost less than $199 on contract. In my opinion, flagships were the only decent choice when it came to good smartphones. Android was kind of a mess at the time (but developing well) and the iPhone, once I discovered it, blew me out of the water. BlackBerry was on its way down, and Windows Phone 7 never did take off.
Working at Sprint at the time, I had easy access to all areas of the spectrum. Low, mid, and high end smartphones were all part of our display, and when you spend 40 hours a week working with phones, you have a lot of down time to check out the display and test phones. It was abundantly clear to me that the higher end smartphones easily outperformed those on the lower end of the spectrum. Which, in my head, was easy to understand and made sense. Cheaper phones had poorer performance; more expensive phones did better. You get what you pay for, right?
That may have been true in the past, but things are different now.
Recently I upgraded my daily driver to the Samsung Galaxy S7. There are a lot of things that I like about the phone, but I’ll also admit that my experience with it hasn’t lived up to my expectations. I still experience the occasional force close, which I don't recall experiencing as often with my old Moto X or either HTC One. My battery life isn’t really that great (better than my previous daily driver, the iPhone 6 – but still not “great” unless I severely hinder its performance with power saver). The Samsung-specific apps aren’t a “must have” for me, although I am enjoying Good Lock. The saving grace for the S7 is its camera, which I have been extremely pleased with.
But over the past couple of months, I’ve seen a couple of phones hit the market that made me reconsider whether the S7 was truly worth the money or not. The Galaxy S7’s official price is around $670. That’s a steep price for a smartphone, but that’s how it’s always been for flagships. You pay a premium price for a premium product - and in this case, a premium brand.
Watching the unveiling of the Moto Z is what originally made me think twice about my decision to purchase such an expensive flagship, despite the fact that we have no price point on the Moto Z yet. But seeing all that it can do with mods, and judging by past pricing of Moto devices, I assume that it won’t reach the nearly $700 price tag of the S7. However, it was the OnePlus 3 “flagship killer” is what really drove this thought home for me with its 6GB of RAM, Snapdragon 820 processor, 64GB of internal storage, 16-megapixel camera, and attractive design.
Tech reviewers have already conducted tests that compare how the OnePlus 3 truly compares to flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S7 (particularly the Edge, which is a more powerful model), because a phone can look great on paper but perform poorly in real world tests. Many times the well-known flagships would best the OnePlus 3 – but often not by much, and I think many would argue that it’s certainly not so much better that the competition was worth nearly double the price. I’m inclined to say that OnePlus has done a rather good job of living up to its title as flagship killer with the OnePlus 3.
Even my Nexus 5X, which I purchased through Project Fi, doesn’t pale in comparison to the S7. In a couple of ways, I actually prefer the 5X. The 16GB of internal storage with no option to expand is a bummer, but the limited amount of bloatware and ability to preview Android N is nice. The battery life is definitely worse than my S7, but its performance isn’t something that I’ve noticed is inherently worse. For $199 plus $60 for a couple of months on Project Fi was well worth the money spent, and again made me question why I spent so much money on a phone that’s really not that much better (to the average consumer, which is what I am).
I’ve known for a while that the days of overpriced flagship smartphones are numbered, but this year is really starting to solidify that thought for me. It’s certainly not a bad thing. If there’s one thing I like more than a good phone, it’s a good phone that doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg. I’ll likely keep my S7 for a while, but I think in the future I’ll be taking flagships off of the pedestal I’ve put them on for so long.
