A 2024 smartphone report card
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Looking back, it is obvious just how busy and chock-full of great options the past year of smartphones has been.
The Class of ’24 led the charge with AI - artificial/Apple Intelligence, based on your mobile platform of choice—with most brands finding ways to dial up the AI seasoning with each successive launch. Peek beyond the AI hype and you had legitimately good phones cross these pages, with something for everyone and for every need.
Here’s our pick of the phones that stood out in various categories, and by size, feature and budget. Remember phablets? To think we coined a word for large phones, one that aptly describes pretty much all flagship phones these days.
Even so, the phone that does the most with its size is the Samsung S24 Ultra, justifying the Ultra in its name with a massive 6.8-inch display with built-in stylus support, a quad rear camera setup and top-tier performance that holds its own, despite being the ‘oldest’ phone on this list! It’s a handful, for sure, but for all the finger calisthenics you have to do to securely grip the S24 Ultra, you’re rewarded with arguably the best media consumption experience on any phone launched this year. For those of us whose digits haven’t evolved to hold massive phones, there are still some legitimate options, though the smallest phone one has considered is still larger than the first Galaxy Note from over a decade ago.
The Samsung S24, the base iPhone 16 and the Google Pixel 9 Pro are all excellent, easy-to-handle phones, but the Xiaomi 14 nails the brief the best, with its 6.36-inch screen form factor hitting the sweet spot between the S24/iPhone 16 and their Plus variants without feeling cramped for daily use. Xiaomi backs it up
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