Gadgetory

all right let's do this hey what is up guys I'm kabhi HD here and a lot has happened in 2016 for better or for worse we got a lot of new videos the studio was born plenty has happened and also a lot of smartphones or release so this video will be your one-stop shop for picking one of them this is for all the people who ask me every time you see me hey what phone should I get this video is for you so for the smartphones released in 2016 I want to be giving you guys what's best in each category and as I do with the smartphone Awards we'll give you guys a first place so the best overall but also a second place a runner-up also really good and then if there are some honorable mentions we'll also mention those in each category as they deserve them so this is the smartphone Awards 2016 so the first step category is the best big smartphone and you guys know smartphones kind of get bigger and bigger every year the average phone size a couple years ago is probably like 3.5 inch display now it's probably up near 4 4.5 inches maybe even higher than that but these are going to be the phones that are best at taking advantage of being a big phone the best that use a big battery that use big displays big display features things like that so my number one first pick is going to be the Samsung Galaxy s7 edge samsung has always been good about this and a lot of the note features actually this year trickled down into this larger galaxy s very so really this phone shares a lot with the note if you don't remember it shares the same exact camera which is great it also has an excellent really high resolution big display and has a lot of those same software features it doesn't have a stylus obviously but it has the edge display stuff as multitasking it has multi window apps so it really takes good advantage of being big along with Hardware wives having a big battery so galaxy s7 is your best big phone but my second place is actually also really good and it's the LG V 20 I talked about this earlier this year as being one of the most underrated smartphones not only is the main screen of this phone pretty big at 5.7 inches but there's also a second screen up top too so LG figures hey if you're going to make a big phone you might as well use the whole front of it and I'm still not really sure about the placement of it but I'm really happy that they kept that second display thing going on and they continue to evolve that and it's just overall a giant piece of metal so if you're into having a big phone these two are your best picks now I have to give an honorable mention of course to the samsung galaxy note 7 moment of silence for our fallen friend but seriously this is one of the best ones of the year this year note 7 had a big display had a big battery had a enough room inside for a stylus and I had a ton of software features to take advantage of being big it had huge processing power it had a great camera like I said but obviously we all know how that went with the battery situation and the phone exploding this was honestly truly one of the best phones of the year for 2016 but I can no longer recommend anyone actually buy one or keep one if you have one for your own safety so note 7 was great but it can't make any of these lists so next up category is the best compact smartphone it's the opposite of the best big phone so as a trend continues as phones get bigger and bigger it's harder and harder to find a great high-end flagship small phone the the flagship compact smartphone is a really rare breed right now but that being said it still does exist there's not that many but these are the best job at filling that gap my number one pick is the iPhone 7 this is absolutely the best phone that Apple makes right now and the performance is on point this is maybe the best performer of any of these smart phones no matter what their size with that new chip it has great fat storage it has a great fast camera the software is excellently optimized so if you're into iOS obviously the iPhone 7 is the smaller of the two iPhones and this is one of the best ways you can go as far as compact performance and on my second place close runner-up is Google pixel not Google pixel excel obviously but the pixel also is again the best of what Google makes right now it's a smaller brother and it packs all of the same exact features that the larger pixel excelled you get the full punch with a Snapdragon 820 won and all that Ram and the pure stock Android the Google assistant all that put together here it makes the pixel a great experience again in a pre compact package but that's about it I don't even have any more honorable mentions that I would recommend even close to those two for compact phones released in 2016 that pack a big enough flagship punch that's where it ends so next up is best camera and I love this category because among all the smartphones on this table I can really say that smartphone cameras have gotten really good now I think the margin of error I said has last year the margin of error between the number one best smartphone camera and the number five or six best smartphone camera is very small if you take almost any of the ones on this list you're gonna have a good time that being said my overall winner is the Google pixel and pixel excel for taking the best photos of any smartphone camera this was one of the most hyped cameras actually of the year because the Nexus line that came before it didn't take the best photos but thanks to the Snapdragon 820 1 and HDR plus the new sensor takes fantastic photos and it lives up to the hype it takes great low-light shots it does great job eliminating noise it takes multiple exposures in the daylight and has a fantastic dynamic range detail and sharpness is there color is really saturated and good to look at overall photos from the pixel and pixel excel look the best for my thing just about any smartphone that's out now my number to pick for best camera and any smartphone goes to the iPhone 7 plus and I'm picking the plus variant because it's got the dual cameras but you could pick obviously the iPhone 7 as well but the iPhone 7 plus not only takes pretty great photos great sharpness pretty great detail and obviously very natural colors but it takes I think in my opinion the best video of any smartphone on this table obviously it's taking 4k video now and there's optical image stabilization in both variants but video is something the iPhones do well and have done very well for the past couple years and the iPhone 7 plus is no exception plus it still has the best app support for things like snapchat and periscope and Instagram stories the iPhone camera will do best with all those and then I'm gonna give a third-place my honorable mention goes to the galaxy s7 for being pretty damn good at both at photos and videos it takes great selfies as well very good wide-angle front-facing camera but also it happens to have some of the fastest autofocus in any of the smartphones we see here again pretty much any smartphone on this table is going to take great photos and pretty good videos but there you have the top three so now next up we have a pretty popular category the best budget smartphones and I've said it before I'll say it again good smartphones are getting cheap and cheap smartphones are getting good there's a lot more bunch of options this year and it's been a sort of a trend and I'll explain exactly what I mean by budget in a second but not only do people not always want to get a six $700 flagship smartphone sub size they want to get them off contract but they also want that experience to live up to those six $700 phones these are the ones that do the best job of that my number one pick for best budget smartphone is the one plus 3t now this one comes in at a little over 400 bucks so $429 right now is the highest end of what I consider budget there is much cheaper smartphones out there but as far as experience those this is a hundred percent a flagship smartphone all the specs are there obviously it's a Snapdragon 820 one there are six gigs of ram and then you have a near stock android experience on that pretty great 5-inch 1080p display and obviously the fingerprint reader and the camera on the back 16 megapixels is pretty good the battery life is pretty good and it has some of the fastest charging in any smartphone ever like if we're comparing it to cars like this is your Tesla Model S this is your fastest 0-60 time reserve it to a hundred time I might say of anyone on this table even if you're not into that the oneplus 3 also came out this year about eight months before that and it also has a pretty low price even might be lower than the 400 bucks now that it's older and it still has great specs and a very similar experience with that in your stock Android my runner-up and this one got a lot of hype earlier in the year is the ZTE axon 7 it got a lot of hype for actually having some of the best speakers in any phone and it still has some of the best speakers on any phone I'm baffled all the time that I don't see more stereo front facing speaker pairs HTC was known for it ZTE picked it right up where I left off and that reason by itself is enough for it to make this list it also has an ear stock Android experience and has a lot of hardware features people like so it's pretty easy to go well there it has a great low price tag and then my honorable mentions are the Alcatel idol 4s and the huawei mate 9 now the next up category is best battery life this is naturally going to shift towards the bigger phones again because to have a great battery life you need a big battery but this this is for your power user this is the person who's in the car like can I borrow the charger and it's 10:00 a.m. and they have like 20% battery already this is for the heavy user who uses their phone a lot and needs it to last all day so if you are that person the best option for you is the moto Z play now I have the regular moto z here but the moto Z play will be a little bit of a thicker version of this they'll have the same software on the front it'll have a very similar display a 1080p display same great specs three gigs of ram and it'll be rocking a 3510 milliamp hour battery and there's something about what Motorola has been doing with battery that they won last year and they're winning this year with their phone again moto Z play is getting people like 6 hours of screen on time which if your Android person you know how impressive that is so if you're a heavy Android user and you want all-day battery life you can't go wrong with moto Z play now that being said there's actually some other phones on this list that come pretty close my runner up here is the Google pixel XL it has a 3450 milliamp hour battery which is pretty close and it's the larger version obviously over the regular pixel but because of its pure stock Android and because of the optimization Google's put in with this pixel line you're also getting 5 plus hours of screen on time if you're a heavy Android user pixel XL is not going to eat down either I'm gonna give a third place in this category as well because we're also seeing pretty great battery life out of the iPhone 7 plus it has only a two thousand nine hundred milli amp hour battery but because of again Apple's optimization because how well i OS works with its chips it has fantastic standby time so if you're one of those people who can end the day at 50 percent battery you don't even have to worry about charging overnight because you'll probably wake up the next day with 50 percent battery so despite having that smaller cell size the iPhone tends to keep making this list because of how well it's optimized and also even honorable mention to like I said the fastest recharging phone that I've ever seen with - charging it's the one plus three and the one plus three T it might not have the biggest battery or the longest battery life but the fact that a recharge is so quickly makes it a lot easier when you're worrying about how long it'll last also honorable mention galaxy s7 active that Loki has a four thousand milliamp hour battery so if you're looking for a durable phone with a long battery s7 active so next up is sort of a fun one it's sort of shifted from last year which was best design and we're just going to call it the best build the best built phone released in 2016 and believe it or not this one was kind of a tie for me between two really great phones but I'm gonna have to give first place to the galaxy s7 edge it's just so good it's so pretty again especially in this gold one you can get a silver variant the titanium it's just so sleek and has so many features that people like to see in high-end smartphones so it's got removable storage it is waterproof it's really shiny it's really pretty it's got the angles it's gotten metal bands all the way around it's just such a well-built phone doesn't have a USB type-c jack yet it does have a headphone jack which is nice and also the speakers are not the best again probably because of the waterproofing but overall this is gonna have to be number one or a closed sliver ahead of my second click which is the HTC 10 the HTC 10 is built like an absolute tank it's got the great high-end internals but just looking around this phone the unibody metal there is so much metal here on the sides the big chamfer all the way around and on the back so just in terms of sheer industrial design the HTC 10 does not mess around it doesn't pretend to be anything else it is a tank in every sense of the word and it's built super well so that's why I gets its spot on this list and you probably already know where I'm going with the craziest design my honorable mention goes to a phone I made a video all about the design of and how much I love the risk it took and that's the Xiaomi me mix the huge display bezel list phone from 2016 this one made a statement I mean I loved making this video just because I was raving about how much I loved it it happens to be maybe the slipperiest phone of all time but it does come with a case if you don't want a full time leave it exposed like that but yeah the design of the Xiaomi me mix has it easily in my craziest design of the year now here's a good one next category the most improved award and this one's kind of a fun one because I was I was tossing up again several options for it but if you look back here last year the bust of the year was the HTC a9 and I have to give the most improved award to the HTC 10 because they stepped right back up to almost the heights that they were at before I say almost because obviously there's no boom sound they still have a facing speaker and they still have a lot of where they came back but they have the high-end specs again and they did a great job with the software experience of making it not only very similar to stock Android but having it really readily upgradeable and still including a bunch of features that are overstock andr and then there is the bust of the year and surprisingly I actually had like a couple candidates for this one also its 2016 weird things happen now I think the obvious pick for bust of the year just because of phrasing has to go to the Galaxy Note 7 who was literally busting open batteries all over the country and it's a weird bust of the year because it was one of the best phones of the entire year before started having problems if he saw the review already you already know what happened but it started catching fire and then they started handing out replacement Note sevens to people's who were breaking they were called the old ones then the replacements started exploding too so it's a dangerous phone you can't buy it anymore bust of the year really disappointing and it'll be interesting to see what Samsung does next year with Note 8 but here's another one to think about project ara remember the videos we were looking at for project ara of this modular smartphone concept that we were convinced was going to come to fruition there was a whole team dedicated to it had all these videos and people were getting really hyped about being able to put together their own smartphone with all these pieces project ara got really lit for a second there and I guess now they just killed the project I can't even tell you why I'll leave a link article below that sort of does a good job of explaining the whole situation but you can just a scrap project ara don't expect that anytime soon we saw the modular thing happen a couple of times we saw LG g5 which could also be considered a bust of the year it's not the worst thing that ever happened to LG but it was kind of a weird experience with that pulling out the battery thing and not a whole lot of modules ever happened with it and we also got moto Z not a bust of the year by any means but another modular thing so I guess Project ara didn't completely fail in its mission to promote this sort of a modular concept but the actual project is now dead so that brings me to my overall MVP most valuable phone it's my best phone of the year and it's usually it tends to be the phone that I use the most often during the year so that actually that criteria made it really easy for me to pick for me the MVP is the Google pixel excel this might not have been the prettiest phone in the world that might not have been the best look or feel in the hand it definitely isn't especially from the ones on this table but the software experience more than made up for that and that's why I keep gravitating back towards near stock Android phones because the optimization is great the battery life is great this one turned out to have an excellent camera and then just things just fly along there smooth the fingerprint readers smooth the home button smooth the assistant is smooth everything the animations and frame rates and gaming and performance and multitasking are so smooth with pixel and pixel excel I'm a big phone person I went with the Excel but I also have two pockets and my other pocket I pretty much always have my second place which is the iPhone 7 plus even if it's just for its performance this is one of the fastest and most impressive phones of the year in terms of internals iOS obviously optimization does great but I take a lot of photos I take a lot of videos I share a lot of stuff I go back and forth between Twitter and snapchat and Instagram and you guys know all the links are below but these are the types of things that make me carry two phones because they're both so good now you're probably noting marques you haven't reviewed the iPhone 7 yet I and yes you're right I did my first impressions of this phone and I did some other later videos but I haven't done my full review but I'll say still expect it it's not a terrible idea right I'll probably do something like a 6 months later when this phone has been in my pocket for a long time but obviously because of its placement in this list you know that I like it also I still think Note 7 probably would have been one of my close runner ups if they didn't start to explode but they did so there you have it guys no matter what you think of 2016 there actually turned out to be a lot of really good smartphone options a little something for everyone you know if you're a selfie taker or you take a lot of photos or videos you got good cameras if you need a long battery life you're a power user got big hands you want a big phone we got small hands you want a small phone all kinds of preferences were rewarded in some way this year so that's been it maybe let me know what your MVP is most valuable phone best phone of 2016 and your opinion in the comments below either way that's been it thanks for watching I'll talk to you in the next one peace