Which mobile phone should I buy for 200 Euros? Which top tier is worth it? Is it really worth spending a fortune on a phone? The most common questions I encounter in my daily life are about which mobile phone to buy and point directly to specific models.

In this personal guide, I want to show you what the key points I look for when recommending (or not recommending) a phone. What is necessary to ensure that the advice is appropriate.

Has more power than the user needs. All of us, absolutely all consumers, actually need more power than we think. Not for gaming, not for running multiple apps at the same time, but for how the phone will work tomorrow. A great example of this is POCO mobile phones.

My POCO F3 is now two years old and works better than many mid-range products I’ve tested from 2023. Reason? Snapdragon 870 is more powerful than processors mid range flow. Buying a mobile phone with the right hardware is a sentence. It will almost inevitably start to slow down in the short term.

Not possible without Gcam support. There is another question that users often ask me, especially those who want an affordable mobile phone. “The camera is not good, are there any settings to improve it?” Another point I look at when recommending a phone is Gcam support..

Installation is as easy as sending the relevant APK to the user via WhatsApp or Telegram, and the surprise is big when you see your camera completely transformed.

ROM error history. This is one of the main reasons why I do not recommend some phones that, although at first glance seem great in terms of quality and price, have been proven to cause problems and more problems over time.

I won’t point out specific names, but before buying a phone I always check how previous versions came out and how the ROM behaves. Some phones are updated for years, but they do so at the expense of bugs and serious operating system problems. Perhaps a better plan is to have a phone that is only updated every 2 or 3 years but doesn’t cause major problems.

The speed of your memories. We usually look at whether a phone has 64 or 128 GB of internal memory, but not eMMC, UFS, etc. We don’t care whether it happens or not. The speed of the memory affects the opening times of applications, installation times of heavy games, the agility of the phone when moving files, etc. It determines much more than the processor.

This is an important aspect and is not widely known to the public, but it is decisive in terms of the current performance of the phone and, above all, predicting how it will behave in the future.

Camera sensor. Not megapixel. Logic marketing It might lead us to think that a mobile phone with a 50 megapixel camera is worse than a mobile phone with a 108 megapixel camera. Interestingly, the opposite often happens. It’s not the resolution that matters, but the size of the sensor, the quality of the optics, etc.

One of the things I look at to see if the camera will be any good (although this depends on the manufacturer’s processing) is the camera sensor itself. In general, adherence to the latest generation Sony IMX sensors always pays off well.

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in Xataka | The best mobile phones (2023), we tested them and here is their analysis