As the calendar turns, I turn my thoughts to my personal smartphone of the year. It’s been a year that feels like a calm before a storm. Multiple manufacturers have picked up the idea of folding smartphones, which will undoubtedly force a faster innovation cycle in this space. Beyond the origami of the former, both hardware and software are going through incremental advancements, leaving many smartphones feeling slightly better than last year’s option but with no standout improvements.
The rise of AI in the public consciousness started to impact in the second half of the year, with software opening up about its use of AI, and hardware offering specific support for AI and ML routines.
All these have a bearing on my choice, but the most significant criterion is a tricky one to quantify: my personal judgement. This isn’t a massive survey and investigation to find everyone’s phone of the year—an exercise that would no doubt find the least worst phone rather than the best phone. My winner needs to say something about the wider industry, the difference it has made, and the ideas it supports and introduces.
Before we come to my pick, here are some honourable mentions.
Oppo Find N2 Flip
2023 saw the global release of the Oppo Find N2 Flip, the manufacturer’s first flip phone.
More importantly, the Find N2 Flip offers a strong challenge to Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip family. It undercut the price by $150. The outside cover screen was larger and offered more information, and with the release of Oppo’s ColorOS13 debuting on the Find N2 Flip, the company signalled that this was one of its flagship handsets.
Oppo is following the trend but is also one of the first in the space and can lead the thinking behind the next generation of flip phones. That makes the Oppo Find N2 Flip an important starting point, but it’s not yet mature enough to command the smartphone space.
OnePlus Open
OnePlus debuted its first foldable this year (but I’ll note the same design is available from its parent company as the Oppo Find N3), and it picked up almost instant critical acclaim. It’s not hard to see why because OnePlus leaned heavily into the camera during the design process and has made smart choices around multitasking on a large-screened Android device.
It’s a great evolution on the foldable phone design, but it’s also missing features that are present on other premium foldables (such as wireless charging). Like other foldables, the price is still high for most consumers. I await the evolution of the OnePlus/Oppo design with keen interest to see what innovations 2024 could bring to the world of folds.
Apple iPhone 15 Pro
The iPhone is the only game in town if you need to be in the iOS ecosystem and work with Apple’s cloud-based services. The small changes made to the iPhone can feel momentous; adding the programmable action button feels like a revelation, and the faithful can celebrate the reduction in weight thanks to the move to a titanium chassis.
Yet there’s a touch of hubris around the iPhone 15 Pro’s most significant change—the move to USB-C—when it was mandated by the EU to allow for a standard charger across all consumer electronics.
The iPhone 15 Pro saw a small evolution on the iPhone 14 Pro; just enough to be new but not so much as to disrupt the market. Apple offered a minimum viable upgrade, ticking all the boxes except the one marked “excitement.”
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra
The same could be said of Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra. It offered enough updates from the Galaxy S22 Ultra to be a new phone, but the fundamental package remained steady.
The performance was lifted thanks to the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset, but that performance gain was reflected across many manufacturers. Samsung’s OneUI software retained either its charm or its awkwardness, depending on your viewpoint, and the S-Pen continued to be the primary differentiator between the Utlra and other premium handsets.
The Galaxy S23 Ultra did everything 2023 demanded of a flagship phone, but with no fireworks and an air of practicality that felt a touch… boring.
ROG Phone 7 Ultimate
One area where innovation is rife in smartphone design and development is mobile gaming. Modern gaming demands peak performance from every part of a phone, from the raw CPU and GPU performance through the refresh rate on the screen to the high sample rate for accurate control.
It’s an area that Asus’ “Republic of Gamers” has been exploring both on the desktop and laptop markets and the smartphone market. The focus on offering the best gaming experience gives the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate a defined purpose and place. Many phones lack that as they try to be all things to all consumers.
Is 2023’s ROG Phone an all-rounder phone for everyone? No, but it’s a wonderful example of how a specialist phone can deliver a top-notch experience.
My Smartphone Of The Year Is… The Google Pixel 8 Pro
The I/O Developer Conference this year saw CEO Sundar Pichai announce that ” Google is moving from mobile first to AI first.” The launch of the Pixel 8 Pro (alongside the Pixel 8) confirmed just how wide-ranging that statement would be.
AI was promoted at every opportunity, even if some features (such as the AI-powered “zoom and enhance” feature beloved by CSI: Mountain View) would not be available out of the box. AI in photo editing, AI in video editing and sound editing, AI in the Google Assistant. AI is essentially everywhere.
Google increased the support window to seven years for both the security updates and the full versions of Android—which should be good out to 2030. You also have easy access to the Pixel 8 Pro components, which means third-party repair centres should find servicing the handset easier (and if you want, you can repair the device yourself).
We can already see that AI will be one of the key features in every 2024 smartphone. We can only hope that longer software support windows and ease of access to parts for repair becomes standard as well. With the Pixel 8 Pro, there’s no need to wait on any of these.
That’s why the Pixel 8 Pro is my smartphone of the year.
Now read my review of the Pixel 8 Pro following its launch…
