- This video is sponsored by Clash Royale.
Hey guys, this is Austin.
With flagship smart phones costing
in excess of $1000 sometimes,
it really got me thinking.
Is it possible to get yourself
an actually decent smart phone for less than $200?
Which brings us here.
So in front of me I have four phones
all costing less than $200.
So I just took a look at the Nokia 2
as part of my why does Nokia exist in 2018 video,
and my verdict on it was actually really positive.
So for $100 you're going to be getting
some premium build quality features
like an actual aluminum chassis,
a giant 4100mAh battery.
So there's decent software, a nice screen.
There really wasn't a lot to complain about,
besides the performance.
Move up to the BLU and for another $40,
you're getting a much larger phone.
So this actually looks a lot more modern in a lot of ways.
I feel like the main thing
that you're gonna immediately notice
is the 18 by 9 aspect ratio on the screen.
There's still going to be bezels
but they're a lot smaller than on the Nokia.
One thing that is added on the BLU, though,
is a rear facing fingerprint sensor.
Something that's really nice to see
on a budget device like this.
Spend another $30 though
and you can get yourself the Doogee Mix.
Now this phone easily feels like it could cost
twice it's price.
So the first thing you notice is the near bezel-less design.
Yeah, there's gonna be a tiny bezel up top.
And there is a fairly big chin
but it looks very distinctive and that,
combined with the heft as well as the nice metal build,
the glass front and back,
this really does feel like a phone
that could easily cost $500.
Of course it's not going to be perfect,
so with that chin comes a fingerprint sensor
that's going to be down here.
Unfortunately you still have on-screen Android keys
which feels like a little bit of a waste.
And also, very bizarrely the front facing camera
is on the bottom right side.
But I guess they didn't really have anywhere else to put it?
With the NUU G3, you're getting something
that looks very, very similar to a certain series
of Samsung Galaxy devices.
But that's actually not going to be a bad thing
in my opinion.
So around back, it's got that same sort of
curved edges, you've got the dual cameras
as well as the fingerprint sensor.
But interestingly, you're also going to be getting
a tapered glass finish on the back,
as well as even on the display.
It does curve a little bit on the edges.
And bizarrely, even though they did add a USB-C port,
the only of these phones that actually does have USB-C.
They removed the headphone jack.
Which, weirdly, the Galaxy S9 actually was able
to keep this generation.
As far as the screens go, all four phones
actually do have decent displays.
So the Nokia 2 has a five inch, 720p panel.
Step up to the BLU and you're getting that taller
18 by 9 aspect ratio, with a 1440 by 720 resolution.
However it's going to be stretched on a six inch display
which does look a little bit soft sometimes.
The Doogee is rocking a 5.5 inch 720p panel
and interestingly this is actually going to be
a Samsung AMOLED panel.
Now the colors, to my eye, are going to be
a little bit over saturated.
But it's a good looking panel.
However, my favorite is actually going to be on the NUU.
So this is still a 5.7 inch 720p panel.
Same as basically all of these.
However, the color, the brightness, the contrast,
and especially the viewing angles really do set this
a slight bit above the rest of the other phones.
When you're spending $200 on a smart phone,
you shouldn't expect any kind of crazy performance.
However, two of these phones
actually do perform pretty well.
One of the phones that does not, however
is the Nokia 2.
And this is honestly a case where I feel like
Nokia made a lot of the right decisions
when they were designing this phone,
but I think they cheaped out just a little bit too much
when it comes to performance.
So inside, you're going to find a Snapdragon 212 processor,
which is a very old and very slow quad core chip.
And that is going to be paired
with a mere one gigabyte of RAM
and eight gigabytes of storage.
Now the eight gigs of storage you can kinda get around
because you do have a microSD card slot.
But only one gig of RAM and that slow CPU
just makes Android feel not great.
Move up to the Vivo and you're going to be getting
an upgraded Snapdragon 425 processor.
That's still going to be quad core,
however there are going to be updated Cortex 853s,
which is pretty much shared with the rest of these phones.
And importantly, you're going to be getting
three gigs of RAM as well as 32 gigs of storage.
That's going to be plenty to run pretty much
any kind of Android app or game right now.
And on top of that, what you're going to be getting
is a pretty decently sized 3000mAh battery.
Interestingly, both the Doogee as well as the NUU
are rocking very similar specs.
So they each have the MediaTek 6757 eight core processor.
They're both paired with four gigabytes of RAM.
And they both also have 64 gigabytes of built in storage
with microSD expandability.
The biggest difference here is that while the NUU
has a 3000mAh battery,
the Doogee is going to have a slightly bigger
3380mAh cell.
That was a lot of words.
Use these phones in the real world though,
and you'll see this is one of the best examples
of why specs and benchmarks aren't everything.
So inside Geekbench what you're going to find
is that the Doogee and the NUU
are going to be significantly faster.
But in practice, that's actually not the case.
So the BLU actually feels really nice.
Sure, on paper, it's not going to have quite
the same spec and quite as much memory
but it's fairly snappy.
It's going to be responsive.
And it is going to have the power to do some gaming.
However, when you step to the Doogee,
what you're gonna find is something that feels
really, really old school.
There's one clear reason for that.
This software is straight garbage town.
Now I think what it is, is it's going to be a really
poorly optimized build of Android
paired with a pretty heavy skin.
So when I'm scrolling around here,
what I feel is just the frame rate is slow.
It doesn't feel responsive.
It really feels like I'm using a phone from five, six,
seven years ago, and that's totally not okay
at any price, especially when you consider
that cheaper phones are going to perform
and feel much, much better.
The best of both worlds though, is going to be
the NUU, so not only do you have the
on paper specs and the potential of those specs,
but you also have a build of Android
which is going to be fairly clean
and you know, not laggy and slow.
Sure, if you put this side by side
with something like a Pixel,
it's not going to be able to hold up
but for a normal person just to pick up the phone and use,
it is going to be totally respectable.
And of course, what better way to take advantage
of those awesome specs than by playing some
Clash Royale, the sponsor of today's video.
Don't you love my super clean segue?
I've had a lot of travel lately,
which has given me a lot of time
to play some mobile games.
And I've found that Clash Royale has legitimately
taken up almost all of my phone gaming time.
Clash Royale is a free to play game
where you can duel players in real time
while unlocking arenas, cards, and collecting treasure.
Now I gotta say, I'm not usually into freemium mobile games,
but Clash Royale is really well done.
So it's really simple to be able to get into a match,
and once you get in there, while it's easy to learn,
there's plenty of depth to make it challenging.
And you can still play with your friends as well.
And if you really wanna get into it,
they released a new feature called Clan Wars,
where you could assemble a clan and compete against others
in a series of battle modes to see who's the best.
So if this looks cool to you, you can check it out
in the link in the description.
Or you can just search up Clash Royale
on Google Play as well as the App Store.
While it might be slow, the Nokia 2 has the cleanest build
of Android here.
Now right now, it's running on Android 7
although it will be getting an update to Oreo pretty soon.
But even though this isn't an Android One device,
it really does feel like it.
There's essentially no bloat, and actually
Nokia's been good with updates, too.
The NUU G3 isn't far off.
Now yes, there are a couple of apps
and they've done a little bit of tweaking,
but for the most part, you are getting a stock build
of Android.
What you're not necessarily getting though
is any real guarantee of solid Android updates
in the future.
But, right now, seems to be working out okay
if you don't mind taking the risk.
Come over to the BLU and well,
we've got some software issues.
First of all, it is a pretty offensive skin.
So not only do you not even have an app drawer,
but there's a lot of bloat on this guy.
Now I get it, they've gotta make some sacrifices
to be able to hit this price point,
but if this is me, I would put some serious work
into cleaning up as much as I could,
changing the launcher because right now,
yeah, not good.
Whereas the Doogee has well some straight
garbage town software that I've already complained about.
But, yeah, it's just not good.
But what could be good are the cameras
on all four of these phones.
Or they might not be good, actually.
They are less than $200.
So, yeah.
So to start with, let's give the $100 Nokia 2 a try.
Now this guy has a single eight megapixel
rear facing camera.
So as with a lot of things on the Nokia 2,
the performance is not going to be fast
when it comes to taking photos.
And to be fair, this is a really challenging shot,
which it really doesn't hold the highlights well in.
That's a very white sky.
There's some detail there, although
it almost seems like the processing is a little bit
soft.
Although I say processing, most likely it's the
less than stellar optics on this tiny, tiny little camera.
Stepping up in the budget range to the $140 BLU
we do get a 13 megapixel camera.
And well, it looks bigger so it must better right?
Allow camera to phone.
Why, yes, I want my camera to phone.
That's definitely something I want.
Alright so let's throw that
really contrasting shot at it.
So there's definitely more detail with the BLU shot
however, I actually feel like
there's even less dynamic range.
It really does have a hard time with those highlights
whereas the Nokia actually did a better job
at keeping them in.
Here's gonna be a shot that's a little bit more normal.
Get an excellent closeup of one of Ken's waifus.
Yeah, that's actually not bad at all.
It's actually fairly sharp.
The dynamic range really isn't as big of a problem here
with the less contrasting shot.
I'm actually pretty happy with that,
especially for 140 bucks.
Now a lot of smart phones have some sort of beauty mode
in the camera.
But something I've never seen is on this BLU
we have a beauty video mode.
Alright, so this is a test of beauty video mode.
So you guys can be the judge for yourselves,
on whether I am more beautiful or I look exactly the same
and there's a stupid softening filter on my face.
Step up to the $170 Doogee
and we're going to find dual cameras.
Now here we're going to be getting a 16 megapixel
main sensor paired with a 8 megapixel telephoto camera.
You know that's actually not bad.
So it does still have issues with the dynamic range,
but there's a lot of detail, it's nice and sharp,
and importantly, it kept exposure of the main subject
pretty much all in here.
Let's try blur mode.
Oh, wow, let's not try blur mode, are you serious?
That's a photo I just took in 2018.
Some quality Doogee images right there.
That is wow.
Well last, but certainly not least we have the NUU G3
at $200.
Now this guy's also going to be rocking dual cameras,
however what's different about this one
is that while they're not only
going to be slightly lower resolution,
13 plus five as opposed to 16 plus eight,
but that secondary camera
actually doesn't really function as a telephoto option.
It's just going to be there for extra depth data,
for stuff like the portrait mode.
First thing I notice is that the processing
seems to be a lot faster.
When you take a shot, there really isn't that huge
shutter lag that there was on some of the other phones.
Oh man, this portrait mode's not good.
Oh, I can tell already this is not going to be pretty.
I think you could do something
a little bit creative with this
but, yeah, portrait mode,
not really gonna be the strong suit
of sub $200 smart phones.
Comparing the selfies, the first thing that jumps out to me
is the Doogee.
The color is just really, really washed out.
Sure there's detail there but it just looks terrible.
The Nokia actually has very vibrant rich colors.
I think it's a, maybe a little bit soft.
There's definitely some sort
of chromatic aberrations going on.
Or it looks like there's some weird filter almost.
It's passable.
The NUU doesn't do a terrible job of getting detail
and there's plenty of dynamic range.
But the color just looks off.
It just looks very sort of, cool, very
de-saturated?
I'm not, not a fan.
What should be no surprise is that
the BLU takes the best selfie.
Now a big part of that is that not only does it have
a front facing flash,
but also has a 16 megapixel selfie shooter.
Something that's way beyond any of these cameras.
Alright so it is conclusion time.
Now coming in at number four is the Nokia 2.
Now don't get me wrong, there's a lot
that I like about this phone.
The build quality is nice,
the battery is going to be massive
and the software is really clean.
However what really undoes it, is going to be the
super low end internals.
Now I can kinda get by the low end processor,
but with only one gig of RAM it really makes this
almost unusable, especially when you consider
that for only a little bit more
you can get a ton more phone.
A solid third place goes to the Doogee Mix.
Now there's a lot to like with this phone.
The idea that it has a nearly bezel-less design
really does make it stand out.
I love the heft, the way that the phone feels.
And the hardware is great.
But what undoes it is the software.
I said it before and I'll say it again,
it is a straight up deal breaker for me.
A very solid second place goes to the BLU Vivo XL3 Plus.
Now there is a ton to like with this guy.
$140 price tag feels like it's right in the sweet spot.
You're getting a solid build.
You're getting a nice size screen.
You're getting decent performance.
The cameras are decent, the selfie camera is great.
Really the only major problem
is that the software is going to need some tweaking.
Now if you don't mind putting a little bit of time
into your phone to customize things like your launcher,
then the BLU is really worth a look.
If you're buying a phone under $200 though,
I really do like the NUU G3.
It pairs an awesome build
that really is very similar to phones
such as the Galaxy S9, which costs three, four, five times
as much with a really nice screen.
You're getting that taller aspect ratio.
The camera's going to be decent
but importantly, the software is clean
and the performance is top notch.
It's a close one, I feel like a lot of people
might be happy with the BLU but if it's my money,
I'm going to spend a little bit more
to get a much nicer overall package.