Who wouldn’t want a brand new cordless phone offered at half price? At the dawn of the fall season that is beginning, manufacturers are marketing phones whose technical data sheet does not suffer from any complex, but whose retail price makes them far more affordable than the most popular models currently. on the market.
According to data from major carriers, Canadians continue to pay a little more every month for their wireless services. If you can’t reduce your bill on this side, maybe it’s better to try on the side of the device itself…
With the price of goods and services soaring, suggesting a recession on the horizon, manufacturers are realizing that not all consumers can afford the most high-end phone, which nearly costs the price of an entire home theater. Already, a few manufacturers think their customers will want to stretch the useful life of their next handset a bit longer than in the past.
Result: at least three brands – Google, Motorola and OnePlus – have decided to play the game and offer these days lower-end phones that take up most of what their more expensive versions offer.
In the case of Motorola, it is also a sort of return to Canada for a brand that was once the reference in mobile telephony, until it was bought out first by Google, then by the Chinese giant Lenovo. Today, Motorola is no longer just a brand in the latter’s catalog, but last year rose to third place among the biggest phone sellers in the United States.
Google Pixel 6a
The Californian company Google will be talked about in the small world of electronic gadgets in the coming months, because it is preparing a major offensive both in terms of telephony and connected watches and tablets: Pixel 7, Pixel Watch and Pixel Slate.
And yet, perhaps its best move is this: the launch of the Pixel 6a, in early August. This Android 12 system phone (or Android 13 in public beta, for those in a hurry to have the most modern software) is a slightly more modest version of the Pixel 6 launched last fall. Its screen is 6.1 inches diagonally, there are two lenses for the photo, and its internal storage is capped at 128 gigabytes, but all of this is supported by software tools that push these limits a little.
A co-processor digitally retouches photos to enhance quality (which usually works quite well), cloud storage from Google Drive and Google Photos frees up internal memory, and best of all, the camera is optimized to run for as long as you want. the day before its battery was completely depleted.
Screen size, photography and battery life are the top three purchasing criteria for North American consumers, we hear over and over again in the industry. Google strongly believes in it.
Motorola Moto Edge
Motorola is expected to expand its presence in Canada a bit this fall with a new version of its Razr foldable phone. Those who already had a wireless phone in their pockets at the beginning of the millennium may remember that at that time when the most popular smartphones were powered by Palm Pilot or Windows Mobile, the flip phone of Motorola was the ultimate of mobile telephony.
While waiting for the Razr, it’s a device called Moto Edge that catches the eye. The device has just been refreshed and most importantly has a huge battery under the hood which is good for two days of use, they say at Lenovo-Motorola. Its screen is still quite large, at 6.8 inches diagonally.
On the photo side, it is its front camera that impresses, with a 32 megapixel sensor far superior to what the competition offers. It’s probably a sign of the times: Motorola estimates that North American consumers use the front camera of their phone 20% more often than the back one.
This extended battery life phone targets a clientele addicted to selfies!
OnePlus 10T
Less known to the general public, the Chinese brand OnePlus has enjoyed success in the last decade by marketing phones with state-of-the-art specifications, but sold at a fraction of the price of similar products. This has deteriorated over the past three years, as the price of its phones has joined that of the most prominent models from Samsung or even Apple. OnePlus has expanded its lineup to offer watered-down versions of its device, though, and the newest edition of this more affordable version is the 10T, which just arrived in Canada.
The 10T has impeccable mechanics: its processor is the most powerful chip for mobile devices currently marketed by Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. Its three-lens device uses a 50-megapixel sensor. Its 6.7-inch screen is bright and detailed.
And yet, the most interesting thing about the 10T is not even the phone itself, but its charger: with a power of 125 watts, it gives the equivalent of a day’s autonomy to the device in just 10 minutes. As a bonus, it doubles the total battery life of the phone, which won’t degrade for at least 1600 charge cycles. A little more and we would like to see OnePlus manufacture electric cars…
These phones sell for between $600 and $850 (without a plan). It’s still a lot of money, but they seem designed to last a long time, long enough that it will end up looking like a bargain three or four years from now…