When the Affordable Beats the Spectacular devices

Smartphones have been around for almost exactly one decade. Perhaps a little more, if we count the early attempts made by a variety of manufacturers to release handsets with no physical keyboards and large screens. They were different from today’s smartphones – they used styluses instead of fingers and had physical keys for answering and ending phone calls. Basically, they were phones with extra functions meant for a business environment, capable of handling documents and spreadsheets on the go. They were great devices but not desirable for the general public. Then the iPhone came along, and things changed for good.

Year after year, smartphone makers kept pushing out increasingly spectacular devices. The processing power hidden inside the smartphones’ ever-thinning bodies has grown exponentially, quickly overtaking the average office PC in speed – and price. In the meantime, smartphones have become larger, more user-friendly, and more secure. They have grown to become the gaming device of choice for billions of their users. In short, they were the most craved-for gadgets for years. Yet the ever-increasing processing power of smartphones has stopped being “that” exciting a few years ago. Seemingly users were – and still are – expecting something new rather than “more of the same”. After all, most smartphone games play puzzle games, word games and similar – less power-hungry – games on their phones, and usually have no use for the processing powerhouses manufacturers are offering.

Even the most ingrained smartphone gamer will think twice before spending $800 on a Galaxy S8 when Vainglory, one of the most beautiful MMOs you can play today, will run just fine on a Galaxy S6 (which you can buy for half the price). And those who don’t use their smartphones primarily for gaming – the average humans like you and me, who play Candy Crush and Wild Jack slots on the go – really have no reason to buy one. After all, playing at the Wild Jack is as exciting as it isn’t power-hungry – all Wild Jack games are created not only to run on an amazing variety of smartphones, they also “live” inside a web browser so they don’t care about the make, model, processing power, and operating system they are run on, they just work.

Affordable phones are becoming more exciting each year. Samsung’s cheapest model, the Galaxy J1 Prime, its cheapest model currently on sale, offers a decent performance for a surprisingly low price. And other manufacturers, such as Nokia, Lenovo, Huawei, and ZTE (the latter two are from China, yet this doesn’t make them any less spectacular) are already offering – or planning to release – smartphones with mid-range prices and hardware that matches the flagship models from a couple of years ago, perfect for the everyday use. While affordable smartphones will never be the most discussed topics for the specialty media, in the long run, they are becoming more exciting for the end-user than the flashy models that will cost you an arm and a leg.