Vivo X Fold 3 Pro, OnePlus 12, Xiaomi 14 & more: Best phones of 2024

All of a sudden, users in India find themselves in a rather interesting place. One where they hold the power to decide which artificial intelligence assistants stand tall (and which eventually fall behind), amidst an explosion of choice. In just the past few days, Google released Gemini officially in India, and then Meta introduced the Meta AI assistant for users of its incredibly popular apps, in the country. As I pointed out in my analysis, the timing of these launches has all to do with an attempt to not waste any time in acquiring a base that’ll hopefully stick around as active users. Competition is tough, something Google and Meta could see. There is of course OpenAI’s domination, Microsoft’s intent to widen scope of its Copilot assistant across PCs and apps, as well as the upcoming Apple Intelligence suite that’ll span the iPhone, iPad and Mac portfolios. Competition is only getting more intense, and every AI company knows they can ill-afford to lose time they don’t have.

Meta’s big pitch is, as Ryan Cairns who leads engineering for AI at Meta told me, the seamless nature of Meta AI access across their apps. WhatsApp, Instagram Facebook and Messenger, across wherever you’re using any of them – an Android phone, iPhone, iPad, Android tablet or a desktop, will have a Meta AI access shortcut. He has a point. Data points to India being Meta’s biggest market for its headline apps. WhatsApp has 535.8 million users (and counting) in India, with Brazil in a distant second (118.5 million). Facebook clocks 378.05 million active users here, significantly ahead of US (193.8 million) and Indonesia (119.05 million). For Instagram, India’s contribution of 362.9 million active users, surpasses US (169.65 million) and Brazil (134.6 million).

Meta AI’s foundations are incredibly solid, with the Llama 3’s 8 billion and 70 billion parameter models at work. All of the processing is on a server, which means no ‘on-device’ AI as such. The nature of Meta AI’s implementation, considering it isn’t integrated within any operating system, is one of the reasons. It does need to step forward on a few things though – one of which is the language support (English only, for now, will only take it so far amidst India’s diversity). Google Gemini, in comparison, is proficient in 9 Indian languages. OpenAI’s GPT-4o can work with 12 Indian languages.

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We are at the midpoint of 2024. Good time then, to take stock, of the most active tech space there is. Smartphones. What’s new, what’s in vogue, and what’s simply old wine in a new bottle. There have been a lot of new phones in the first six months of the year, and we have reviewed a handful which we thought would be the most impactful in one of the many ways possible – take forward the experience with a mix of specs and software, newer generation chips themselves defining performance, camera upgrades and what they mean as well as evolving form factors too. It is good to note that not just flagships, but mid-range Androids too have stepped forward with upgraded experiences. More than anything else, I’d opine it does two things – lengthens potential life of the phone for a user, which in turns adds value to the expenditure. Let’s get to the highlights then.

Though the year began with quite a bang, dotted by earlier than usual launches (phone makers didn’t want to waste any time, clearly), I must admit to a recency bias. And that takes me to the Vivo X Fold3, which as the name suggests, is a foldable phone. Vivo took their time with this one and didn’t simply follow the market that was being defined by Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5 phones (they’ve been impressive, but competition is catching up). OnePlus perhaps set the example of wait-and-watch late last year, with the Open foldable. Improvements to ergonomics are clear (the screen folds flat; no gap near the hinge), with Zeiss’ influence on the camera perhaps the real deciding factor. I did note, “as has become the form with Vivo’s recent flagship and premium phone launches, things are mostly spot on.”

When talking about Android flagships, it is nigh impossible to miss out on the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, the latest chapter in a long lineage of Android flagships that define experience. Things got off to a rocky start, with the initial camera performance of the Galaxy S24 Ultra being quite inconsistent. One could argue that releasing a phone in such form is perhaps borderline negligent. There has been improvement since, but general consensus is, photography performance could be better still. Yet, the Galaxy S24 Ultra still is, all things considered, the definitive Android flagship because of many reasons – long software support, that gorgeous display and an unmatched identity. While the AI smarts, such as circle to search and transcriptions in the recorder app are becoming more common across the Android landscape, this phone will forever hold credit as the torchbearer of true AI phones.

All said and done, I simply wouldn’t discount the OnePlus 12 from the flagship conversation. It is a phone, again with a long history of capable predecessors, that simply delivers on most aspects. The personality is very likeable, top-notch specs, an OxygenOS that can often divide opinion but gets the job done and photography performance has improved so much, it has to be seen to be believed. So much so, a friend insists that the OnePlus 12 on the latest software update often pips the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s camera in certain scenarios. I concur. That says a lot about OnePlus’ attention to updates, which holds the phone in good stead for a few years. Like I said, a phone that you really want to like. It’s the sort of personality that’s consistent with OnePlus phones, something that surely isn’t easy to achieve year after year, phone after phone.

A trajectory that continues to impress, is smartphone photography. Leica with Xiaomi, Zeiss with Vivo, Hasselblad with OnePlus and a whole lot of image processing smarts alongside artificial intelligence use by Google, Apple, Samsung, Nothing and others, has simply elevated the smartphone photography experience quite a bit. Take the Vivo X100 Pro for instance, where the camera integrates smarts such as an Astro Mode that overlays stars and constellation on photos using AI, and a dedicated algorithm for processing sunset photos. It is difficult to pick an ultimate favorite, because there are things to learn from Leica’s Authentic and Vibrant shooting modes for Xiaomi’s flagships, Hasselblad’s colour handling that gives OnePlus 12 a strong foothold and Zeiss’ attentiveness to extracting the maximum details (which made the Vivo X100 Pro and then the Vivo X Fold3 personal favorites).

Mid-range Android ≠ compromised experiences

This is a question, the answer for which will be relevant for a bigger demographic of smartphone buyers, than you may imagine. Exactly how have mid-range Android phones improved? Quite significantly, if I am to draw on my experience with select, recent Android phones that cover a fairly wide price band too. Mid-range, upper echelons of that band and gently nudging into the alternate flagship phone classification. No longer, the “cheaper” alternative just because you may be on a strict budget. Time to save some money and skip the flagships? We may be on to something here, and increasingly so, as time passes.

While there’s weight to that argument, the mileage derived by the passage of time, will be subjective. Your usage may be in prime position to make the switch to a powerful mid-range phone now. Or you will be, a couple of years later when it’s time to buy a new phone. We’ve come a long way since the 2010s (or at least most part of that era) when mid-range Android phones represented the worst of the value proposition. Compromised specs to stay within budget, lacklustre performance, software that struggled after the phone began to fill up and cameras that were there for the sake of being there.