5 Simple Tips When Buying A New Phone

5 Simple Tips When Buying A New Phone

It’s not as simple as just dropping cash

So you finally saved up enough cash to buy a new phone. Congratulations! But before you roll up to an SM Cyberzone and get sweet-talked by promodizers, there are a few things you need to consider before parting with your cash. Buying a new phone nowadays is an involved process, especially considering the large number of phones and brands that are available online. Here’s 5 things that you need to do before buying a phone:

1. Reflect on your needs and consider the features

Before you start window shopping, you need to reflect honestly on your use case and think about what features are really important for you. Do you have a long workday and need a phone with a big battery? Do you put a premium on great photos? Are you the sort of person that wants a phone that’s capable of heavy gaming on high settings?

While more expensive phones have many of these features lumped together (i.e. great battery life, camera, performance, etc.) the lower you go on the price bracket the more specialized these phones become because of cost considerations.

2. Decide on a budget

This is a big one – with the features that you listed down, you’ll now have to take a long, hard look at what you can realistically afford.

One good tip is once you decide on a particular price point (say, 10K) is that you put a Php 1K buffer on top of that (or a little bit more to where you’re comfortable with) so you can consider competing models that’s a tiny bit over your price cap.

3. Research the brand, research the phone

Once you’ve determined that you’re buying a particular model from a particular brand, you’ll now have to do research on the brand. Specifically, what other consumers have to say about their experience when dealing with after service support, as well as what current owners of the phone have to say.

While Unbox.ph and other websites that review stuff for a living try our hardest to give you accurate, unbiased information about the phones we review, truth is we have these phones for a limited amount of time (around 1-2 weeks) before we deliver our final verdict.

It’s best to join that phone’s particular FB group (there will be one, I promise) to see what exactly its owners have to say after owning them for weeks, or even months. Those groups will also have solid insight on what their experience dealing with the brand is like when it comes to having their phones serviced.

4. Decide where to buy

Once you’ve already decided on what brand and phone to buy, you’ll now have to decide where to buy it. There’s plenty of places to buy a phone you want, but we strongly suggest that you buy from official portals instead of grey market sellers for reasons we outlined here.

Some dealers also offer freebies for purchases, while online portals like Lazada and Shopee have discounts especially when you use vouchers. Keep that in mind when you start browsing – and always compare prices between dealers and online portals to get the best deals.

5. Buy now, or wait for sale?

Because of the ruthless competition in the online marketplace these days, many brands like Xiaomi and Realme conduct flash sales for their products that cut a few hundred, if not thousands of pesos of the price for a better deal. Lazada and Shopee also periodically hold special calendar sales that come with vouchers that cut prices of smartphones even further.

If you’re the type that doesn’t mind buying last year’s models today, you can also get good deals from companies trying to empty inventory before new models meant for the holiday season rolls in. Make sure to follow Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Realme, OPPO, vivo, etc. Facebook page to get an idea when these sales start.

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