Unbox Best Gadgets of 2018: By Category

Unbox Best Gadgets of 2018: By Category

Here are the gadgets you need to take a look at

This is part two of our best gadgets of the year companion article and in this one, we categorize our best picks for different categories. We’ve also thrown in two notebooks in the mix because we get a lot of questions which model/brand they should get – hopefully this article helps ’em out. And without further ado:

Best Bang For The Buck Smartphone: Pocophone F1

When you’re talking about undisputed value, nothing really beats Pocophone’s F1. It’s hard to argue against a phone that has a flagship Snapdragon 845 processor for literally more than half the price of other flagship phones.

Sure the body is plastic, sure there were problems with the display in early devices, but you can’t deny that the Pocophone F1 set the standard this year when it comes bang-for-the-buck phones.

Most Innovative Local Phone: Cherry Mobile Flare S7 Plus

Cherry Mobile really came out of left field with their Flare S7 Plus this year. The local brand hasn’t been quite as active with releases in 2018 compared to previous years, but what the company lacked in volume they made up for in quality.

And The Flare S7 Plus is one of the best phones Cherry Mobile has ever come out with, armed will all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a flagship phone at a very attractive price.

Best Budget Smartphone: Redmi 5A

It’s not surprising that Xiaomi’s Redmi 5A wins in this category yet again, considering all the things that the phone has going for it. With a really affordable price and relatively powerful hardware, the Redmi 5A sold tons and tons of devices for a reason.

Best Value Notebook: Acer Nitro 5

Budget and power aren’t usually two things that go together, especially for notebooks, but Acer’s Nitro 5 is a pleasant exception. Retailing at a mere Php 39,995, the Nitro 5 has a rather powerful AMD RYZEN 5 2500U processor along with discrete Radeon RX 560X graphics.

That hardware combo allows the Nitro 5 to run most games nowadays at medium settings, though prospective buyers may still want to upgrade the storage and RAM of the machine to improve loading times.

Best Gaming Notebook: ASUS Zephyrus S

ASUS’ original Zephyrus was an awesome machine for what it was. It was a powerful gaming notebook that finally fulfilled the promise of portable gaming machine you can bring anywhere.

This year the Zephyrus S takes that promise and runs with it, offering gamers and mobile professionals a notebook they can take anywhere, anytime without compromise.

Best Gaming Phone: ASUS ROG Phone

ASUS’ second flagship smartphone of the year is quite unlike what the company has released so far. It’s one of the most powerful smartphones you can buy this year, has a large pool of peripherals to choose from to elevate your mobile gaming experience and has a display that’s to die for. If you’re a mobile gamer and want the very best, then the ROG phone is the smartphone for you.

Best Smartphone Design: Huawei P20 Pro (Twilight Color)

This is going to end up as a controversial pick, but hear us out: while there were plenty of pretty smartphones released this year, none of them was as influential in smartphone design as the Twilight variant of the P20 Pro.

Think about it: it’s not just Huawei that has a shifting color option for their phones now. It’s one thing for a company to trickle down a color fabrication process to their own phones, it’s quite another for their competitors to get heaps of “inspiration” and release smartphones in a similar color swatch a few months later. While the P20 Pro’s hardware was quickly superseded by the Mate 20, its contribution to smartphone design is going to persist for years to come.

Most Innovative Smartphone: OPPO Find X

While the search for notch replacements continue, OPPO found a clever and elegant way to keep that ungainly notch out of sight: a motorized sliding mechanism. The mech keeps everything nice and tidy, leaving you with a large, 6.4-inch OLED Panoramic Arc Screen that’s a joy to use.

Best Selfie Smartphone: vivo V11

If you’re looking for the best selfie shooter in town, you’d be hard pressed to find better value than vivo’s V11. While it’s relatively more expensive than other phones in its category, the V11 packs plenty of tech under its pretty body, as well as the ability to take really great selfies. If you want a selfie phone that has a lot of extras on top of it, then get the vivo V11.

Mobile Shooter of the Year: Huawei Mate 20 Pro

Huawei’s newest flagship keeps poppin’ up in this list, for good reason: it’s honestly one of the best flagship phones we’ve used so far this year. We’ve already detailed why the triple camera arrangement on the Mate 20 Pro is the best we’ve seen on a phone, so we’re going to keep it short: if mobile photography is your thing, then the Mate 20 Pro is the smartphone you should pick up during the holidays.

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