Smartphone technology has progressively become more and more accessible, meaning the once exclusive flagship-only features have now trickled down to the high-end smartphone segment. So, if someone comes up to you flaunting a flagship phone and its smorgasbord of enticing features and blazing-fast performance, chances are, your high-end phone may be capable of the same. This year, high-end smartphones incorporated flagship-grade chipsets, premium hardware, and a plethora of features, making them a more “sensible” purchase in a price-conscious market like India. Holistically, they may not be as complete as the premium smartphones (for which we’ve got a separate category), but you wouldn’t be wrong in saying that these high-end smartphones are giving the premium ones a serious run for their money.
The winner of this category is one that performs exceedingly well in not just synthetic benchmarks but other aspects such as day-to-day usage, user interface, battery life, and display. As for the Digit Best Buy Award, it goes to the product in this category that offered the best value proposition.
The iQOO 9T is the most powerful smartphone you can get your hands on under ₹50K in 2022, period. Powered by the speedy Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC, this phone is blazing fast no matter what task you throw at it. In fact, it even beat out some of the phones in the premium segment in synthetic benchmarks. The phone is also capable of sustained performance despite strenuous loads. In the CPU Throttling Test, the phone throttled to only 80 per cent of its peak performance, which is good. Additionally, the phone’s performance in GPU benchmarks was also excellent. Simply speaking this is one of the most powerful phones in the market in 2022 and is an excellent choice for mobile gamers as well. The phone is lag and stutter-free when playing demanding games such as Call of Duty: Mobile and Genshin Impact. Additionally, the phone is equipped with a liquid cooling system that keeps heat in check even when it’s running intensive tasks. All of this combined with excellent battery life and a decent enough AMOLED display makes for a fantastic flagship-akin experience that you don’t have to spend big on. This level of performance at just ₹50K means that the iQOO 9T not only snags the Digit Zero1 Award win but also grabs the Best Buy Award for this category!
While the OnePlus 10T couldn’t surpass the iQOO 9T in terms of raw power despite being powered by the same chipset, what the phone does give you is a more rounded experience. The OnePlus 10T is no slouch when it comes to performance and can handle everything you throw at it including gaming, photo editing, video rendering, basic tasks, and more. Its battery life is slightly better than the iQOO 9T with the phone lasting over 15 hours in our 4K video loop test. The phone can also charge to full in merely 34 minutes. Another area where it is slightly ahead of the iQOO 9T is display brightness. We recorded a maximum brightness of 913 nits which is plenty bright in any kind of condition. Despite having these wins, the OnePlus 10T still falls short of the speedy performance offered by the iQOO 9T, which is why it is the runner-up in this category. However, it is still an excellent option to consider under ₹50K.
Housing the capable Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 SoC, the Xiaomi 11T Pro is a great choice in this segment if you don’t want to spend close to ₹50,000. For just over ₹35K, the Xiaomi 11T Pro impresses with its consistent and reliable performance when gaming, web browsing, multitasking, or more. The phone’s battery life is excellent as well and the bundled 120 W charger quickly powers the phone. With Xiaomi’s Game Turbo app, you can also optimise your phone to tweak swipe response, aim accuracy, and more. We actually tried this out and found a noticeable difference in our COD: Mobile gameplay, so this is a very capable phone that deserves to be taken note of in this category.
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