I've been seeing a lot of budget phones recently that claim to offer you the world they make such bold claims about their amazing screens and their amazing cameras and their amazing battery and how the specs are absolutely ludicrous that they really make you wonder if all of this was actually true then why would anyone ever spend more than the $3 to $400 that they cost and are Flagship phones basically a scam so let's find out this is the top of the line almost maxed out Samsung Galaxy s23 Ultra which I bought for $1,379 and then this is I think the best spec affordable phone that's ever existed the $349 xiaomi redmi note 13 Pro Plus yeah I could buy four of these phones for the price it would cost to buy one of these so let's properly test every aspect of both phones to see how close or far the experience actually is so as far as the unboxing goes it's not a question of how close the redmi can get to the Samsung it's really how close the Samsung can get to the redmi the answer to which is not very close this note 13 Pro Plus it comes with a matte black case included a USBC cable and then a I'm not even joking 120 W fast charger Samsung literally just comes with a cable so there's already additional cost that you're going to have to pay out and even when you spend that money you're still not going to get close to the charging speed of the redmi but more on that later let's start with the build you would expect Flagship phones to get you higher quality materials right and in a way that is the case the s23 ultra comes with the very latest Gorilla Glass victus 2 the redmi comes with the prior generation Gorilla Glass victus 1 which just requires a little bit less Force to damage the rim going around the Samsung is armor aluminium which is a bit tougher than the more standard aluminium that you get on the redmi but really that's it will 99% of people be able to tell any perceptible difference in quality I don't think so there's not a single bit of flexing or creaking on the xiaomi the vegan leather on the back to me feels just as high quality as the glass on the Samsung and it passes the scratch test I've rubbed Keys against it cards against it phones against it and it doesn't really pick up any wear and tear these buttons on the side they're so they're really quiet to press and just generally the phone is way more comfy it's got soft rounded Corners that don't dig into your hands like Samsung's sharp ones and it's almost 15% lighter which is light enough to feel liberating when you're coming from this to this but not light enough to feel cheap and yeah Flagship phones do tend to have ip68 water resistance but so does the redmi so at 25% of the price I would genuinely say the build and design you're getting is 95% as good which is a very strong start and then you turn the screens on and you have to full-on check yourself because this is where you would assume the difference would be immediately obvious but the redmi has not just a passable screen or even a good screen this is nearly as good as you can get both phones have a 120 HZ Max refresh rate both are OLED panels which keeps the contrast levels high and both have basically infinite viewing angles Samsung has a very slight blue tinge as you rotate and xiaomi has a very slight yellow tinge but barely noticeable on either now Samsung's display is a better display like it's got the ability to be both High higher resolution and brighter but it's also a really good example of how nowadays the Baseline is so good that you probably either won't notice the difference or you'll actually think the xiaomi looks better for example in terms of resolution the Samsung has a 1440 by 3088 display which is 4.4 million pixels compared to xia's Max of 1220 by 2712 which is 3.3 million pixels but here's the thing Samsung knowing how Niche the need for that many pixels is actually ships the phone set to 2316 by 1080 which is just 2.5 million so while it can be sharper the setting that it comes with the one they recommend and therefore what most people are going to use it with is actually less sharp exact same thing for brightness while Samsung is capable of going brighter that extra brightness is locked behind a separate setting that most people probably won't enable since it specifically warns you of the loss of battery if you do and assuming you don't the redmi note is actually the brighter of the two screens the only meaningful advantage that the Samsung and any $1,000 plus phone screen will have is ltpo which is a more advanced more expensive bottom layer to the screen that lets it not just get its refresh rate super high but also dial it down really low like to 30 HZ when you're watching a video that's only refreshing 30 times per second or 10 HZ on a fairly static web page no budget phone has this Tech and so the lowest they're going to be able to go is 60 this doesn't actually have any impact on the screen quality and so four screens I'm going to say the redmi is again 95% of the Samsung Experience but it should come into play with battery as of now though if this phone continues at this rate of being 95% as good while also coming with everything you need in the box then honestly it is on track to completely embarrass the flagships of this year so then I thought what's likely to be the weakest link of a phone like this where they have most tried to cut Corners what about the signal so I started by doing a Wi-Fi speed test I went to three different locations and in location one they were basically on par location two Samsung was edging out to the xiaomi and then location 3 xiaomi edged out the Samsung meaning really there's nothing in it unless you have some Bonkers Wi-Fi high speeds and you're reaching the ceiling of what this phone is capable of so then I put a UK vone Sim into both phones went to three different spots again to test cellular speeds I started with my desk which sadly is a pretty low signal environment and honestly Samsung destroyed the red Mei it had two times the download speed almost three times the upload speed faster across the board in a medium signal environment though it's about a draw Samsung had higher download speeds and less latency but xiaomi's upload speed is clearly ahead and this was consistent with what I found in the high signal environment where xiaomi's upload speed completely runs away with it but Samsung has faster download and slightly less latency and the real life experiences of these phones quite closely match what I found in that test I found myself trusting the Samsung more when I get to those difficult hard-to-reach places like the inside of an airplane you will notice the redmi signal dropping off faster which is also not exactly surprising given that it has a less Advanced 5G modem and almost definitely fewer anten ey in the Samsung now because of this I was also expecting the Samsung to hit higher Max speeds when you get to a city but I guess the state of UK 5G right now is just not there this might be different for some parts of the US but largely speaking globally I don't think you'll be getting close to the potential Max speeds of either so I would say the redmi is 85% of the signal experience of the Samsung what about battery then for which I was fully expecting the redmi to get demolished I thought well past redmi phones haven't exactly had the best battery and also this is where the lack of an ltp screen is going to catch up with it well there's two sides to battery one is charging for which it's not close Samsung does have wireless charging which the redmi doesn't but it's tough to argue against that phone's 120 W charger that fully charges it in 20 minutes or in other words three times faster than the absolute fastest that the Samsung can possibly charge with a charger that you'd have to then buy separately but then the other side to this is how much life can you get out of that full charge and this is where it swings the other way both phones are matched on paper with 5,000 Mah batteries but I was running a side-by-side battery test of the two yesterday I just basically pulled up YouTube and left them to it and while the Samsung successfully reached the end of the day with 35% left the redmi was hanging on with 21 which is already a big difference but then there's three further things in the Samsung's favor one that if you look really closely at the spec sheet you'll notice that while both phones have the same capacity they're actually using different battery technologies Samsung with Leon xiaomi and most phones like it with Lee poly this is very easy to miss but essentially Lee poly is an older cheaper type of tech that while fast to charged generally depletes faster and importantly degrades faster in the long term which will likely be compounded by the second thing the heat generated in xiaomi's battery because of its Ultra fast charging so 3 years in the future the gap between these phones might be twice as big and then three that the Samsung wastes less battery while on standby the fact that it has a top-of-the-line Snapdragon chip means that yes its max power consumption will be higher when it's pushed but it's also smarter than the mid-range ship in the redmi so it knows how to consume less power when it's not being pushed as for how close that makes this battery category well it depends how you use your phone I know people who constantly top up throughout the day in which case you would wait the redmi's fast charging more heavily me personally I just want to charge my phone once overnight and then just trust that it's going to last both during the day and then also in the long term so for my uses the redmi's battery experience is a decent 25% behind what the Samsung is offering and if you're enjoying this video then a sub to the channel would be Sam in terms of software then I was surprised by this affordable phone xiaomi especially has a bit of reputation with their cheaper phones for tons of ads and tons of bloatware that's a big part of how their phones historically have been so affordable with this I've had neither of those two things now whether that's because this is the China launch software as opposed to the international launch software that it will come with or if xiaomi views this actually as a premium phone I don't know but the point is my software experience has been pretty great the phone is is running mui1 14 based on Android 13 so it's up to date all the animations in your day-to-day experience are smooth and beautiful and jiggly it's got tons of customization options everything from the way your phone responds to Notifications to how your fingerprint scanner reacts as you press your finger onto it and then the Samsung is running one UI based on Android 13 which I would describe as probably the more corporate of the two on the face of it but at the same time I do have a new found appreciation for the sheer extent of customizability you unlock with Samsung's goodlock app it's probably the best you can do on Android without installing custom firmware I mean the actual software skin that you're going to get will depend on which brand of budget and Flagship you end up going for but the key point I'm trying to make here is that the software package you get on the affordable phone is the real deal it's not missing anything where they diverge though is in the software support the way to think about it is this when you're selling a phone for $1,000 plus you have far more room within that budget to justify spending the time required to keep that experience high level and there's an incentive to cuz anyone buying your $1,000 plus Flagship they are immediately one of your most valuable customers so keep them happy and invested and they'll keep spending on your services and your ecosystem products and your next Flagship phones so while with most companies you can expect 3 to five full years of updates after launch on their flagships on the budget end of the spectrum that's much more likely to be 2 years of updates and you'll get those updates slower because you're considered a lower priority by that company now this is important but I also wouldn't overweight it it's not like the moment an Android version comes out that you're not getting your phone becomes garbage no your battery degradation especially here is much more likely to end up being the reason you switch than a lack of updates is so I would say the software experience of the redmi is again around that 85% Mark compared to the very best but do you know what's not 85% as good the performance all right so spec-wise the s23 ultra here has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip and by default it would have 8 gigs of RAM but I bought the upgraded version with 12 gigs of RAM to match the 12 that come by default in the redmi and then this redmi as well as the beefy 12 GB of RAM is powered by the dimensity 7200 Ultra chip which sounds amazing right the chip actually has Ultra in its name so it's got to be top level well not really in a very literal sense if we run a geekbench benchmark the CPU on the flagship is about two times the performance of this phone and the GPU is about 3 times it's an order of magnitude more powerful on paper but how much do you really feel that day-to-day well when you're opening apps Samsung is pretty significantly more responsive probably partly the chipset and partly also the faster storage you get it just feels like it's ready to load things at all times playing games there's a big difference too like just look at how much nicer this game looks on the Samsung it's running at a higher resolution it's running at a higher frame rate and there are so many more effects on screen than the xiaomi can handle xiaomi has a few more stutters when you do something the phone isn't expecting you to do and you'll just generally notice it being sluggish when you're trying to do things that are considered Pro user tasks like zooming in and out of a super high res photo so for me in my uses there is a very clear speed Gap I'd say the red me is only 50% of the Samsung Experience but it does also depend on who's using it if you're sticking to the basics if you're looking for a phone to make calls to browse the internet to take some nice photos and then edit those photos for social media then you're not going to come across the situations in which the differences are really noticeable so you'll find it closer to 75% 80% of the flagship EXP experience and we should talk about photos cuz cameras are where tech companies seem to be spending the majority of their effort and spare budget but when you don't have spare budget how much are you giving up well funnily enough both of these phones have a 200 megap Main camera the Samsung's is a better 200 megapixel camera but not by as much as you might think like this is a 200 megapixel shot on each Samsung is a bit less fuzzy it's sharper but only really because more sharpening has been applied you could actually argue both ways which is actually the better a photo I've taken a lot of side by sides here and when you're using the redmi right the difference between the two phones is really not what you think it should be in a way it's just a cool time to be alive where an affordable phone can do this and I was pretty shocked to see that at night using the main camera the Gap is even smaller sometimes actually tipping the other way where I would say this $349 phone has taken a better photo than this $379 phone now that shouldn't be the main takeaway here but the point I'm trying to make is that the hardware is good enough here but if you learn how to use it well to play to its strengths and skirt its weaknesses the ceiling of what you can achieve is still super high that said there are a whole slew of reasons why it's much easier to get a great photo on a flagship for starters you'll get a proper Hardware focusing system like the Samsung for example has a laser that just helps it lock onto things so while sometimes when you get into lower light this phone has to kind of hunt for Focus you don't need to worry here and actually all the cameras on Flagship phones they tend to be able to autofocus which means you can use your ultrawide camera to double as a macro camera for close-ups instead of building an entirely separate camera on budget phones just for macro that will also happen to be much worse quality the software processing on Samsung is more sophisticated it understands faces and how to sharpen them which is especially apparent when you're taking selfies since that tends to be the focal point its portrait mode blur effect is more realistic to my eyes and the zoom I mean Samsung has both a three times and a 10 times zoom lens affordable phones nowadays they tend to have nothing so they will get obliterated oh yeah and if you ever want to properly expose a less good camera try video cuz video is hard stabilization matters much more with it and it's also one of the first things that skimped on to save costs video requires more Hardware power to apply effects like noise reduction in real time and it'll also be incredibly obvious with video when the focus dips even if it's for a second so in terms of the overall camera experience I would say the redmi is again 50% of what the Samsung is it gets the single most important thing right having a strong main camera that can capture great detail in all lighting but loses just about every other luxury apart from that as well as the USB 3.2 Port that you tend to get on expensive phones which lets you offload all of that footage you take very quickly and together all of this does add up to an experience that feels cheaper so where does that leave us well in most categories this phone is a stark reminder of the diminishing returns that you can get when you spend more on a phone it's actually wild but for 25% of the price you can get something that very often feels like 80 to 90% of the phone there are not many times in the tech world where I can say I've experienced that and it's true for a lot of the more General quality of life things too like the speakers Samsung's a bit clearer and a bit louder but just a bit Samsung's Inc screen fingerprint scanner is higher quality and its haptic motor is more expensive but in Practical use you'll notice it to be a little better the only outright thing that the Samsung has that this straight up doesn't is the S Pen but that's more specific to the company as opposed to something that you just tend to get with flagships so I would think of this redmi as a surface level Flagship it's a flagship looking phone that I'd even go as far as to say functions and feels like a flagship until you try and be a power user with it where you will start to feel a more real compromise in power battery life and camera versus a real one so to answer our original question there is a time and a place for more expensive phones and it's when you need more of those 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