Summary
5 amazing phones.. Apple and a few firms that are part of the Android community have a monopoly on the smartphone industry in the United States. The majority of the top Android smartphones that we suggest are produced by OnePlus, Google, and Samsung. Although other companies, such as Motorola, are present in certain price ranges, none of them have been able to dominate the flagship market as well as this three has. However, there is a vast universe of cellphones available outside of North America, with so many attractive choices that it is difficult to narrow down to a few favorites. As a result, we’re providing a list of some of the best cellphones from other countries that we believe you should be able to get in the US.
Although importing these phones domestically may seem appealing due to their unique experience, keep in aware that there may be shipping and customs complications involved, and there is no assurance of complete network compatibility with your carrier. Now that we have cleared things out, let’s look at the devices that pampered people over the Atlantic.
The Xiaomi 14 series
The Ultras have an incredible island of cameras.
Manuel Vonau, our Google Editor, was quite pleased with the Xiaomi 13 Pro’s camera performance when he evaluated it the previous year. The collaboration between Xiaomi and Leica is paying off in a big way, both for the color science and for the fluidity of the camera software. The Xiaomi 14 Pro from this year has only made things better. GizmoChina’s side-by-side picture comparison reveals that the Xiaomi 14 series camera produces images with a more colorful appearance. When you zoom in, you can see that these photos are far more detailed than they were before.
That’s not all, however. There is a another, more expensive Xiaomi 14 model that seems to be a photographic beast. The Xiaomi 14 Ultra has several striking design aspects, like as the multi-tiered camera island that occupies a significant amount of the rear, as shown in the official image above. We just hope that the Xiaomi 14 Ultra’s picture quality matches the device’s visual swagger, since the last Ultra was a camera champion.
Oppo Find X7 Ultra
The kind of cutting-edge phone that we hope OnePlus produces
The fact that OnePlus and Oppo are essentially one company is not a secret. However, the Oppo Find X7 Ultra’s rear camera array outperforms both the recently released OnePlus 12 and the OnePlus Open, to the point that it makes us want for a OnePlus 12 Ultra. The Oppo phone shows off its enormous camera bulge, which has a quad-camera arrangement. In addition to a wide and ultrawide camera, it has two telephoto cameras, one with an optical zoom of up to 2.8x and the other with a zoom of up to 6x.
Because each of the four cameras has a 50MP sensor, there is no loss of resolution and the Hasselblad logo and color tuning are retained. Nirave Gondhia discovered the Oppo Find X7 Ultra to have a better camera phone than the OnePlus 12, despite ColorOS still being inferior to OxygenOS. Therefore, all this flamboyance is not in vain.
Open Fairphone 5
Replace, mend, and finish!
Repairability has become a huge term in the tech industry, somewhat less than AI, with firms like Apple offering to mail you cumbersome equipment so you can fix your phone at home. However, Fairphone has been handling this issue for a longer time and with more intelligence. Possibly the most repairable phone available is the Fairphone 5. Although it makes it simple for you to rapidly replace a dead battery, Fairphone went above and beyond.
Things like the speaker unit, the USB port, and even the camera module are simply replaceable by one person in a matter of minutes with a few basic tools. As a result, the phone is also more ecologically friendly since you aren’t throwing it away when anything fails. The phone has a strong reputation for its distinctive repair method, even if its internals may not be the best.
Vivo X100 Pro
putting the “Pro” (literally) in the camera
Vivo has partnered with Zeiss to co-brand its phone cameras, as is customary among smartphone manufacturers. But this specific collaboration also goes into hardware, as the business chose a coating that lessens lens flare for sharper images. The excellent color science of the X100 Pro is the result of collaboration between Vivo and Zeiss. The three back cameras on the phone provide consistent color reproduction while switching between them, which is a common complaint with multi-cam phones.
One of the few high-end phones using a high-end MediaTek CPU rather than a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is the Vivo X100 Pro. Not everyone is a fan of Vivo’s Funtouch OS, but even so, its performance for routine chores and even gaming is still satisfactory.
Honor Magic Version 2
It seems almost magical since it is so light.
Foldables sometimes have a bulky design since the two parts add to the total thickness, however the Honor Magic V2 does not have this issue. When folded, it only has a thickness of 9.9 millimeters and weighs about the same as a standard phone, making it very portable and simple to use. Even while the Magic V2’s folding design is intriguing in and of itself, you’ll be amazed when you first take it up and wonder whether it’s really foldable until you get acclimated to its thin profile.
In spite of its relatively small design, the phone makes no additional compromises. Its impressive specs list may match or surpass those of any high-end phone. It may have been a strong competitor to the present foldable market, but it doesn’t seem that it will be available in the US.
Past the Big Three
We often claim that, apart from a few minor changes, popular cellphones have become very static, with little to no innovation occurring annually. There’s still a lot of intriguing things going on, however, if you look past the three main Android phone manufacturers in the United States. There are now a ton of Ultra phones available in Asian and European regions that are competitive with the Galaxy S24 Ultra and the iPhone 15 Pro Max. One company wants to make foldables more widely available, while another longs to return to the good old days of self-swap batteries. We are enthusiastic about the future of Android phones because of the diversity that exists in the global smartphone market.
