And the Smartphone of the Year 2019 Award Goes to…

A Roundup of the Year:

The year 2019 has slowly given way to 2020 and it marked the end of a decade with the beginning of an another one. If you are a technology love, specifically a smartphone lover, the year 2019 was no less than a blast.

It saw every single element from budget smartphones like Realme C2 which are popular still after 7 months of their launch to flagships like iPhone 11 Pro Max which had camera that grabbed a lot of headlines.

Besides the smartphones, there were a number of smartphone chipset launched in the year. While on one hand it saw smartphone chipsets like MediaTek Helio P65, on the other, you saw the likes of Snapdragon 865 coming up to power the smartphones.

No wonder, you saw a lot of them, the year 2019 could be touted as the year of 5G as this year saw a lot of 5G chipsets coming up in the market.

Apart from Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ and Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, HiSilicon came up with Kirin 990 in September 2019 to offer the real 5G power.

MediaTek too did not stay back and gave a tough competition to the brands with its new MediaTek Dimensity 1000 5G chipset launched in the last week of November.

If you believe the AnTuTu scores, MediaTek Dimensity 1000 chipset surpassed even Snapdragon 855+ processor and Kirin 990. So you could say that MediaTek and Snapdragon are having a tough fight with MediaTek Dimensity 1000 chipset on one side and Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor on the other.

Further, MediaTek is also planning to launch Dimensity 800 chipset in 2020 which is presumed to be a mid-range 5G chipset and Helio G70, a budget gaming chipset.

However, the highlight for the smartphone industry was MediaTek Helio G90T octa-core processor which was lunched in July 2019 and grabbed the most of headlines till the end of the year.

While the chipset was launched, Xiaomi was the first one to announce a smartphone with the processor and what resulted from it was Redmi Note 8 pro — the smartphone which further became the highlight of the smartphones launched in the year.

The Award for the Best Smartphone:

Most of the techies, smartphone reviewers and columnists started a trend to offer awards to the highest performing smartphones and guess what, Redmi Note 8 Pro made it to almost every smartphone award nomination.

In fact, this smartphone powered by MediaTek processor went to be the best smartphone launched in 2019, topping the selling chart in November 2019 across the world.

MediaTek Helio G90T is a gaming-specific processor so Redmi Note 8 Pro ought to be a gaming smartphone.

The major competition to the processor and the smartphone was Snapdragon 730G — the gaming processor by Qualcomm. However, MediaTek Helio G90T proved to be better than even Snapdragon 730G in terms of the AnTuTu scores and this grabbed the attention of the people.

What came as a bonus was the pocket-friendly price of MediaTek processor. The smartphone with the MediaTek gaming chipset started at just 14,999 in India and the smartphone had 6GB RAM with 64GB of internal storage.

As compared to this, the smartphones with Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G were priced above 20k. No doubt, the budget-friendly cost and the power of the smartphone attracted the people all over the world and they found it really interesting.

Though, Realme came up with Realme X2 which had Snapdragon 730G starting at just 18k in India, it was all too late and people had already bought the Redmi smartphone.

But even if you compare the smartphones, Redmi Note 8 Pro still stands a far better performer and thus, it is deemed to be the ‘Smartphone of the year’, with MediaTek Helio G90T being the smartphone processor of the year.

The News Against Redmi Note 8 Pro:

Though Redmi Note 8 Pro has been a hit smartphone of the season, it faced the ‘heat of heating’ initially. And for those of you who do not know about this, before the smartphone was launched, some YouTube videos demonstrated how this smartphone reached almost 50-degrees in heat while gaming.

There were a number of such videos and people were really startled with Xiaomi facing a huge setback due to this.

However, this was all a myth or a misconception of the people as the Indian version of Redmi Note 8 Pro is quite normal and does not face any extra heating.

When the smartphone hit the market and people actually used it themselves, they were, in fact, quite happy with the kind of performance it delivered.

So, heating and all was just a marketing hoax and the Redmi gaming smartphone with Helio G90T processor was considered good enough.

Some of the people even criticized the camera of the smartphone.

Yes, in spite of having a 64MP + 8MP + 2MP + 2MP quad rear camera with dual LED flash, the smartphone did not appear too effective to some. They were of the impression that Redmi Note 8 Pro offered good images only in the natural light and not in dark.

However, even this problem of the people was solved when they were able to download Google Camera which offered powerful images and videos.

The End Result:

Even when Redmi Note 8 Pro faced much of negative publicity just before its launch, there wasn’t any significant loss to its reputation. And this could be deduced from the fact that Redmi became the number 1 selling smartphone for the month of November, all across the world.

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So the smartphone of the year award goes to none other than Redmi Note 8 Pro which managed to keep lure people and earn market even after facing so much criticism online.

If you have any views about it or you think any other smartphone was better, you can surely hit the comment section.