Guide
The editorial team’s favourite smartphones – July 2025 edition
by Jan Johannsen
Smartphone buying advice: How to find the right mobile for you
3.11.2020
Translation: machine translated
The choice is huge, the demands are high: but finding a new smartphone doesn't have to be a Sisyphean task. My tips will help you find the right mobile for you.
Storage: having is better than needing
Apps, photos or streaming content downloaded for offline use require storage space. But how much memory should a smartphone have as a minimum? My experience: 64 GB is the absolute minimum. 128 gigabytes is better. External memory cards are now better. Nevertheless, they are not as convenient to use. So I wouldn't plan with that.
Up-to-date software is important
I don't want to pass judgement here on whether Android or iOS is better. The operating systems from Google and Apple both have advantages and disadvantages. One advantage of iOS is that Apple reliably delivers software updates for five years. This means that with the iPhone, you don't have to worry as much about keeping the software up to date.
Google promises five years of updates for its latest Pixel smartphones. Other manufacturers have also recently significantly extended the periods for software updates - at least for the top models. Huawei is a special case due to the US boycott and forced renunciation of Google services: the Chinese manufacturer is currently working with its own solutions and Android. With HarmonyOS, Huawei's own operating system could be used on its smartphones.
Ports for power and music
Display resolution and refresh rates
Camera: megapixels don't matter
You can't tell whether a smartphone camera is good just by looking at the data sheet. The number of megapixels is not a suitable quality criterion. 12 or 108 megapixels - it doesn't matter! Much more important is the software and what it does with the images. For this, I can only refer you to our tests.
Only if a wide-angle or telephoto lens is important to you, you can then narrow down the selection. Small restriction: These secondary lenses only achieve the image quality of the main camera on a few smartphones.
Battery and fast charging technologies
The typical smartphone lasts a day on a single charge. For larger batteries and longer runtimes in your smartphone, you either have to sacrifice functions or live with the fact that the smartphone is larger than others. The big leaps in battery technology are yet to come.
There is therefore only one rough guideline: the battery of your new smartphone should have a capacity of at least 3000 mAh. Exceptions also prove this rule: Apple has managed to make the interaction between hardware and software in its iPhones so efficient that they achieve similar battery life to Android models with smaller batteries.
As progress with the batteries themselves is slow, smartphone manufacturers have discovered fast-charging technologies for themselves. In other words, if the battery doesn't last forever, charging should at least be quick. It is therefore worth buying a smartphone with a fast charging function.
Hardware
Or to put it another way: with a cheap smartphone, you quickly get annoyed by hardware that is too slow. In the mid-range you get the best value for money and with the top devices you spend a relatively large amount of money for the extra computing power.
NFC for mobile payment
GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are standard features of smartphones. However, "Near Field Communication", or NFC for short, is not. Again, it is the low-cost models where manufacturers try to reduce costs by not using an NFC chip. However, NFC now has an important function. This technology is used to process mobile payments with your smartphone. In other words, if you want to use Apple Pay, Google Pay and the like, your smartphone must have NFC.
5G is the standard
There is no way around 5G. In 2022, finding a 4G model among the new smartphones will be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
If I now feed these specifications - current Android version, at least 64 or 128 gigabytes of storage space, USB-C port - into our filters, the following lists of currently popular models in different price ranges emerge:
Android up to 200 euros / francs
Diese Auswahl weiter bearbeiten.
Android up to 400 euros / francs
Diese Auswahl weiter bearbeiten.
Up to 600 euros / francs
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without price limit
Diese Auswahl weiter bearbeiten.
If you are only interested in the iPhone, I can recommend this guide:
Jan Johannsen
Senior Editor
Jan.Johannsen@galaxus.deWhen I was but a young student, I'd sit in my friend's living room with all my classmates and play on his SuperNES. Since then I've had the opportunity to test out all the newest technology for you. I've done reviews at Curved, Computer Bild and Netzwelt, and have now arrived at Galaxus.de.
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