The best sub-$1,000 smartphones

HOW IS IT that smartphones are getting more expensive? We thought Apple was taking the mickey when it came out with the iPhone X in 2017, which had a top-of-the-range model that came close to the two-thousand-dollar mark. But it went even further the following year with the 512GB iPhone XS Max, which ripped past the $2k ceiling without even blushing. Other vendors, like Samsung, Huawei and Google, have followed suit with high-priced handsets, and with 5G smartphones now trickling out and foldable-screen phones on the horizon, it doesn’t look like the pricing pain is going to let up any time soon.

So what does that mean for the rest of us who can’t afford several thousands of dollars every two years for a new smartphone? The good news is that we’re not relegated to shopping for smartphones at the supermarket or post office. While flagship phones are continuing to hold our bank accounts to ransom, vendors are recognising that many end users are holding onto phones for longer. As a result, they’re shifting focus to the mid-range of the market and producing high-quality handsets that either have last year’s technology (which is still typically more powerful than the average user knows what to do with) or using current tech but stripping back nice-to-haves like higher display resolutions, wireless charging, and waterproofing.

Typically, the great dividers are the quality of the display and the camera. At the sub-$1,000 price range, these will both be better than what you’re used to if you’re coming from a two- or three-year-old smartphone, but some smartphones are markedly better than others within the same price range.

BlackBerry KEY2 LE

NOT YOUR FATHER’S BLACKBERRY.

THERE WAS A time when BlackBerrys were the “it” phone among celebrities and business people – but those days are long behind us. The