£449 is now "midrange"?
As a few other people have noted, the high-end of the phone market has crept up, but I'm still struggling to see £449 as a mid-range value.
I've just fired up Carphone warehouse's website and arbitrarily picked a couple of a handsets at the £200 price range to compare against the Reno 2 - the Huawei Mate 20 Lite and the Samsung Galaxy A20E.
At least on paper, the Reno 2 does a fair job of spanking the A20E, but it doesn't really offer much more than the Mate 20 Lite - more ram (8gb vs 4gb), a higher resolution rear camera (48mp vs 20mp)[*] and a slightly newer version of Android out the box.
Certainly, I'd be hard pushed to justify spending another £250 based on the specs alone.
Admittedly, I did buy a Samsung S10 Pro when it was released, partly because I was at contract end and partly because I use the camera enough to justify trying to get the best available bit of kit at the time. Sadly, it also made me realise that (slight camera tech improvements aside) there really wasn't any significant difference between the S10 Pro and the LG V30 it was replacing, despite the fact that the former was twice as expensive as the latter.
It's all incremental hair-splitting at this point. As such, I'm pretty much out of the phone arms-race; as and when this beast dies, I'll just pick something up secondhand for a fraction of the original price!
[*] Though as ever, higher resolution doesn't necessarily mean higher quality; as the sensor density increases, the amount of light hitting each receptor decreases...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
