A solid smartphone is going to be an essential bit of kit for travelling. Space-saving, time-saving, fun-enabling and potentially life-saving. But how do you choose the ideal phone to take?
Criteria for choosing
We have travelled a fair amount with smartphones and have a pretty good idea what we are going to need. Our priorities are:
Dual sim: So we can keep our UK-based phone numbers for staying in touch, but enjoy the benefits of cheap local calls and data.
Battery life: So we can get through a couple of days of hardcore, off-grid adventure and still have enough juice to take photos and find our way home.
Good camera: Cameras on phones are more than adequate for taking beautiful pictures and videos for personal use.
Resilience: Ideally I want a phone that can shrug off rain, dirt, knocks and high temperatures and still deliver fast performance and great pictures over long periods. If you get caught in a mudslide, you want to be able to call help to you quickly!
RAM and storage: Whilst being able to store a lot of pictures is useful, I have found that higher RAM and storage tends to extend the shelf life of your phone, despite apps getting bigger and OS inflation.
Budget: Money is always a consideration. I don't want to feel like my phone is irreplaceable.
A phone delivering all of these features is the ideal. But this is quite a wide set of criteria, and some are more important than others. To make things easier, I am setting some specifics against each of the criteria.
Dual Sim
We will be returning to Europe every year or so, and use WhatsApp for a lot of communication (no to mention the number of apps that use our UK numbers for verification).
There are not a huge number of dual sims on the market, and this is a binary criteria. A phone is either dual sim or not. We think it is essential to get the benefits of local low cost data and calls, whilst retaining the benefits of our UK numbers.
Battery Life
The last thing you want is your battery dying halfway to nowhere. We'll be doing long travel days, and need sufficient juice. There are strategies for extending battery life: take a recharging powerbank, frugal power usage (especially reducing GPS usage on long trips), keeping the phone cool.
We have a couple of lightweight powerbanks that will do 2+ full recharges each, and are used to conserving energy.
A "shorthand" for battery life is the mAh rating of the battery. This is not everything, and reviews give you a good idea of how efficiently the phone uses that power storage. We are looking at circa 4,000 mAh or more. Ideally with a "quick recharge" feature so we can unbrick a dead phone in a tight spot.
Good Camera
I am not at all expert in cameras, and the tech seems to have moved on a LOT since I bought my HTC One M8! Key things for me are: has a good review, motion detection, and reasonable low-light shots. I'll be relying on reviews a lot for this information.
Resilience
Water resistance and a build that prevents grit getting into the device are very important for taking tech into the wilds. There is a fair degree of choice here and manufacturers explicitly state if water-resistance is available.
Protecting from bumps and knocks has always been a problem with full-screen phones. I'll solve this with protection covers and gel cases. Some models get specifically slated in reviews for being delicate, so I'll be avoiding these!
Having read around the subject, there is a limited choice to get performance at high temperatures and humidity, as most devices are built on relatively similar technology. But I think the answer to humidity is to go for water resistance, which will keep the moisture out of the phone. The answer to high temperatures is to keep the phone out of the sun (a bit lo-fi as a solution, but effective most of the time).
RAM & storage
I don't need heaps of apps on the phone, or vast amounts of data storage. Being able to hold a couple of hundred images and a couple of hours of hi-res videos is easily doable. Where RAM and storage really matters is the lifetime of the device. As operating systems and apps cater for the current benchmarks, I find my phone slows down year after year. So going for 4-8GB RAM and >64GB (ideally 128GB) storage means the phone remains viable for longer.
Budget
Longevity has more of an impact on the "cost" of the phone than the single purchase price. If it lasts twice as long then double the price is still the same cost per year. We'll have insurance so replacement will not be such a big issue.
I have noticed that top-range phones are more geared towards "civilised" living, if you see what I mean. I would characterise them as "being champagne resistant, not water resistant". They are more clunky to carry, not geared towards travel (except in Business Class), and less set up for long battery life.
Also worth considering on budget is that you don't want something that is so attractive that you find yourself a target. So we are not looking to spend a grand on a huge, highly attractive, expensive-looking phone.
Finding nirvana
I am holding off the purchase at the moment. Having reviewed a lot of the current offerings, I would have gone for the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, but it doesn't offer the dual sim. The Honor View 10 also looks good (see the review in the first link below) but could be improved with water resistance and better battery.
Going to hold off until a new batch of models is launched in November!
Sources
If you are looking for a bit of travel kit, my go-to source is usually this excellent blog, Too Many Adapters.
I am also following new releases on Tech Radar...
https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/new-product/mobile-phone/best-new-phones-3680100/
https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/test-centre/mobile-phone/dual-sim-phones-2018-3511526/
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