Best premium all-rounders 2023 - buyer’s guide

The Motorola Edge 40's price may have you raising your eyebrows at first glance - €500-600 sounds like a lot for a midranger, and side-by-side comparisons with rivals often end with the Moto losing the price battle. But it's more nuanced than that since the Edge 40 offers a feature set and performance quite unlike the rest, and it's possibly worth the premium. And for that it has occupied our premium all-rounder top spot.

The chipset is among the most potent options on this side of a truly flagship SoC and the Edge 40 extracts excellent results from it both in terms of performance and stability. The Moto is also no slouch when it comes to battery level, and the class-leading charging speed doesn't hurt either. The smoother-than-most 144Hz display is also among the brightest in the class, and the stereo speakers are both loud and easy on the ear.

The camera system isn't too bad either, with the bright aperture on the main unit making for solid low-light results and nicely out-of-focus backgrounds. The ultrawide is... good enough, and the selfies are pretty nice too. The UI offers a very appealing marriage of simple stock look and added in-house functionality, including the PC-like Ready For feature - Samsung midragers don't do DeX.

All of this comes in a hard-to-find lightweight package that is dust and water-resistant - more so than the bulk of its competitors. Its soft back is nicely grippy too, perhaps too much so for its own good - we found it all too easy to accumulate dirt and grime, which is among the few complaints we have about the phone.

The lack of a zoom camera is perhaps only half a problem - the main camera does okay for 2x shots, and we wouldn't have expected more reach in this segment anyway. The less-than-perfect video stabilization irks us a bit more, perhaps, since most others have it dialed in pretty well. And if we label that a software issue, we have another one of those to mention - a two-year OS update policy sounds like too little.

Still, the Motorola Edge 40 offers a very well-rounded smartphone experience that's in many ways better than its competitors, and we think it's worth adding to your shortlist.

The Pixel 7 is definitely one of the best options in the €600-700 range, especially when considering camera quality. It has a flagship-worthy performance, although a bit lower than you'd expect; it's one of the best phones for mobile photography, if not the best-in-class, and it has bright OLED, great-sounding stereo speakers, long battery life (with the size category in mind) and exceptional software ensuring timely updates and smart features.

Sadly, there are a few caveats to consider here. There's no true telephoto camera; the display is limited to 90Hz; some of the most advanced software features are region-dependent, and the charging solution is just way too outdated for a 2022 flagship release.

But we do recommend it- at that price, the Pixel 7 offers a unique combination of ultra-premium camera experience, long battery life and AI-based features that make it the smartest kid on the block.

The €700 Xiaomi 12T Pro is an incredibly well-rounded device. It has many bells and whistles to entice prospective buyers and hits particularly hard in a few key areas. The 6.67-inch, 120Hz, 12-bit CrystalRes AMOLED display is nothing short of gorgeous in person. It delivers great brightness and contrast, perfect colors with lots of customizability and even has HD10+ and Dolby Vision certification to take full advantage of that 12-bit color depth. The excellent stereo speaker setup, with Harman Kardon, tuning and Dolby Atmos tech and equalizers, completes the awesome multimedia experience on the Xiaomi 12T Pro.

Xiaomi also left no room for compromise in the performance department, where the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is powering the show - Qualcomm's latest and greatest. Thanks to it, the Xiaomi 12T Pro chewed through every task we threw at it, including several AAA games, happily rendering past 60fps when available.

The 5,000 mAh battery offers solid battery life and is also extremely quick to charge, thanks to Xiaomi's regretfully proprietary but unquestionably awesome 120W HyperCharge tech. And we can't forget to mention the all-around excellent camera setup on the 12T Pro, which performs masterfully both in good and low-light conditions.

Honestly, it's hard to find any serious omissions or faults with the Xiaomi 12T Pro. A proper ingress protection rating would have been great, and so would wireless charging. The same goes for a telephoto camera and perhaps some expandable storage. There is no perfect phone out there, particularly not without affecting its price point substantially. We are definitely giving the Xiaomi 12T Pro a hearty recommendation – it is almost perfect, but it does come on a perfect price.

The OnePlus 11 is a perfect fit to the premium all-rounders category as it has an excellent LTPO3 OLED screen, the newest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 under the hood, long battery life, blazing-fast charging, a nice set of stereo speakers and the full set of cameras, including a nice 2x zoom unit. Surely, 2x zoom doesn't really cut it in 2023, but it's a rare find in this price bracket.

In short, for around €800, the handset delivers pretty much everything you'd need from a high-end phone, except wireless charging. That's where the 11 comes short. The state of the software is also a bit of a let down, especially for OnePlus die-hard fans. OxygenOS is not the one we remember and it's replaced by Oppo's ColorOS, despite what the marketing says.

As the price settles with time, the OnePlus 11 will become even more desirable, especially in the context of rising smartphone prices in 2023.

The Find X5 Pro continues a lineage of compelling Oppos in the high-end segment. The Find X5 Pro model looks like the Find X3 Pro, but has lost the unique microscope camera. Still, it offers excellent hardware and performance where it matters.

The only downside is that the telephoto camera only offers 2x zoom but you get excellent photo and video quality with special features like the custom MariSilicon X image chip and the 5-axis OIS.

Outside this concern, the Oppo Find X5 Pro delivers across the board – it has a great OLED, the latest and fastest hardware, a large battery with good endurance and incredibly fast wired and wireless charging. And, of course, the high-end ceramic back which you can carry around without fear of scratches.

The Galaxy Z Flip went from a fashion-centric device to a full-blown flagship in just a couple of generations. The Flip4 is what the Flip3 should have been from the get-go - a powerful foldable smartphone with excellent camera performance, decent battery life and charging speed.

And indeed, we can say a lot of positive things about the new Z Flip4 - it has a superb water-proofed design that will hit the nostalgia notes across many users. It's a compact flip phone, one that clicks simply great.

The Z Flip4 offers an excellent AMOLED screen, good battery life, good charging speed, and the speakers are nice. It also packs the most powerful Android chip to date, though the thermals lead to throttling. And the camera performance is superb across the board, photo and video, day and night.

We consider the Flip4 as the most affordable foldable smartphone of the current generation, and for its €730 price, it delivers an outstanding set of features..

It's not an ideal smartphone - it takes a while to get used to its design and form factor. Then you need to live with the crease and the plastic screen protector over the screen. Dust gets in various places, too. But we are recommending it to people who'd like to own a unique phone, small, and yet powerful and capable; to users that will take it with all of its good and not so good aspects

The Motorola Razr 40 Ultra runs on flagship hardware, asking for flagship money. Both displays are great, and we like the foldable screen implementation. They are vivid and bright enough, while the external screen offers almost full functionality. The chipset may not be the most recent one, but it's capable of running everything you find on Play Store. However, there are several pitfalls that are hard to ignore, even in the context of a foldable device.

The stills and videos are cropped when the device is closed, the charging speed is unimpressive, and the battery life is about average. Sustained performance may also be an issue for some of you who like to play demanding games from time to time. And although powerful enough, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 isn't as energy-efficient as its successor, the SD8 Gen 2. A flip phone with such a small battery would have benefitted from the extra hardware efficiency gains.

All in all, the Razr 40 Ultra marks a big improvement over its predecessor. It's competitive in the clamshell foldable category, and its asking price may get you any 2023 flagship smartphone with fast charging, longer battery life and excellent camera performance. That's the price - both literally and metaphorically - for getting this exclusive form factor and iconic name.

The Zenfone 9 is a great little flagship priced at €800. It has superb water-resistant build and eye-catching design. The large circles on the back aren't just for show, and camera performance is respectable with autofocus across all lenses and a particularly impressive video stabilization capability. The latest top-end Qualcomm chipset delivers excellent performance and is also decently efficient, which results in class-leading longevity when coupled with the YoY increase in battery capacity. The audio department isn't neglected either, and the loud and clear speakers and headphone jack... speak for themselves.

Setting out to make a proper flagship in a tiny body, Asus did a lot of things right with the Zenfone 9, with only minimal compromise. If we have to point out its missteps, those will include the lack of wireless charging (all the bar phones above have it, and so does the Flip) and the missing telephoto camera. These are both more or less understandable omissions, given how both take up valuable space. The rather slow Night mode implementation had to be mentioned, but it's more of a niggle in the absence of other flaws and one that could potentially be fixed in an update.

The Find N2 Flip is Oppo's first global foldable and as such is a direct competitor to the Galaxy Z Flip4, so it has some big shoes to fill.

It's quick to impress with the smoothest crease we've fondled on a display that, outside of its bendiness, is as great as the best in the field. The ability to stay open at arbitrary angles enables use cases that only the Galaxy clamshell can match. And the large cover screen is superior to all competitors' offerings when it comes to camera applications. The battery life is one of Find N2 Flip's strongest suits too, particularly in screen-on tasks, which is how we tend to use our phones.

It also comes with a thoroughly capable primary camera and internal selfie unit, but that's offset by a few quirks. First, the ultrawide camera's quality is more fitting for a lower-midrange phone. Then there are some illogical image quality differences depending on which screen you use for UI. And the real kicker has to be the lack of 4K recording with the outer screen on. We generally like the camera experience, but the opportunity for overall camera superiority was missed.

You could say that last bit about the cover screen too, which does save you a lot of unfoldings, but still feels underutilized. Other point deductions in the Find's scorecard include the lack of wireless charging and an IP rating - sure, they can only be found on one competitor, but that's still one competitor that has them, and the Oppo doesn't.

In the end, the Find N2 Flip is a solid package overall. It has a superior main camera and longer battery life than the Galaxy Z Flip4, but it's not universally the better phone of the two, even if only a few missteps stop it short of true greatness.