Top 10 fan favorite phones of H1 2018

Ro, 01 July 2018

Mid-range phones are becoming increasingly popular for the last couple of years and it shows in our statistics. For the first half of 2018, five out of ten phones in our top 10 favorite smartphones are affordable devices. High-value offers have always generated a lot of sales, but they are now starting to earn the love of a lot of people, which is a whole different level.

Interestingly, Xiaomi seems to be dominating the table with four handsets, three of which are budget-oriented. As expected, the Redmi Note 5 Pro is one of them due to its outstanding value. For about €200, you get big screen, SD636 chipset, dual camera setup on the back and a generous 4,000 mAh battery.

The second place is taken by the HMD Global's upper-mid-range smartphone, the Nokia 7 plus featuring big screen, capable Snapdragon 660 and a big 3,800 mAh battery. And like every new Nokia out there, it runs stock Android. It seems that there's plenty of appreciation for that formula.

The list can't be complete without Samsung's latest flagship, the Galaxy S9+. It occupies the fourth place in our ranking while topping off the other flagships with just a few votes more than the affordable OnePlus 6.

Next down the line is Huawei's P20 Pro and it's easy to see why. It packs an amazing triple camera setup on the back capable of capturing impressive images even in challenging conditions. That appears to be enough to get ahead of Samsung's smaller flagship, the Galaxy S9.

The seventh, eighth and ninth position are all occupied by Xiaomi phones with only one being a flagship. In fact, the Mi 8 has the exact same number of favorites as the Mi A2 (Mi 6X) at the time of writing. But since the Mi 8 is a fairly new addition to the company's lineup, it will surely gain traction throughout 2018. Then again, the Mi A2 variant with vanilla Android still awaits global release and could easily win over some die-hard stock Android fans.

A close ninth position goes to the original Redmi Note 5, which is one of the top selling phones in India due to its ridiculously low price. The only device that comes close to Redmi Note 5's competitive pricing in the country is Oppo's Realme 1.

And the last place here goes to Nokia 6.1, which is hardly surprising given its predecessor's popularity. It was announced back in January but was released about three months later in April. It's a compact device, by today's standards and has more than decent hardware operating under Android One (8.1 Oreo).