Neither of these phones will win any spec sheet battles, but when looking at them, just keep whispering ‚under AU$400‘ to yourself.
If you are looking to purchase a phone in Australia for under AU$400, you are entering a very competitive space. Phone makers try to balance specs against cost, market share against returns, and sometimes a handset from the mid-tier might appear on special at this level. Two phones doing this are the TCL 20L+ and Vivo Y52 5G. The TCL 20L+ is a phone approaching 7 inches with a Snapdragon 662,6GB of memory,256GB of storage expandable via micro SD, four rear cameras, and 5,000mAh battery. It’s hardly a head-turner, in fact, it sounds quite standard and boring. At similar levels of excitement is the Vivo Y52 5G, which is a 6.5-inch phone with a Dimensity 700 chip,4GB of memory,128GB of storage expandable via micro SD, three rear cameras, and 5,000mAh battery. As the name suggests, the Y52 has 5G connectivity, and the TCL phone does not. If that is all you care about, and I’m not sure why you would before millimetre wave spectrum is available, then it is an easy decision to make between these phones. However in my testing, I couldn’t get a reliable 5G signal, but that could simply be an issue with the towers around me during lockdown, but a Pixel 5 was able to get a signal reliably. For everyone else, it’s about weighing up the tradeoffs made. The 20L+ has double the storage at 256GB and more memory, which sounds good, but the Y52 uses a Dimensity 700 that positively smokes the Snapdragon 662 inside the 20L+.
