CES 2022 was not a festival of pricey flagship debuts. But surprisingly, it was the value-centric phones appearing at the show that really made a mark.
CES 2022 was surprisingly not a total disaster, despite a lot of big names pulling out of the glitzy show and the threat of a pandemic looming. We got a glimpse of a color-changing car, oddly cute robot, tablets that put a gaming laptop to shame, crazy-fast silicon from Intel, and a spaceship-like router with motorized antennae, among other marvels. But CES 2022 was also about phones. Actually, great phones, which offer capable hardware without nuking your wallet. Yes, flagships with outrageous amounts of RAM and obscenely high megapixel cameras were missed, but CES 2022 was the show of value-centric phones. The kind of phones that sell by bucket loads without getting a flashy launch event and outlandish claims. Samsung, TCL, and Nokia were the brands that delivered such phones, and they will soon hit on shelves without an eye-watering price attached to them. Here are a few that stood out the most. Technically, the OnePlus 10 Pro didn’t make a public appearance at CES 2022. But OnePlus has drip-fed enough details that we now know almost everything about the phone, from its divisive design to its top-tier internals. The specs are your usual 2022 flagship ingredients — Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 system on a chip, a 120Hz OLED display, and a large battery. Some notable aspects include support for 80-watt fast charging and 50W wireless charging, both under Oppo branding now. The camera setup (48-megapixel main + 50MP ultrawide + 8MP) is unchanged, but they now come armed with a few imaging tricks. The ultrawide camera now covers a 150-degree field of view, while a new RAW Plus mode will deliver the magic that the new iPhones are serving with the Apple ProRAW format. A manual video capture mode has been added, while the Hasselblad mode works across all three rear cameras now with 10-bit color capture. It’s quite evident that the focus is more on cameras and practical features that actually make a difference.
