Best flagship phones 2022 - buyer’s guide

The Galaxy Z Fold4 is our current top pick for the best flagship for many reasons. It is among the view smartphones right now that has the wow factor and unique looks. Sure, there are other foldables, but the Fold is the only one that’s available everywhere and is jam-packed with features.

The Galaxy Z Fold4 offers Samsung’s best displays and chipset, some of the best cameras, and it even supports S-Pen if that’s your thing. And being a foldable tablet surely puts it ahead of the competition for its versatility and usability.

Indeed, those who are after productivity are unlikely to find a superior package than the Fold4 - in smartphone or smartphone-like form, that is. The combination of the new Android for large screens, Samsung's proprietary One UI add-ons, and the stylus support, is simply unrivaled.

The Fold4 all-round excellence continue with its speakers, battery life, connectivity. In fact. The only things that fail to impress on this Fold4 are the charging speed and the still present screen crease.

Ultimately though, these are small enough as to be largely immaterial and Galaxy Z Fold4 is the best flagship right now.

The iPhone 14 Pro Max is Apple's best iPhone in 2022. It has a ProMotion 120Hz display, now with an Always-on option, a redesigned notch that’s now a feature called Dynamic Island, and a more prominent camera upgrade with a 48MP sensor for the main camera with 2x lossless zoom, a better ultrawide camera, and an improved selfie one with autofocus.

The Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max offers amazing dust and water resistance, plus its Ceramic Shield is incredibly crack proof. Of course, the latest iPhone is unmatched when it comes to performance. If you are an iPhone type of person, the 14 Pro Max is a no-brainer. If you are after the best flagship - that's also this iPhone 14 Pro Max but you should be willing to give Apple iOS a chance. It's not bad, it's just different.

All of these apply to the regular Pro, in fact. It's up to you to decide which size suits you best. No matter the hardware differences, you will still get the same experience. Got to love Apple for that.

The Xiaomi 12 Pro surely deserves a spot on our shortlist. It has one of the best displays in the industry, four immersive speakers, comes with the most current Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip, and the battery can be recharged unbelievably fast with the 120W power adapter.

The triple-camera system on the Xiaomi 12 Pro offers excellent photo and video quality and it’s versatile enough for a flagship. Sure, the UW camera could have benefitted from autofocus capabilities, and the zoom camera could have a longer reach. But Xiaomi makes up for these with good sensors and processing.

While the Xiaomi 12 Pro may not be the most feature-rich flagship, it is still one of the best around. The Xiaomi 12 Pro is one dependable smartphone suited to gaming, streaming, and photography. If you can forgive the lack of (official) ingress protection, it can very well be your thing.

Another year, another great Find – the Find X5 Pro continues a lineage of compelling flagship 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 iQOO 9 Pro is a brilliant smartphone currently sold in India and China. It offers plenty of cool stuff like gimbal stabilization, LTPO 2.0 E5 AMOLED, 120W fast charging, 3D ultrasonic fingerprint reader, and even the BMW Motorsport branding.

The camera on the back, even if it won’t impress with its zooming capabilities, offers outstanding photo and video quality, and impresses with video stabilization.

In addition to the screen, battery life, performance, and camera, we also liked the iQOO 9 Pro speakers and the fast 120W wired charging.

The Edge 30 Ultra is a capable allrounder, with an excelled 144Hz OLED, the latest Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset, and a versatile camera with a 200MP primary and a 50MP ultrawide shooters in addition to the 12MP 2x telephoto. There is also a 60MP selfie camera, which turn out to be quite capable.

Perhaps our biggest gripe with it has to be the lack of 4K video recording on the ultrawide and the telephoto cameras, which feels like an arbitrary limitation, and one that may be fixed with an update. What isn't going to be fixed is the build - waterproofing for submersion, poor grip and misinterpreted touch input every now and then.

But for all that's not quite up to scratch, there's a lot to like about the Edge 30 Ultra. Outside of its video peculiarities, the camera system doesn't have glaring flaws, so long as you didn't expect miracles from 'the first 200MP camera'. The display is bright, fluid, and just the right amount of adaptive; battery life is top-notch where that display is involved, and charging speed is among the fastest we've seen from standard USB PowerDelivery peripherals. The Moto is rocking a nicely complete software package, too - stock look, custom features, PC-like capability, and 3 OS updates.

The Honor Magic4 Pro is an awesome phone that's rather easy to recommend. It offers premium hardware and features sprinkled with some rare functionalities such as Ultra Wideband, high-frequency PWM backlight control, and an advanced facial unlock in combination with a great ultrasonic fingerprint reader. It also has a whole bunch of video recording and editing tools and the memory config.

The Magic4 Pro has all the bells and whistles, of course, an excellent 6.81-inch LTPO OLED display, top-tier SoC, blazing-fast charging, all the cameras you'd need, sleek design, offers 256GB of internal storage as a standard, IP68 certification against water and dust and awesome stereo speakers. Moreover, the handset brings UWB support, two actually usable 3D ToF sensors (one is used for biometric identification aside from the fingerprint reader) and some unique video recording features.

Honor has to work better on its software, especially with the somewhat unreliable camera app, which makes unpredictable switches between the zoom and main cameras. The low-light performance needs a boost, too. But all things considered the Honor Magic4 Pro is still one of the best flagships on the market with some unique capabilities and we do recommend putting on your shortlists.