No. Price has almost very little to do with reception and more to do with the general finish of the product. It used to mean more features too but there's a rather pronounced bell curve on that aspect these days. If you've got a specific device in mind, GSMArena should be able to give you all the information you need.
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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Reception is dependent on which bands the phone supports, and which bands your sim contract supports. You can get cheap phones that support all major bands, and the rest is up to the sim
Well you can definitely impact the reception with the antenna design, and the quality of the hardware also plays a role to some degree.
Wasn't there a thing with one of those iPhones where the reception was drastically worse depending how you would hold the phone in your hand.
The iPhone 4’s Antennagate, yeah! Holding it in your left hand would bridge a gap and cause reception to crap out, wild stuff
It could, but realistically not much in most cases. Only if you're on the very edge of losing a signal entirely.
The specific network chip and device antenna design could play a significant part on reception, but realistically there won't be much of a difference in the real world, lots of research and development has already gone into the technologies we use now.
Higher end phones will often support more frequency bands, and thus support more signals, but no carrier uses all of them. Just make sure the phone you pick supports the bands your carrier uses.
Now when new technologies come out, that's when you can see real world significant differences between devices because there isn't as much real world experience with a new technology yet, but everything out now and in the near future has already gone through that phase.
Depends of they have better antennas. In theory newer phones would up the quality but now and days this isn't always the case.
But WiFi and Bluetooth connection will usually always be higher. They release newer versions of the chips that connect to those radio frequencies. So you can get better, further and faster connection with the newer chips that are usually in the newer phones.
In general, devices with plastic cases typically have better reception because plastic is RF transparent. Devices with metal cases tend to have worse because they block RF. That’s grossly simplified but it’ll get you started on researching it.
Since the iPhone 4? lots of phones simply moved the antennas to the exterior, so that's not really a problem nowadays.
Not a great example of the improved reception of metal frame phones, because it was the iPhone 4 that lost reception quality significantly when it was held on the metal sides and your finger/hand happened to be near the lower left corner. This was a perfectly natural way to hold the phone and most impacted left-handers.
Apple famously responded by saying "you just need to not hold it like that", rather than admitting an engineering mistake.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/iphone-4-signal-problems-apple-says-dont-hold-it-like-that/
I wouldn't think so, because data speed is a set standard that is applicable to all phones.
What does matter is whether or not a phone can support all or the bands you need.
Yes and no. It's not about the price of the phone, it's about the capability of the modem and the material between the modem and the sky.
About ten years ago, I went to visit family in another state, and I blew my brother's mind with the speeds my iPhone was getting. He thought it was an iPhone thing. I said nah, much as I'd like to brag about having the more powerful, more private phone — I just had a newer modem. I think he had a Galaxy S3, which was a few years older than the 6s I had. I told him if he had the latest Samsung, he'd likely see comparable speeds.
Apple is getting into making their own modems, and the jury is still out on whether that's a good thing. I think the 17 series still use Qualcomm for 5G but they use Apple silicon for WiFi and Bluetooth. Maybe LTE as well, not sure about that. The Apple modem will almost certainly sip less power, but I'm not sure if it will be "better". Probably not.
I've been all over the smartphone debate and I've argued on both sides (for Android and for iPhones). I've never heard anyone seriously defend one having better network connectivity. iPhones are almost always universally faster. Right now the Galaxy S25 is faster than the iPhone 16 series, but the iPhones lose less power to thermal throttling, which is to say the iPhones are better for gaming since they lose less power, but if you're not a gamer, the Samsung will be faster. Camera is subjective. iPhone almost always has the best video recording, but their photos are oversharpened. Samsung oversoftens, and Pixels hallucinate details they can't see, with AI. (Zoom in on something far away with text, take a picture, then zoom in on the text and look at the AI-generated text that looks like it's from Animal Crossing. So what other details is it hallucinating?) But network connectivity? We don't get into that. Because it really boils down to "it's all the same but each generation improves upon the last a little."
for gaming
Lol do people actually play cpu-intensive games on their phones? What would that even be? The only thing I can think of is PUBG Mobile and that's boring since its filled with bots.
I don't know if they're CPU or GPU intensive, but I've heard Call of Duty Warframe pushes the phones to overheat. I dunno, never played it. Also, iPhone 15 or 16 and later can play a handful of AAA games. Nothing good, just some Capcom and Ubisoft slop. Assassins Creed and Resident Evil stuff. The new ones, too.
Pretty sure the last couple generations of iPhones are more powerful than the Switch 2. Pretty sure most phones from the last 5-6 years are more powerful than the Switch 1. The Switch 1 was just a reworked Nvidia Shield tablet... from 2014. It had more RAM than the phones of its time, and the Tegra GPU hit a little harder, but the whole Switch 1 was quickly outclassed by every flagship phone on the market after a couple years, and the Switch 1 came out in like 2016 or 2017. Basically if you have a good phone from 2019 or 2020 or later, it's more powerful than a Switch 1, and Switch 1 ran Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom (with cel-shaded graphics and heavily optmised).
A lot of us in tech are guilty of underestimating ARM64, but it's been doing great. Apple has used it exclusively in their desktop and laptop computers (the M-series Macs) since 2020. I have an M2 Pro on my desk, it can run Cyberpunk and you probably know how small it is. Whole computer is like 7.75" square and maybe an inch tall?