All hail the rise of the affordable smartphone. $1,000 flagships are so yesterday. Today, it's all about sub-$600 and even sub-$500 pocketable handsets that somehow manage to match their pricier cousins on looks and AI capabilities while mostly hiding the hardware shortcomings that most might not notice anyway.
This fact was made clear to me when I anecdotally compared the attractive new Samsung Galaxy A57 with its more expensive (and smaller) counterpart, the Samsung Galaxy S26. I've now seen these phones in person and can say with conviction that, at a glance, they're both attractive devices.
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