It’s that time of the year when you might be on the lookout for a new smartphone. Specifically, you might be considering the iPhone 16, Apple’s latest iPhone series. You might not be an early adopter, preferring to check out the new phones in stores and read plenty of reviews to determine your next smartphone purchase. That’s especially true if you’re not exactly loyal to one of the two big platforms, and if you’re looking for a device to use for several years.
What’s the best iPhone or Android handset to buy right now? It turns out that a data scientist had the same question. They used AI to analyze more than 1 million online smartphone reviews and found the best iPhone and Android options that are currently available.
Before I tell you that you won’t believe the results, I’ll note that the iPhone 16 models are too new to be included in the rankings. Ready? You’re not going to believe the results.
Redditor eneskaraboga used ChatGPT GPT-4o mini to scrape and analyze more than 1.1 million online reviews for various smartphone models. The researcher tasked the AI with looking for positives and negatives about the phone models in those reviews in five categories that might be important to smartphone buyers: Value, Performance, Design, Battery Life, and Camera.
The resulting scores provided eneskaraboga with a ranking for the best smartphones in the world. That’s how we get the best iPhone and Android devices in the following table:
The data scientist and a friend scraped the reviews from Google Reviews, which, in turn, compiles reviews from Amazon, eBay, Verizon, AT&T, and others. They used Puppeteer to do it, creating a scraper in about 10 to 15 hours. The scraper worked on a computer rather than the cloud, scraping “tons of data.”
The next step involved cleaning the reviews so irrelevant information would not impact the results. Reviews under 20 words and reviews that included “emoticons, irrelevant characters, or templates” were discarded.
Also, reviews that did not mention the five categories above and those that failed to prove the reviewer had used the device were removed from the list. Reviews mentioning issues with the delivery and faulty products from resellers were also removed. This is where GPT-4o mini went to work.
The scientist asked ChatGPT to count positives and negatives from each qualifying review. That number dropped to about 30% of the initial 1.1 million. Here’s how the scoring went:
So if they mention they loved the camera, it goes to the camera category as +1 and if negative, it goes to +1 to negative. The good thing is that a review can have both positive and negative ratings. For example, if someone says, “I loved the camera, but for this price, it is not worth it!”, that means we have +1 for camera and -1 for value for money.
ChatGPT also produced the table on the Redditor’s website, available at this link. A screenshot below shows the overall sentiment score for phones released between 2022 and 2024. In this case, “sentiment” is an aggregation of data in the five categories.
As I said before, the results are quite surprising. Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Plus is at the top of the list, followed by the iPhone 14 Plus. The Galaxy Z Flip 6 takes the third spot. While I can’t blame buyers for liking the Flip 6, I’ll mention an error here: Samsung released the foldable only a few months ago, not in 2023.
Samsung dominates the top 10, and the only iPhone Pro model on the list is the iPhone 14 Pro Max. You can extend the range of the search and include phones older than 2022. Add 2021 phones, and the iPhone 13 Pro Max appears in fifth place. Go back one more year, and the iPhone 12 Pro phones outrank the iPhone 14 Pro Max.
Flip the table, and you’ll find that the Google Pixel 7 Pro has the worst overall score. In second-to-last place, there’s last year’s iPhone 15 Pro. Keep scrolling, and the Galaxy Z Fold 6 makes the bottom 10.
But if you’re using the tool to buy a new phone right now, you’ll want to restrict the search to 2023 and 2024 devices. What’s interesting is that the researcher found the iPhone SE phones to be quite well-reviewed, outperforming more expensive iPhones. I couldn’t find the iPhone SE models in the table even after including earlier years, but that’s what the researcher said:
The iPhone Pro Max models had a very low value for money score and the iPhone Plus modes had the best. So, Plus seems to be the choice if you are looking for value for money and paying more decreases satisfaction even though you get more power. Samsung does better overall than iPhones, and iPhone SE phones almost always beat the high-end phones in satisfaction scores.
I will note the obvious caveats here. ChatGPT can (and does, frequently) make mistakes, so we can’t be certain about the data. Also, smartphone reviews can’t be perfectly objective, and the ones ChatGPT analyzed aren’t either.
However, the results are interesting and worth checking out. You’ll find the table and order the rankings by the category you value most on the SentimentArena website. Ultimately, you should buy the iPhone or Android phone that makes the most sense for you, even if it’s not at the top of any rankings.
