The Reign of the Fancy Phone Is Over

Few people can justify spending $300 on a bit of extra camera zoom

Photo: Giuseppe Cacace/Getty Images

The annual hype around smartphones tends to focus on what the tech press affectionately refers to as “flagship” phones. These are devices like Apple’s iPhone 11 Pro, which starts at $1,000 and is marketed as a film studio in a box, or Google’s Pixel 4, whose radar chip and voice-powered…