Would have been the Google Pixel 2... until I bought a Samsung S20 Ultra. I think a lot of this comes from me buying it at launch for full retail price, since the phone and the experience I got wasn't all too bad if I paid less for it. Unfortunately, $2000 CAD after taxes and eco fees for a phone that feels haphazardly thrown together is far from an ideal experience for anyone in my opinion. I'm not saying it was "thrown together" in terms of how it was physically built, but rather more in terms of its equipment and software.
I had a Note 9 before this and it was a very good phone. I want to say it was great (especially for everything you got for the price that came to about 1400 for me) but the software situation (ads, bloat and poor commitment to "4 years of updates with 3 years monthly") keep me from praising it. I did not have the same experience with the S20U and instead felt like it was an overpriced, gimmicky marketing experiment.
First of all, the S20U had the exact same software experience as a then fully-updated N9 with only a handful of new features you must go out of your way to find. Even though this is a significantly newer and arguably more advanced phone than one from 2018 with a few software updates, the One UI skin made it feel dated. I didn't even know it was running a newer version of Android than the N9 was at the time because you couldn't tell with the skin.
Secondly, I really think the S20U was just haphazardly thrown together instead of being well thought out in terms of how it was designed and engineered. Instead of producing something that was new, fresh, nice to look at and nice to use, Samsung recycled their tried and true design once again (also adding to the dated feeling) and made a few minor tweaks to call it something "new". You could say the same thing about Apple but at least they make substantial changes to the design every two generations. The S20U just looked like an S8 with a full screen, no headphone jack, centred holepunch selfie camera, an offset rear camera island and a slight change to the curvatures of the screen and back glass edges.
In terms of features, it brought absolutely nothing new to the table that I would genuinely consider "features" but instead introduced a bunch of gimmicks that were ultimately useless to me. The 100x zoom (which they actually went through the effort of proudly advertising on the aforementioned camera island – on a phone introduced in 2020? were they stuck in 2010 or something?) worked to an extent but the resulting images are quite blurry and the gimmick itself was quite finicky, even if you used a tripod as it had some kind of stabilising thing that you'd always be fighting with – it would freeze frame to "stabilise" the shot where it wants to, not where you want it to. It was even worse right out the gate and only got to this point after about a year's worth of software updates.
The 108MP primary rear camera was also yet another gimmick because it is absolutely overkill for a mobile phone. It seems like Samsung were firmly stuck in the great megapixel war of the mid 2010s despite nearly everyone else having moved on since the late 2010s began. They added a "max res" mode that would let you capture in the full 108MP to take advantage of what the sensor is capable of, but I only used it a maximum of five times when the phone was brand spanking new before switching back to standard operation in which it bins down into 12MP. I just did not see the point of capturing such high resolution images with a mobile phone as a regular consumer, especially when most DSLRs don't even capture in such a resolution. If I had to capture such high resolution images for whatever reason, I would probably use a special camera designed for that purpose instead of a consumer mobile device. 8K resolution is only 33MP and change so if Samsung wanted their phones to capture 8K video, they could have gone with a much more reasonable sensor and still let users do that with their phones.
Aside from the stanout gimmicks, the rest of the phone was just extremely mundane and offered nothing you couldn't find on anything else in the same price range. It (at least in North America) had the typical specs for an Android flagship from the same year and I didn't even get mmwave 5G or a working eSIM here in Canada (the former is justified because we don't have that yet, but the latter isn't because Samsung have sold phones like the Fold 2 with working eSIMs here in the past). It seemed like all Samsung cared about with the S20U was 5G and cramming the most megapixels into a mobile phone camera because that's all I saw in that device. The rest of the phone was just classic late 2010s Samsung with then up-to-date specs and no headphone jack.
Like I said, the S20U's shortcomings could be forgiven if it sold for less to begin with but cannot be at the high price at which it was originally sold. In contrast, I currently have the Pixel 6 Pro and I am able to forgive its shortcomings due to its much lower price. It is also a much better phone that doesn't feel dated and thrown together at all, but that's a story for another thread...
