Let’s start this article off by clearing a few things up. This is not a sponsored article and I have had no contact with the companies of which will be included. Next up… this is without a doubt the first time in a long time I have been inspired to write an article just because. If I can save you alot of money, that is my reward. And that’s my last promise. If you read this article to the end, the door will be wide open for you to save thousands on a phone literally thousands less than you are paying now. No tricks. Nothing difficult. I am simply going to show you that larger phone companies have established a oligopoly (Yup…look that one up!) in the smartphone industry, but there are alternatives. Their marketing is so good that even I considered paying in excess of $2700 for a phone, only to now have, hold, and brag about a phone that costs just over $100US… or $150Cdn. With all the best features and then some, I really don’t see my going back. Bit of background if I may. I am a police detective short of 16 working days until retirement. I have held two phones on my person for much of my adult life, the first being for my policing job, and the second being personal and an absolute necessity with respect to my second business which is the Essentially Tech Media Corporation. Would you believe that way too many years ago I was investigated by my own policing organization for conducting personal business on the company phone? Not guilty but that absolutely happened. My personal phone gets more use than most personal computers. Its bouncing down the highway while out for a motorcycle run with the wife was the beginning of this story, and I can relate that replacing the data on that phone was just short of 500GB. Music. Photos. Videos. Business files. Contacts. Nothing backed up. Replacing that alone would be a challenging benchmark for any phone. I carry a Samsung ZFold5 for work ($2559.99 Cdn). I did carry a Huawei Mate 20x which I cherished for its photography prowess and I absolutely loved its industry leading 7.2″ 2.4k screen. It was a gift from very close friends at Lexar/Longsys and, as many times as I tried to set it aside over the years, I simply couldn’t. Regardless of the present political climate with respect to Huawei, they make absolutely amazing gear. My wife, Karen, still wears and gets use from her Huawei GT2 Pro smartwatch which says tons as Karen isn’t tech savvy (Ya… I am going to hear it for this statement.) and the battery in that watch lasts two plus weeks. Find that in another similarly featured smartwatch…even today. So how did we get here… Driving down the highway for a motorcycle run a few weeks back, I thought how great it would be to grab a shot of Karen ahead of me on her bike and then realized the holder didn’t have the phone locked in. I watched it hit and bounce down the road in my rear view mirror, finally ending up in just the right spot in the left lane for so many cars to run it over. It was destroyed…or so I thought. Would you believe that the internals still worked to an extent , even though the front and back of that phone had shattered and mangled. Yup… I plugged her in and music played and the phone even connected on the bike screen. The problem later was that I could not get access to all that info, short of a chancy lock screen replacement which would mandate time out of my person and would not be a good business choice, considering its contents. I needed a new phone and I needed one quick. My retirement was just short of a month away where I would lose that ZFold5 and I was set on the new Samsung ZFold6. Its expected release is in July, and would easily hit me around $2800 in the pocketbook after taxes. So I relied once again on tried and true Amazon to fix me up. Say what you want about Amazon but I live WAY out in the middle of nowhere where bear roam my yard daily, yet Amazon still gets my purchases here the next day, and on a few occasions even within 12 hours. Thank you Amazon Prime. I searched out smartphones using the “Sort By: Price – Low to High” and three phone brands popped up that got my attention, Umidigi, Motorola and Blackview. Truth be told I got a bit tempted by the Blackberry Passport still available but that was a hard pass. I then went to “Sort By: Average Customer Review: limited the price to $200 Canadian (YES THAT’s $200) and two phones popped up. OSCAL and Blackview. I learned quickly that OSCAL is a sub-brand of Blackview and Blackview had a very strong showing for a phone that cheap. But wait! It has micro-SD card access which high end phones such as Samsung have done away with. This is a marketing ploy and this where where the price gets driven up. People need phones with storage and are forced to pay exorbitantly high prices for integrated storage. Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply pay $100 for a 1TB SD card and have 1152GB of storage (1TB SD + 128GB base) for a minimal cost upgrade? Oh but…you can. After all, I simply wanted a cheap phone to get me through to the Samsung Zfold6 release about a month and half down the road didn’t I? So I am writing this with my new phone beside me and I am still stunned. I chose a relatively new release with the Blackview Shark 8 (Ya I know I know Shark 8 right?) but take note of these specs. It has a monster… monster 6.78″ 2.4K FHD+ 16.7mil color screen that refreshes up to 120Hz. Your scrolling is as smooth as it gets. It is ultra slim and slimmer than any Sammy at 8.35mm, only 198.3gm light and comes in 3 color patterns. I chose Galaxy Blue and I amusingly think they are playing off the Samsung ‘Galaxy’ name. Now when considering this size, throw in that it has a 5000mAh battery that can clearly brag about having the longest battery life in the industry for its feature set. The battery life on this phone BLOWS the Samsung and my previous Mate20x away. Oh wait… That’s not all by a long shot! Not only does it have dual SIM capacity, but it also incorporates a spot for up to a 1TB SDXC card. That is where my Lexar Play 1TB SDXC card came in. I plugged it in and was offered two choices: incorporate it as internal memory or use it as a removable storage device where it had its own logical drive designation. I chose internal. This camera comes with 8GB internal RAM that automatically expands to up to 16GB when needed and is available in 128GB or 256GB storage. I chose 128GB. For those techies, its internal engine is that of a MediaTek Helio G99 Octa-core 6nm chip which sports 25% better performance than other similar chips… with much better battery life. Its camera is that of a Samsung GW3 ISOCELL 64MP quad rear and 13MP front camera and backed with Blackview ArcSoft® 7.0 camera software. It contains an audio port (Take that Samsung and Apple!), has NFC technology, as well as fingerprint recognition on it’s side power button which is a great security feature for so many software programs these days. So what doesn’t this phone have? 5G. This is a 4G phone which contributes to battery life significantly. If you, like I, carry both a 5G and 4G phones… try and identify speed differences in your typical daily use. You can’t. I promise you that you won’t see any difference whatsoever. It is Bluetooth 5 vice the newest 6. Again… tell me why I want to pay that premium. It’s speaker is on the bottom and has remarkably good sound but it is not stereo as just about every high end smartphone is these days. Is it worth paying 8x more for this? This phone is fully Google incorporated and Google Play has all the programs you could hope for. As a Samsung user, there isn’t that large assortment of icons and themes on the Shark 8 and, if you need that which I don’t, you need to download launcher software which can be a bit confusing. I don’t use themes as I often incorporate my wildlife and motorcycle shots into my phone screens. Next up…. what’s in the package? I couldn’t believe that as well. Included with the phone is a 33W fast charger (Take that Samsung and Apple!), silicone slim case which is very nice and a tempered glass screen protector which goes on remarkably easy. Every phone I have ever had mandated purchase of a case and screen protector which adds to the cost, not to mention that its a $25 bump minimum for that Samsung charger. Did I mention that this phone is priced as low as $154 Canadian or just over $100 US? And its Android 13! Simply put, there is no value or cheap whatsoever in this phone and there isn’t a person out there that would believe this is a sub-$200 (Cdn) or just over $100 US phone. I know as I find myself showing and bragging about this to just about anyone that will listen… And some have already made that switch. Why not? Really…how can you go wrong? Last but not least… I have had this phone in my hands for just over a week now and I truly believed if it could survive my file uploads, it would be home free. It did that with ease. It connected seamlessly to my car, to the motorcycle, to the PC and Android Auto works great. I have fifteen cameras around my home that monitor movement with instant alerts that work great with the phone. I am an avid photographer of wildlife, motorcycle adventures and sports cars (photo below) to which my Canon R5 connects seamlessly and helps me observe and do my work in real time. The Shark 8 is IP68 waterproof and dustproof which means your safe when that person throws you off the dock or pool. Again, try that with a price premium design smartphone. I guess all there really is left to ask is why we fall pray to phones costing as much as 15x more when we can trust in the same, if not better at a fraction of the price. For me… the Blackview Shark 8 fit that bill perfectly. There is a sense of pride on my part in this find. But you don’t have to go that route. There are other choices and just knowing what you can get for so little puts you one step ahead. Good luck! CHECK OUT BLACKVIEW SHARK 8 SMARTVIEW PRICING AT AMAZON. This is also a Canadian AliExpress Link. I have used them before and, as there is an Aliexpress Canada, products arrive within 2 weeks normally and they are trustworthy. The price there is only $157 Canadian!