The Best Phones You Can't Get In the US
Walk into any store that sells phones and you're likely to see the same dozen handsets lining the walls, along with a few carrier exclusives and lots of accessories. That’s because Apple, Motorola, and Samsung make the majority of phones sold in the US.
Walk into a mobile store in China or Germany, on the other hand, and you see a much wider assortment of brands. Companies like Oppo, Realme, and Xiaomi offer exciting, innovative, and oftentimes cheaper alternatives to the phones we get here.
We review only those phones you can buy stateside, but we still get pitched on models available abroad and sometimes get to test them. While we would like to use a few of these phones as our daily drivers, doing so isn't feasible. Even if you purchase a so-called global phone on Amazon, for instance, it likely won't work properly in the US. You might get spotty service, for starters, and you almost certainly won't get 5G coverage.
That said, it's still worthwhile to explore the phones we can't get or use here, because very often they have features that eventually make their way to phones we can buy. With that in mind, here are the best international phones you can't get in the US:
It's difficult to find slim, premium Android phones nowadays, but the Xiaomi 12 is an exception—at 2.75 inches wide, it might be the narrowest one available. The phone is slim enough to easily hold in one hand, but packs a top-of-the-line Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor. A Pro version of the phone with a bigger screen is available, but it's the petite, regular version that stands out.
The Xiaomi 12 has a 6.28-inch, 2,400-by-1,080-pixel OLED display, a 50MP main camera, and a 32MP selfie camera. You also get a 5MP macro lens and a 13MP ultra-wide
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