iPhone recently launched the iPhone SE and the major attention that it has gotten is from the western audience primarily due to the face that the phone costs a mere $400. Although the phone seems to be a perfect fit for the western market, it has major competition in the Asian market due to the presence of major android payers like the Samsung and OnePlus. In India, the closest competitors are the Samsung Note 10 Lite and OnePlus 8 at ₹41,999/- and ₹41,999/- respectively as opposed to ₹42,500/-.
Note 10 Lite
The one ace that the iPhone SE has is the A13 chip which is the flagship of Apple's offerings. The Note 10 Lite is powered by an Exynos 9810 which is a flagship of 2 generations old. But the main selling point of a note device is the s-pen. Even in the lite version, all the s-pen features are available like the remote trigger for cameras and the note features.
This is a phone for the s-pen focused users. In recent years the s-pen
has become the flagship thing and this lite version tries to bring the
good things from the note devices to a much affordable price. Even though
the device is not the most powerful of all but the target audience is
totally different and the s-pen will be more important than the raw
performance for those people.
OnePlus 8
If you are just concerned with performance, OnePlus 8 is a better option as it has the latest snapdragon 865 with 6GB RAM. The clean oxygen os with
90Hz display is the dream of a performer. Although it is not the pro version it still has the flagship processor which makes it future proof as the first thing to get outdated is the processor.
In general both the OnePlus 8 and Samsung Note 10 Lite makes more sense as in my opinion at this day and age he processors have evolved and even the mid-range phones perform good enough to daily drive with ease. The things that matter the most like the screen real estate, battery, cameras are more in these other devices. If you want the iOS there is no option other than the iPhone SE. Even the cameras have gotten good to a point that the normal user does not care about the colour accuracy, photo quality that he prefers a variety of lenses than a little improvement in the quality. So in a country where the pricing is a major concern for an average user the other devices are a better option.
