Affordable phones

You don’t need to spend lots of money to get the best phones: many of today’s mid-range phones punch way above their price tag. Here’s how to choose yours

If you’re looking for a new smartphone, there are lots of very powerful and capable phones to choose from – but that doesn’t mean you need to buy the latest and greatest models to get a phone you’ll love. As we’ll discover, there are plenty of more affordable options that deliver exceptional bang for your buck.

The smartphone market has changed very dramatically since 2015. Back then, flagship phones cost close to $1,000: the iPhone 6S started at $1,079 and the Samsung Galaxy S6 was $999. But as technology has improved flagship phones have become more expensive. The standard iPhone 13 now starts at $1,349; the Samsung Galaxy S21 at $1,249. Those are the prices of the base configurations: going for the models with the most storage takes the price well past $1,700.

Capitalism hates a vacuum, so as the flagships became ever more expensive new brands rushed in to fill the space they’d left behind. Brands such as HTC, Huawei and Huawei’s sub-brand Honor did it so successfully that even Apple noticed: Apple’s first generation iPhone SE, released in 2016, was Apple’s cheapest ever iPhone at just $679, an obvious attempt to get more people into the iPhone family instead of the Android one. Samsung had also decided to target budget buyers: at $440 its 2015 Samsung Galaxy A3 was less than half the price of the Samsung Galaxy Alpha.

By 2016 a clear pattern had emerged. The big smartphone firms would launch two kinds of phones: cutting-edge flagships with price tags to match, and repackaged versions of their older phones priced to sell. And the newcomers, the brands that were largely unknown here at the time, would cut their margins to the bone in order to sell similarly priced budget phones with better specs.

To describe today’s affordable phone market as hyper-competitive would be an understatement. In addition to the brands we’ve already mentioned you’ll find old favourites including Nokia and Motorola, household names such as Google, relative newcomers such as Xiaomi, OPPO, Realme and OnePlus and what feels like a never-ending stream of new models to target every possible kind of buyer.

And that’s great news because it’s very much a buyer’s market now. You’d have to try very hard to actually get a bad phone in the sub-$1,000 sector. Some phones are better than others in certain respects, but the days when affordable was a synonym for awful are long gone: if flagship phones have it all, affordable ones have quite a lot of it.

When you look at our recommendations, you’ll see we’ve listed the SIM-free price. This is almost always the cheapest way to buy a smartphone: contracts mean less or no money up-front but the seller makes its money back on the contract. And the length of contracts has been increasing in recent years: if you look at the best deals on your favoured phone, you’ll see that the cheapest-looking deals tie you down for two or even three years.

As you’ll see from our recommendations, you can pick up a

smartphone with a still astonishing specification for half the price of a high-end model. It won’t have identical specifications and performance to the very latest and most expensive phones, but we think you’ll be surprised by just how good the current crop of affordable smartphones are.

THE CORNERS USUALLY CUT

Clearly a $1,000 phone won’t have the same components as an $1,500 one, let alone a $1,800 one: some corners will have to be cut in order to keep the price down. The specific corners will differ from phone to phone, but there are some differences you’ll keep seeing.

The first is the processor. With very few exceptions, such as the OnePlus Nord 2, you won’t get the fastest processor from that manufacturer’s range – so for example the iPhone SE has the same processor as the iPhone 11, not the iPhone 13; the Samsung A52 5G has the Snapdragon 750 while the Samsung Galaxy S21 has the faster Snapdragon 888 or equivalent Exynos, which is Samsung’s own in-house processor.

Build quality is usually lesser too. Affordable phones aren’t badly built, but they tend not to have the latest generation of toughened glass and they’re likely to come in plastic rather than the glass and metal cases of more premium models. You’ll typically find the display isn’t as good as the current flagship, too: the iPhone SE has a 4.7-inch IPS LCD, compared to the iPhone 13 mini’s far superior 5.4-inch HDR OLED.

If the phone isn’t being marketed specifically for its camera, you’ll often find previous-gen optics or image processing. And if you can’t see any corners that have been cut, it’s worth looking at the battery life: affordable models tend to ship with batteries that have less capacity, and with processors that aren’t as energy efficient.

It’s also important to consider the following: how long will you be able to hold onto your phone before it becomes obsolete or unsafe? Firstly, there’s the operating system. Apple leads the pack when it comes to operating system support: while it doesn’t deliver all the features you’d get on an iPhone 13, the latest version of iOS is available for every iPhone from 2015’s iPhone 6S onwards.

Things are very different on Android, largely because manufacturers often make many more models than Apple does. Continuing to update older Androids is a gargantuan and expensive task, so as a rule of thumb you can expect your smartphone manufacturer to support your device for no more than three years, sometimes even less.

When the manufacturer stops supporting your phone it will continue to work, but you won’t be getting the patches and updates that protect you from newly discovered security vulnerabilities and you may find that apps start to require a later version of Android than the one you have.

That means it’s actually a better idea to buy a brand new Android phone than a similarly priced second-hand one: with used Androids the clock has been ticking since the day they were bought. And the clock has been ticking on their battery too.

When you’re looking at phone spec sheets it’s important to think about what you’re

Some corners will have to be cut in order to keep the price down

actually going to use your phone for. That sounds obvious, we know, but for example if you’re planning to take lots of 50MP or 64MP shots or shoot a lot of video and you don’t use cloud storage such as Apple’s iCloud or Google Photos, you’ll fill up the on-board storage fairly quickly – so you’ll need a device with lots of storage space or the ability to expand it with an SD card.

It’s also important to consider which corners you don’t want to cut. For us, it’s battery life: we’d rather have a slightly less exciting display than a huge one that kills the battery before the day is done. For you the deal-breaker might be the power of the optical zoom, or the speed of the processor, or how drop-proof the phone might be.

KEEP AN EYE ON THE CAMERA

Everybody’s different and so are their phone requirements, but for $800 you should be able to get a phone with at least a 20MP camera, the same performance as flagship phones from two years ago, a decent OLED display and 5G. Unless you’re buying Apple, that is. Apple’s camera focus is on image quality rather than just counting the pixels, and its iPhone SE is only 4G.

There’s one more thing to consider when you’re thinking of buying an affordable phone, and that’s whether it’s about to be replaced. It’s easier to check that for Apple and Samsung phones than for others thanks to the online rumour and prediction mill: at the time of writing it’s looking very likely that the iPhone SE will get a minor update in April 2022 to add 5G connectivity; the Samsung A52 5G is expected to get a marginally better display and a new case colour some time in 2022 too. That means the current models are likely to get significant price drops to clear existing stock when the new models are imminent.

We think $600 is the sweet spot for affordable smartphones at the moment: once you get closer to $500 or below you start seeing phones that are cheap rather than affordable. You can still get good budget buys – the Xiaomi Mi 10T Lite 5G can be picked up for around $500 – but the cut corners are often big ones, so for example the camera app in the Mi 10T is painfully slow, its digital zoom is awful and of its five cameras, four are disappointing. It’s a good budget phone, but it’s not in the same league as our selection of affordable Androids.