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Best phones for less than $500
In the market for a new phone, but wary about dropping serious cash on something you might lose or break? We recently gave our recommendations for the best phones, period. These are our recommended more affordable options in the $400 to $500 range, and while you may be worried that cheap phones won’t function as well, some incredible models have a lot to offer for the price. For hundreds less than some of the more popular and pricier phones out there, you can get the latest processors from Apple and Google, years of software updates, stunning cameras and much more.
Even the best phones for less than $500 will still make some compromises when compared to more expensive models, but nothing that prevents you from being able to do everything you’d like from playing games to hosting video chats and multitasking. Instead, you should note what the phone excels at and whether that makes up for an area where it might not. Some of these devices have 120Hz refresh rate screens with silky animations, but might use a slightly slower processor. Others do the opposite and put a brand-new, blazing fast processor into a phone body that has a smaller screen and a 60Hz refresh rate. Here are just three of our best phone picks for less than $500.
PIXEL 6A
The Pixel 6A is Google’s newest Android
12 phone, replacing the Pixel 5A as the
$449 budget-friendly version of its flagship phone. CNET’s Lisa Eadicicco dubbed it the “best Android phone under $500” in her Pixel 6A review, calling out how it keeps the same Tensor chip seen in the
$599 Pixel 6 and many of its features. The phone is slightly smaller than the Pixel 6, featuring an 6.1-inch OLED display and a refresh rate of 60Hz. And it has a similar camera to the Pixel 5A, including a 12.2-megapixel main camera and a 12-megapixel ultrawide camera. But by including the Tensor chip, photos can benefit from its Real Tone skin tone feature, Face Unblur, Night Sight for darker photography and the Magic Eraser for removing unwanted elements from a photo.
IPHONE SE 2022
Starting at $429, the iPhone SE is a mix of an older design with the latest smartphone features, including Apple’s A15 Bionic chip and 5G support. It’s also one of the few phones on the market that includes a smaller 4.7-inch screen.
It’s the throwback design, which continues the general shape Apple has used since 2014, that could be what you love or dislike most about this phone. If you want a larger iPhone in this price range, you can also consider the iPhone 11 and get a bigger screen and Face ID. But that phone does not include 5G connectivity.
SAMSUNG GALAXY A53
The $450 Samsung Galaxy A53 includes many of the best features seen in the Galaxy S22 line, with a few trade-offs to hit that lower price. The phone includes a 6.5-inch AMOLED screen with a
2,400x1,080-pixel resolution, 5G support and a long-lasting 5,000-mAh battery. The phone also comes with a 64-megapixel main camera, 12-megapixel ultrawide camera, 5-megapixel macro camera and
5-megapixel depth camera.
But a particular high point for this phone is Samsung’s pledge to provide four years of software support, in addition to shipping with Android 12 with Samsung’s One UI 4.1.