If you are fine spending more than $500 you can check out our best smartphones, you’ll find a few of the budget options there along with the $600 to $1,200+ flagship phones. With that said, stick around and see if you can save yourself a lot of money with one of these more affordable phones. There are budget phones that offer you a great camera, some of the best battery life, or even a stylus, no matter what your interests are we’ll find the best budget phone for you. At $449 the Pixel 6a is at the upper-end of budget phones, but it earns its top spot on this list by coming pretty close to the Pixel 6, which I called the best Android value ever. If performance and software support are your biggest concerns for your budget phone then look no further than the iPhone SE (2022). Samsung’s Galaxy A53 is another potentially compelling budget option with a 120Hz display that puts the Pixel and iPhone to shame, strong software support, and a premium look and feel that holds up against Samsung’s best.
The best budget smartphones
The Pixel 6a brings many of the best features of Google’s flagship phones to a sub-$500 price point. While that description also fit for the Pixel 5a, the Pixel 6a has the benefit of following in the footsteps of the much more successful Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, which means it gets Google’s powerful Tensor chipset. This is a dramatic performance boost from the Snapdragon 765G in the Pixel 5a and catapults the Pixel 6a to near the top of the performance charts in this price range. The cameras and the 60Hz display are the biggest sacrifices you are making by going with the a-series, but thanks to Google’s computational photography prowess it is still considerably better than its budget competition. Unlike some other budget models, you also get the exact same modern design as the flagship Pixel phones and with its more modestly sized camera array and 6.1-inch display, the Pixel 6a is more pocketable than its siblings. Top all of this off with five years of security updates and Google’s handy Pixel “Feature Drops” and it’s easy to see why the Pixel 6a is the best cheap phone around. See our full Pixel 6a review. Apple’s latest iPhone SE makes one major hardware update to the iPhone SE (2020) with the leap to the same A15 Bionic chipset found in the iPhone 13. It makes multitasking and mobile gaming a breeze on its bright and colorful 4.7-inch Retina display. It’s not the only premium feature that was transplanted over from other premium devices, with the SE able to use wireless charging and retaining the signature iPhone glass and metal design. However, the SE’s camera remains its downfall, at least on paper. We know the brains of the iPhone 13 managed to make the jump to the SE, but the eyes didn’t. While the 12MP rear camera is fine, that’s about all it is. The SE’s powerful SoC will attempt to boost that relatively weak camera with enhanced computational photography prowess, but we’ll need to see it in practice. Motorola’s primary selling point of the Moto G Power is its claimed 3-day battery life. Motorola even says that with one charge you’ll be able to stream 150 hours worth of music, and most battery tests I’ve come across manage to squeeze somewhere between 16 to 18 hours out of the Moto G Power’s 5,000 mAh battery with in-house testing. The Moto G Power is priced at $249.99, and if you’re looking for a budget buy that you can rely on to hold a charge, very few smartphones come close to the same endurance on offer here, let alone budget smartphones. While the battery is a crowning feature for this device, you may find that the rest of the Moto G Power’s offerings are not a standout affair. Its 6.4-inch LCD display is bright but doesn’t impress in terms of colour. The internal 64GB of storage is lower than most in the same price category, and the Snapdragon 665 CPU with 4GB of RAM isn’t exactly going to stand out as a powerhouse against the competition either. If you’re on the move a lot throughout the day or are a heavy smartphone user who’s tired of reaching for the charger every few hours, this is your battery solution. But, if you’re looking for the wow-factor in other areas also, there are other smartphones out there. The Samsung Galaxy A53 5G is cursed with strong competition at its roughly $450 price point. It offers an excellent 120Hz display, an impressive four years of OS and security updates and a modern design that doesn’t look out of place next to Samsung’s flagships. The Galaxy A53 also boasts a bevy of cameras, but of the four lenses on the back you will only care about the wide-angle and ultra-wide and they come up significantly shy of the results you get from the Pixel 6a. Performance is the biggest downfall for the Galaxy A53, the iPhone SE 2022 naturally blows it out of the water with its industry-leading A15 chip, but even the Pixel 6a’s Tensor ship leaves the A53 in the dust. While I try to stick to the retail pricing looking at these phones, I’d be remiss to ignore the fact that the Galaxy A53 is often available for closer to $350, which may tip the scales for you. While it may not quite match up to the top options from Google and Apple, the Galaxy A53 is an excellent budget choice. If the Moto G Power caught your attention but seemed to be lacking anything that made it truly stand out, then Motorola has another budget phone that may be of more interest to you. For $400, the Moto G Stylus 5G adds a stylus, 5G, 6GB of RAM and an impressive 256GB of base storage to the mix. While a stylus isn’t something that everyone is clamoring for on a phone, Note owners would tell you it’s an awesome addition. On removing the stylus from the body of the smartphone, Motorola’s proprietary sketching software opens up, allowing you to jot, sketch or doodle without delay. While the original $400 price point was a bit tough to swallow, you can find it for less than $350 now and that’s an excellent value for this unique budget offering. The OnePlus Nord N200 5G is easily the most affordable 5G phone that we’ve seen so far at just $240. The phone boasts a premium look that holds up to phones that sell for 2-3x as much. This is the best sub-$250 phone I’ve used all things considered. I am still blown away by the fit and finish OnePlus delivered in a phone this cheap, but of course there are some tradeoffs to hit that price point. The camera is my biggest complaint camera, if photos and videos are a major concern for you with your phone then the Nord N200’s cameras fall flat. It’s always possible for OnePlus to improve the software, but don’t buy the phone counting on that happening. Software support is my other major critique. It’s a budget phone, but you only get one software update which is arriving within a few months of this phone launching — that’s unacceptable even at this price point. If you can look past those two flaws, this is an otherwise fantastic phone. If you want a premium-looking phone without spending a premium price then this belongs on your short list. See our OnePlus Nord N200 5G review
