Don’t want to spend $1,000 or more on a new smartphone? We don’t blame you, and the good news is there are plenty of models available for half that price, but the trick is knowing which cheap smartphone is worth buying. After all, just because you’re not spending flagship-phone money, doesn’t mean you want to be stuck with anything rubbish.
The Samsung Galaxy A53 is not a massive departure from the Galaxy A52 and A51, but the modest update gets the fundamentals right: It has a two-day battery life, a capable camera, a gorgeous AMOLED display, and a great looking design too. The Galaxy A53 comes with Android 12 standard, and Samsung has promised four years of software updates and five years of security updates. This means it could potentially last you a very long time. The battery life, as mentioned above, is a particular highlight, managing two days of moderate use . It supports 25W fast charging, but there's no wireless charging.
Google is famous for its computational photography expertise, and a great deal of it can be found inside the Pixel 6a, despite it being cheaper than the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. The 12.2-megapixel main camera is joined by a 12MP wide-angle camera, plus most of Google’s clever and fun camera modes, including Night Sight, Portrait Mode, and Magic Eraser.
Who it’s for: Apple iPhone lovers who miss small phones, but don't want to compromise on performance.It's not the biggest smartphone on this list, but it's one of the most powerful. The jewel in the iPhone SE's crown is the A15 Bionic processor powering it. This is the same chip you'll find in the iPhone 14, and it's incredibly powerful.
Prices for the Apple iPhone SE start from $429 for 64GB of storage and rise up to $579 for 256GB of storage. We recommend buying the $479 to upgrade your storage to 128GB at least, as performance and battery life suffer when the storage gets close to full. A 48-megapixel camera on the back may sound simple , but it takes photos that are fine for social media, particularly if you don’t mind playing with the editing suite in the Gallery app. The phone’s software is a letdown, though, as it runs OxygenOS 12. It’s not as fluid or cleanly designed as old OxygenOS, and can be complex and unreliable.
It has all Google’s computational photography expertise fed through a 50-megapixel main camera with optical image stabilization, plus there’s a wide-angle camera and a 10.8MP selfie camera. It takes fantastic photos, and the editing suite is extremely powerful. It’s versatile and inspiring to use. The same goes for the software, which is slickly designed and super smooth, all powered by the latest Tensor G2 processor.