FEBRUARY 2022 T3 47Affordable phones
f 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
- Back then, flagship phones cost
just over £500: the iPhone 6S started
at £539 and the Samsung Galaxy S6
was £599. But as technology has
improved flagship phones have
become more expensive. The
standard iPhone 13 now starts at
£779; the Samsung Galaxy S21 at
£769. Those are the prices of the base
configurations: going for the models
with the most storage takes the price
well past £1,100.
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 £359, 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
£249 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-£500
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 aI
Words: Carrie MarshallYou 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
Affordable
phones
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