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 £500 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£400 is the sweet
spot for affordable
smartphones at
the moment
MOBILE MATHS
Why buying your phone on contract is often a false economy
If you’re planning to buy an affordable phone,
getting a SIM-free one is almost always the
best way to do it. Contracts offering a low
monthly fee and no money upfront can make
it feel less expensive, but of course the
network makes its money back on the
associated phone plan. It’s also expensive to
cancel or switch before the contract period –
typically two to three years – is up.
Here’s a real example: the iPhone SE with
free calls, free texts and 2GB of monthly
data. That’s free upfront and then £21 per
month, and the contract is for three years –
so your total expenditure will be £756. But
you can buy the phone SIM-free for £389 or
less and get 3GB of data for £180 over the
same period. That’s a saving of nearly £200.
The other benefit of buying SIM-free is
that you don’t have to commit to a particular
network for the long term. For example if you
go with GiffGaff, which uses the O2 network,
you don’t have a contract: if you decide you
don’t like the coverage or the cost you can
simply buy a SIM from somebody else and
use that instead. You might jump ship to
TalkMobile, which uses the Vodafone
network, or PlusNet Mobile, which uses EE.
If you don’t want to pay up-front there are
other ways to spread the cost. Some retailers
use services such as Klarna or PayPal Credit,
which enable you to pay in three interest-free
instalments, and some credit cards have long
interest-free periods on new purchases. Just
make sure you’re choosing the right deal –
pay-later services also have longer borrowing
periods and those ones charge interest – or
that you pay off your credit card before the
interest-free period ends.Another way to make your affordable
phone even more affordable is to sell your
existing phone, or any other phone you have
sitting around. Sites such as MusicMagpie
will happily buy old phones if they’re still
working, and while the sums aren’t huge
you’d be surprised what the sites will buy:
MusicMagpie offered us the princely sum of
£7 for a 2013 HTC One M7. Expect to be
offered around £60 for a five-year-old
iPhone in good condition and half that for
a Samsung Galaxy S of similar vintage.
Watch out for lightning deals too: phone
retail is competitive as phone retailers
frequently offer phones with short-lived
special offers that can cut the cost
considerably. If you’d rather let someone else
find the special offers for you, we have live
phone deal trackers online at T3.com.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
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 £400 is the sweet spot for
affordable smartphones at the moment: once
you get closer to £300 or below you startseeing 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 £200 – 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.
50 T3 FEBRUARY 2022
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