Best budget phones
Many flagship phones are prohibitively expensive for most of us, but as the top end gets better so do more affordable models. In fact, it’s now possible to buy a decent model for under £200. The best budget devices are also more attractive in the long-term thanks to cheaper contract prices, though you might prefer to buy these outright and then pay only for your minutes, texts and data.
Our current favourite is the Xiaomi Redmi Note 8T. It might not be the most familiar brand name but it is the best combination of value, specs and design out there right now.
In our experience, the ideal way to get a cheap phone is to buy it SIM-free then grab a great-value SIM-only deal. You won’t be paying £50 per month for a phone for the next two years, and you can swap it for a newer model whenever you fancy it.
Over the following pages we rank the best budget phones on sale right now.
1. Xiaomi Redmi Note 8T
Price: £179 from fave.co/2tCDndX
Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 8T is a mid-ranger with a budget price. It headlines with a 2GHz Snapdragon 665 octa-core processor and a 4,000mAh cell for two-day battery life. The 6.3in 19.5:9 Full-HD display uses a Dot Drop (waterdrop) notch to house a 13Mp selfie camera, but the real star is the 48Mp camera at the rear – one of four lens that make up the Note 8T’s primary camera. Aside from this 48Mp lens, which is able to use pixel-binning to combine four pixels into one and create much better quality 12Mp images, the Note 8T has 8Mp ultra-wide, 2Mp Macro and 2Mp depth sensors.
Design
Our first impression of Redmi Note 8T out of the box was that it is somewhat bulky, heavy at 199g and rather chunky for today’s standards at 8.6mm thick.
That’s not to say it is inelegant, with its rounded sides and curved glass at the rear allowing it to fit right in with more premium models.
This is Gorilla Glass 5, which is commendable in a budget phone, and should help protect it from accidental damage. That’s a very good thing, since the materials used here can make the Note 8T rather slippery in the hand.
The quad-lens camera protrudes from the phone’s body, located on the back just above a fingerprint sensor that is – in more expensive models – nowadays often built right into the screen.
While none of Xiaomi’s line-up is fully waterproof, in the Redmi Note 8T it has applied a splash-resistant coating. Another intriguing new feature in this model is the self-cleaning speaker and AUX input, able to expel dust and debris through vibration.
You’ll find the SIM tray, power and volume buttons in their usual places, while on top is an infrared sensor that is increasingly found only in Xiaomi phones, able to control a compatible TV in place of your standard remote.
Adorning the front of Redmi Note 8T is a 6.3in AMOLED panel with a Full-HD+ resolution. A small notch at the top of the screen is used to place the selfie camera, which leaves the overall screen-to-body ratio at 88.3 percent. The bezels are larger than we would ordinarily expect to see on a Xiaomi phone, with the bottom large enough to include the Redmi logo, which is also found on the rear. The phone is tall with a 19.5:9 aspect ratio, so despite this it fits comfortably in the hand.
Surprisingly for AMOLED we found rather cold and pasty colours presented by the display, but the colour temperature is easily tweaked in the settings. Thankfully this is a bright screen (claimed 500 nits), because it’s less easy to do something about that.
We found the rear fingerprint sensor worked quite satisfactorily, waking and unlocking the phone with a single touch of the index finger. Though the sensor itself is rather small, it is place exactly where you expect to find it, and therefore quickly becomes second nature to use. The only real gripe we have with this implementation is that it is more difficult to unlock when sitting on a desk, rather than in your hand.
Performance
The octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 processor inside the Redmi Note 8T is a capable chip, but not a fast one. It does, however, provide an improvement over the Redmi Note 7’s Snapdragon 660.
Our usual benchmarks found stronger core performance here than in better-known models such as the Moto G8 Plus which has a similar processor, though it is a little slower than some recent phones using the Snapdragon 712, such as the Realme 5 Pro.
The generous 4,000mAh battery endured 8 hours 27 minutes in Geekbench’s battery test, which should mean it is good for a full day’s use. Xiaomi claims two days of life from the
