Xiaomi continues to impress with its budget-friendly phones, managing to include decent specs, cameras, batteries and displays in devices costing a fraction of the leading flagships. Launched in 2025, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 14 Pro is no exception. The £299 phone features a crisp 6.67in AMOLED screen with a smooth 120Hz refresh rate, a 200MP main camera with natural-looking post-processing, dynamic range and optical image stabilisation, IP68 dust and water resistance, and a 5110mAh battery that will comfortably go two days with light use.
The thin bezels look great, though the slightly curved body and faux leather material doesn’t exactly scream premium. The software experience isn’t as slick as those of Samsung and Google either, and the phone comes with a bunch of unwanted third-party apps pre-installed – but it’s a worthwhile trade-off for a cheap phone that performs this well. Samsung is best known for its high-end S-series phones, but look to the A-series and you’ll find some excellent mid-range Android phones that won’t break the bank. Not only does the Samsung Galaxy A55 have the look and feel of its more expensive siblings, but it’s excellent value for money.
Included here are features you wouldn’t expect at this price, like a great-looking AMOLED screen with a smooth 120Hz refresh rate and a camera array that produces great pictures thanks to Samsung’s impressive software processing. Performance and battery life are where the A-series departs from the more expensive Galaxy devices. You won’t notice much slowdown with normal use, or when opening and closing apps, but more processor intensive activities like video clipping, gaming and photo editing are noticeably less speedy compared to Samsung’s premium offering.
We’re expecting a Pixel 9a to launch in a few months, but until then the Pixel 8a remains the best cheap Pixel phone around, especially as you’ll often find it heavily discounted. The phone takes the most interesting features of the flagship Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro and sticks them into a more affordable mid-range phone, without trimming away too much of the good stuff that makes the Pixel one of the best Android phones you can buy.
That means you’re getting all of those headline-grabbing AI camera features, such as Magic Editor and Best Take, plus the ability to remove background noise from video and translate live between two spoken languages. All Pixel phones enjoy clever software tricks like adaptive battery management, which tracks how and when you use your device to tweak performance and extend the battery life, as well as features like a circle to search, which lets you trace a circle around anything on screen to find it online.
The Tensor G3 chip is still fast, battery-efficient and secure. It also looks great in the new blue and green colourways. In our full Google Pixel 8a review, we called it “one of the best budget phones you can buy”. Heads up, Apple is due to announce the newest iPhone SE any day now, so we’d recommend holding off buying Apple’s cheapest iPhone at least until the latest model – the iPhone SE 4 – arrives.
Apple is an unavoidably premium brand, so it’s no surprise the cheapest iPhone is still the most expensive phone in this list. The iPhone SE is a thin, lightweight 5G device styled after the classic iPhone 8. It has a smaller 4.7in screen that pales in comparison with the more expensive iPhone 14 range, and a physical Touch ID button. There’s no fancy-pants facial recognition here. Yet, there’s no compromise on camera quality. Although the iPhone SE has only two lenses to work with (that means no true portrait mode, wide angle or optical zoom), it manages to produce excellent photography in all conditions. That’s thanks, partly, to the powerful A15 Bionic chip – the same found in the iPhone 13 mini – which keeps performance high and helps with processing camera output.
The Poco sub-brand is Xiaomi’s gaming and performance-focused, mid-range Android phone. The newest in the series, it launched in January and ticks all the boxes as far as cheap phones are concerned: a big and punchy screen, a long-lasting 6000mAh battery, decent storage for the price and a quick processor to boot. Camera performance is where the phone keeps its costs down. The 50MP main lens is competent enough that you can point and shoot and expect decent results, but performance drops off in low-light conditions compared to more expensive devices. It’s a reasonable compromise if photography isn’t a priority for you.
The HyperOS software isn’t as slick as the Samsung Galaxy’s OneUI or the streamlined version of Android found on Pixel phones, and the phone comes with a set of pre-installed third-party apps making it feel distinctly cheap out of the box, but there are loads of customisation options so that you can make it feel your own with some tweaking. An excellent mid-range Android phone. The OnePlus Nord 4 has a great display, a thin and premium aluminium unibody and an intuitive, streamlined and simple user interface. The cameras are a step below premium phones, but performance is good, battery life and charging speeds are impressive, and you get six years of security updates guaranteed.
