How to tell if a budget smartphone is actually worth buying

Budget phones have got remarkably good. They have also got remarkably good at looking good while cutting the things you cannot see in a shop.

Here is what to check, in the order that matters.

Software support, first and always

Find out how many years of security updates the manufacturer promises for that specific model. Not for the brand, for the model, because it varies within a brand.

A phone that costs two hundred dollars with two years of support costs you a hundred dollars a year. A phone that costs three hundred and fifty with five years of support costs you seventy.

The cheaper phone is more expensive. This is the single calculation that reframes the whole category and it is the one nobody does.

Some manufacturers now publish support windows clearly. Reward them for it.

Memory

Look for the RAM figure and treat anything at the low end as a phone with a short comfortable life.

Memory is what determines whether apps stay open when you switch between them, and app memory requirements grow every year. A phone that is adequate on memory today will be frustrating in three years and unusable in five.

If you have to choose between a faster chip and more memory at the same price, take the memory every time.

Storage, and the card slot

Check the storage and check whether there is a microSD slot.

Budget phones with small storage fill up quickly, and full flash storage slows down measurably. A card slot solves this for photographs and media, and it is increasingly rare.

Also check that the card slot is not shared with the second SIM, because on many phones it is one or the other.

The screen

Look at it in the shop, outdoors if you can get to a window.

Brightness is where budget phones cut most visibly, and a screen you cannot read in sunlight is a daily annoyance. Resolution matters less than brightness for ordinary use.

Refresh rate is nice and it is not important.

The camera, honestly

Ignore the megapixel count. A budget phone advertising a very high megapixel main camera and three additional lenses is usually giving you one usable camera and two that exist to make the specification list longer.

Those extra two are frequently a low resolution macro lens and a depth sensor, and both are close to useless.

One good main camera beats four bad ones. Look at sample photographs from reviews taken indoors, which is where cheap sensors fail.

The battery and charging

Battery capacity on budget phones is often excellent, because a less powerful chip and a dimmer screen use less.

Charging speed is where they cut. Check what is included in the box, because many now ship without a charger at all, and a slow charger with a large battery means a long wait.

The bands

If you are in the United States, check that the model supports the bands your carrier uses. Imported and unlocked models sometimes do not, and a phone that works but drops to a slower connection in your area is a daily problem.

This catches people buying online and it is entirely avoidable by checking one page.

What I would buy

Upper budget rather than lower. The jump from the cheapest tier to the one above it buys disproportionately more, particularly in memory and screen brightness.

A model from a manufacturer that publishes its support window.

A single good camera over a specification list.

And I would spend ten minutes finding out how long it will be supported before spending anything at all. That number is worth more than everything else on the box.