These days, the best Android phones under $300 don’t require you to compromise a good experience. As mobile technology gets better and more affordable, you can enjoy features like full 5G connectivity, good software support, and fast charging, all without having to pay a fortune. Know what’s even better? These sub-$300 phones often have some goodies like 3.5mm audio ports and expansion slots, which are no longer found on flagship devices.
At Android Central, we test dozens of phones per year, including ones that are less expensive or flashy, so our recommendations come with first-hand testing and reviews.
My top pick is the CMF Phone 1 by Nothing, a $200 phone that feels nothing like a budget pick. Not only does it have a unique modular design, but it’s got a top-class OLED display, cameras you’d normally find on $400+ phones, great software features, and an impressive software update commitment. But Nothing had to compromise somewhere to meet that $200 price point, which means NFC isn’t included.
That’s why there are so many other picks on this list, because while the CMF Phone 1 is the only good $200 phone I’ve ever used, some other phones here might fill a particular niche better for you. Ready to spend less and still love the phone you get? Here are the best Android phones you can get for less than $300.
Nick grew up in a telecom-savvy household and has been reviewing phones since 2011. Whether it’s waxing poetic about Nokia’s glory days or flipping open the latest foldable phones, he knows what makes a good phone and can help you understand which one to pick.
At a glance
Best overall
Sporting a unique modular design with hot-swappable accessories and backs, the CMF Phone 1 stands out among the crowded pack. It’s even got powerful cameras and a fantastic processor, making this the best overall pick.
Best support
The Samsung Galaxy A25 5G offers an awesome Super AMOLED screen, a big battery, class-leading software update support and a whole lot more, at a price that’s just too good to resist.
Best design
There a lot to love about the Poco X6 Pro, but its design will be the first standout feature you see—especially if you choose the yellow vegan leather version. Plus, fast 67W charging, a great main camera, and lots of features round it out.
Best camera
Is it any real surprise that we’ve selected a Google Pixel phone for category of best camera? The Pixel 6a will consistently capture a fantastic photo despite what specs might make you think, and that’s what makes it truly great.
Best display
The Redmi Note 13 Pro is a well-rounded phone with great overall specs and an even better AMOLED display, featuring eye-friendly features and a gorgeous 12-bit color palette.
6. Moto G Stylus 5G (2024)
Best with stylus
The Moto G Stylus 5G (2024) makes jotting down notes and precise screen interactions a cakewalk. It’s the best mid-range phone Motorola has ever made, yet easy to find for under $300.
Best overall
Nick has been reviewing phones since 2011, using everything from dirt-cheap no-name brands to the most expensive flagships from companies like Samsung and Google. He’s a huge fan of folding phones and anything breaks the mold. He’s also an avid photographer and can commonly be found carrying around three or four phones at a time for camera comparisons.
The CMF Phone 1 is the most exciting budget phone I’ve ever used. It’s also the only truly good $200 phone I’ve ever used and regularly feels more like a $400 phone. The first thing you’ll notice about it, though, is the unique modular design. The back is held on with five removable screws and can be swapped out with several different colors and styles from the company.
Nothing also released official 3D printing guides, meaning you can make your own accessories and backs or buy one from the 3D printing community! A plethora of unique accessories are hot-swappable via the single large thumbscrew on the bottom right, making it easy to pop on a kickstand, lanyard, or anything else you can dream up.
Aside from the design, the rest of the phone is simply brilliant. The bright OLED panel up front is not only wonderful to look at in any light but it’s also incredibly eye-friendly. It’s got the most powerful processor in its price class by far, giving you plenty of power for everyday tasks and surprisingly excellent gaming performance, as well.
The only reason this phone doesn’t get the award for best camera under $300 is because the Pixel 6a exists, but it’s barely a step down from that phone. Plus, the CMF Phone 1 takes much better portrait photos than the Pixel thanks to the dedicated portrait camera on the back and a better background blurring algorithm than Google’s.
Finally, Nothing OS is a superb OS that I prefer over most flavors of Android. It not only has a unique dot matrix-like style but also features plenty of fun home screen widgets, great features, and three years of promised updates. Nothing regularly updates its OS with new features and security patches, too, so you never have to worry about feeling out of date.
Best support
In typical A-series fashion, the Samsung Galaxy A25 5G manages to deliver excellent value for money. The smartphone features a 6.5-inch Super AMOLED panel with a resolution of 1080×2340 pixels and a 120Hz refresh rate. Sure, the waterdrop-style notch has become a little long in the tooth at this point, but the screen gets pretty bright and works well for everyday usage.
Powered by the company’s homegrown Exynos 1280 SoC, the Samsung Galaxy A25 5G comes with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. While these are not top-of-the-line specifications, they’re more than enough for handling tasks like web browsing and some casual gaming. You even get an expansion slot that can take up microSD cards of up to 1TB in size, allowing you to carry pretty much your entire media library in your pocket.
The smartphone runs Android 14 (with Samsung’s newest One UI 6 overlay) and will get up to four years of OS updates, as well as five years of security updates. That means you get Android updates until Android 18! This excellent update policy alone makes the Samsung Galaxy A25 5G one of the best Android phones in its price range.
Speaking of cameras, there’s a triple-lens setup at the back with a 50MP primary unit, an 8MP ultra-wide module, and a 2MP macro sensor. The smartphone can shoot some decent images in well-lit conditions, but low-light photos are largely unimpressive. As you’d expect, the macro lens is mostly useless and only exists to pad the spec sheet. Up front, there’s a 13MP unit for all your selfies and video calls. The whole package is backed by a 5,000mAh battery that comes with 25W wired charging support.
Best design
Harish Jonnalagadda tries to make sense of the befuddling maze that is the Asian smartphone industry. Before switching to phones, he used to write about PC hardware, covering motherboards and video cards. When he’s not playing with the latest phones, he’s either reading on his Kindle or trying to clear his backlog of games on Steam. He can also be found shouting at the TV over the weekends at Arsenal’s continued woes.
If the picture above doesn’t already clue you in, the Poco X6 Pro has looks to kill and the build quality to match. The yellow color looks particularly striking and elegant with its vegan leather back, and the AMOLED display on the front is among the very best you’ll find on mid-range phones, much less in the sub-$300 price class.
Poco’s choice of a fast processor, plenty of RAM, and fast UFS 4.0 storage mean this phone feels faster than most in its class, giving you plenty of power for multitasking and gaming, alike. The downside is that the processor is a little too powerful to run without a more expensive internal cooling solution, so the phone gets pretty hot during longer gaming sessions.
Thankfully, that powerful processor doesn’t negatively affect battery life. Quite the opposite, actually! Our reviewer, Harish, said that the Poco X6 featured “standout battery life” with ultra-fast 67W wired charging support.
The Poco X6 comes with Xiaomi’s HyperOS, built on Android 14, which sports plenty of convenient features, great UI design, and three years of promised updates. That means you’ll see Android 16 plus one additional year of security updates before you should consider upgrading again.
Lastly, the main camera is quite good but the remainder of the cameras aren’t worth using at all—particularly that useless 2MP macro camera. We’re still not sure why some companies feel like a 2MP camera is worth putting on any phone in 2024 but we’d recommend just not using it.
Best camera
Nick has been reviewing phones since 2011, using everything from dirt-cheap no-name brands to the most expensive flagships from companies like Samsung and Google. He’s a huge fan of folding phones and anything breaks the mold. He’s also an avid photographer and can commonly be found carrying around three or four phones at a time for camera comparisons.
For generations now, Google Pixel phones have been lauded for their excellent cameras that take the most consistently-good pictures around. That’s largely in part to Google’s incredible software, which utilizes an intelligent HDR+ algorithm that constantly takes photos, then combines several into one amazing picture automatically.
If you compare the spec sheet for this phone versus other cameras—even ones on this list—you’ll probably wonder how a 12 megapixel camera could possibly outclass a 50MP or higher sensor. The answer is that Google doesn’t need more megapixels to make a great picture, and that’s all because of what I said in the paragraph above.
I’ve regularly called Pixel phones the best phones for parents and pet owners because of their ability to capture crisp images of objects in motion—in this case, that means the kids and pets that refuse to hold still for a photo.
But while the camera is best-in-class, you’ll also be pleasantly surprised at the performance of the Tensor G1 processor inside the Pixel 6a. It’s twice as fast as the processor in the Galaxy A25 above and can play games and multitask better because of it. Tensor is known for getting a bit on the warm side, though, so don’t plan to play cutting-edge games for too long at a time.
The real downside to picking up a Pixel 6a at this point is that Android 15 is the last major OS update the phone will receive, as official OS updates end in July 2025. You’ll still get two more years of security updates, at least, but know that the new features you get next Summer are the last new features you’ll get.
Best display
Harish Jonnalagadda tries to make sense of the befuddling maze that is the Asian smartphone industry. Before switching to phones, he used to write about PC hardware, covering motherboards and video cards. When he’s not playing with the latest phones, he’s either reading on his Kindle or trying to clear his backlog of games on Steam. He can also be found shouting at the TV over the weekends at Arsenal’s continued woes.
When it comes to displays, few look as good as the one on the Redmi Note 13 Pro. This gorgeous 6.67-inch AMOLED panel features those deep blacks and vibrant colors AMOLEDs are known for, and it punches that second part up a notch with 12-bit Dolby Vision support.
If you love watching movies on your phone, this is the one to get as that display will deliver the most accurate colors, widest dynamic range, and plenty of brightness to see clearly even in bright sunlight. Better yet, Xiaomi outfitted the display with eye-friendly capabilities including TÜV Rheinland certifications for low blue light, circadian friendly, and even flicker-free thanks to DC-like dimming at high brightness and 1920Hz PWM dimming at low brightness.
On top of that display is super durable Gorilla Glass Victus, a type of glass you normally only find on phones hundreds of dollars more expensive. And last but certainly not least is Xiaomi’s Wet Touch feature which makes it easy to use the touch screen even when your hands are wet. Try that with your current phone and you’ll find that it’s impossible to accurately type or swipe when water is on the glass.
While our reviewer Harish wasn’t impressed with the phone when it launched in September 2023, Xiaomi has since updated the phone with Android 14, fixed tons of bugs, and the new lower price all come together to make this a significantly better value than it used to be.
While Xiaomi was very slow to update this phone to Android 14—seven months after the phone and Android 14 officially launched—the Redmi Note 13 Pro still gets two more years of OS and security updates, though, so Xiaomi has plenty of time to make up for the slow first platform update.
Best with stylus
Derrek resides on the Best Coast, originally from San Diego, and now living in Seattle. He’s a long-time mobile tech enthusiast, starting with an obsession with Nokia that began at the age of 12. Since then, he’s been lovingly known by most of his friends as the “Phone Guy.” When he’s not talking tech, he’s either working out, hiking, playing video games (Playstation), or making videos.
Motorola truly reinvented itself over the past year as it launched not only our favorite foldable phone ever, but also a line of budget-friendly phones that look and feel amazing. The Moto G Stylus 5G 2024 is the perfect example of this, melding a stylus design glad in vegan leather, all while housing a lovely stylus inside the phone’s svelte frame.
The Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 processor inside isn’t the fastest chip on this list, but it’s still faster than the one found in the Samsung Galaxy A25 near the top of this list. Of course, the main draw of this phone isn’t this performance though, it’s the stylus house inside the body.
Motorola has a suite of software custom designed to work with the stylus, and although this isn’t an active stylus like you’ll find on more expensive Samsung phones that have stylus support, it’s still nice to have one to jot down quick notes or annotate images and screenshots. Especially since it’s always inside the phone waiting to be quickly used!
Motorola also upgraded the cameras this year, outfitting it with some surprisingly good image capture including an ultrawide-angle lens. Our reviewer, Derrek, was really impressed with the image quality and specifically lauded the phone for that feature.
While Motorola ships this one with Android 14 and its excellent Hello UX—complete with all our favorite Motorola gestures like double-chop to activate the flashlight—the Moto G Stylus 5G 2024 will only get updated to Android 15, plus three years of security updates to ensure you feel safe online. If you don’t care about tons of updates and want to prioritize a stylus, this is a great choice for under $300.
How to choose
While there’s no doubt that the best Android phones offer you an unmatched user experience — complete with features like top-tier cameras and wireless charging — these devices don’t come cheap. If you can’t (or just don’t want to) spend thousands of dollars on a flagship phone, we suggest taking a look at one of the many options available under the $300 price point. Sure, these do miss out on some nice-to-have features found in expensive phones and aren’t supported for long, but they cover all the basics, while also having some extras. So, before making your decision, do take a look at what features you need the most.
Our top choice is the CMF Phone 1, a brilliant pick at just $200 with an option to upgrade the RAM and storage for $80 more. Even at that price, it’s still a better phone than any other on this list, including a bright and beautiful—but also eye-friendly—OLED display, a powerful processor, the second-best cameras on this list, and a unique modular design that you can 3D print parts for. It’s an unbelievably fun phone that blew me away from the moment I tried it.
And don’t forget about the Samsung Galaxy A25 5G if you’re looking for some serious long-term value. While the processor isn’t the fastest on this list, it has the longest software support promise of them all—5 years! That means it’ll see Android 18 before Samsung drops support, something that no other phone on the list can claim. That’s great if you like to hold on to your phones for a long time.
Lastly, if we’re comparing affordable phones with those that aren’t so affordable, we can’t ignore the Moto G Stylus 5G (2024). This thing comes with a swanky vegan leather back panel and an integrated stylus that makes it look and feel extremely premium. There’s even NFC support for contactless payments, another feature that’s commonly found in flagship phones.
How we test
Why you can trust Android Central
☑️ One of the oldest and most trusted Android sites on the web
☑️ Over 15 years of product testing
☑️ Thousands of products reviewed and tested since 2007
☑️ Over 50 phones tested every year by our team
Testing phones at Android Central involves much more than simply booting up a device to ensure it works. We can use phones with a consumer mindset because we are consumers, in addition to Android enthusiasts and product testers. Unlike some sites that rely solely on benchmark programs and lab tests to verify performance, we use smartphones in real-life scenarios to better understand how a device will perform during normal, day-to-day use.
This involves personally hitting the streets to see how a phone’s camera will perform during the day and night, and comparing pictures from two devices side by side to see how they differ. Our testing involves running multiple performance-heavy apps simultaneously to see if a phone will overheat or swiftly lose battery life. It involves booting up graphics-intensive games at the highest settings to see if the images will lag or stutter, and it means draining the battery of a phone to zero to test the speed at which it will recharge.
This barely scratches the surface of every testing metric we apply to each new device, so check out our guide to how Android Central tests and reviews phones to learn more.
#Android #phones
source: https://www.androidcentral.com/best-android-phones-under-300
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25612450/Apple_Airpods_pro_hearing_aid.jpg?w=1068&resize=1068,0&ssl=1 "The AirPods Pro 2 will soon double as hearing aids")
