UKC

Hi, I'm looking to buy a new budget mobile phone at around £100-£150. Does anyone have any suggestions? How important are software and security updates as the likes of Ulefone don't seem to get them and others only get a couple of years and I don't want to have to replace every couple of years. Thanks

I used to spend in the order of £200 for phones. Always good spec. BLU abd Moto being usual brands. 

On paper they are as good as £500 phones, but in real life they were slow, glitchy, Bluetooth/WiFi compatibility issue etc and batteries would fairly quickly kill them off.

I now spend £400 on a phone. Current is a Pixel 6a. Apart from the fingerprint scanner being rubbish it just works. 

At your price point I would get a second hand good quality unit (pixel or Samsung), ideally one where the battery can theoretically be replaced since you never know why it was sold.

I buy year-old phones from big name manufacturers and keep them until they die. I usually get 3 or 4 years out of them. I've currently got a Samsung S10e that cost me £150. I've had it 18 months now and it's still got plenty of life left in it.

I actually look forward to the time that it stops getting updates and just stays as it is. Some think I'm taking a huge risk here, but I'm of the opinion that if I'm sensible with what I do and especially what I install then the risk is tiny.

I currently have an old Moto g8 (~£200) as my main phone and a Ulefone Armor X7 (~£100) as my bike satnav (no sim). Both have been faultless for about 3 years so far. No obvious degradation of battery capacity. I wouldn't want the Ulefone as my main phone: It's quite bulky (thick) and heavy due to the armouring and the massive battery, but it's great on the bike. I'm not a 'power user' (gaming?), so I don't need anything more fancy. Fingerprint teader is fine on the Moto; I don't use it on the Ulefone. Cameras are adequate as "aide-mémoire" but not much more.

Moto G22 or G32

I’ve had Motorola phones for years now. Go for the ones with the 5000ah battery. Never paid more than £160 new. Very reliable, the 5 year old one sits in the car as an emergency phone with a pay as you go sim, it’s still got a good battery life.

A mention for the OnePlus Nord series, apparently very high spec for the price (I've traditionally had compact phones - Sony Xperia until they went a funny shape, then Google Pixel (also great value but they too went a funny shape), now have a Nord.

5000Ah! Does it double as dumb bell when you can't get to the gym?

😉

Sorry, senior moment, 5000mAh. Is that right.

I've just replaced an iPhone 5S that couldn't get beyond iOS12 so was running out of working apps, with a Motorola G13 on Android 13 for £120 new. So far, other than an initial  bit of "operating system shock" it's doing the job and the apps I need are running happily. I spent a little time wading through reviews, and for what I want this or the G53 seemed to tick enough boxes, and it didn't seem worth spending any more. Both had the 5Ah battery, and  128GB of storage. I run it on an 02 3-2-1 PAYG SIM.

Ive got a blackview bv5300 which cost £100. It's got a decent sized battery which easily lasts two days, it's waterproof and rugged, it runs Android 12 so most apps work and it's dual SIM so I can switch between two networks depending on what the service is like. It's nowhere near as big and heavy as my last rugged phone. The downside is that the specs are a bit weak: there's not much storage so I had to add an SD card and there's not much ram, so apps don't tend to stay running in the background for as long. The processor is a bit slow and there can be a lag of 10s or so loading things like OS maps. It doesn't have fancy features like wireless charging or Google pay. Ultimately I can live with all of that and I'm happier using it in all sorts of harsh environments because I know that if I do break it I haven't thrown away £500.

I always used to have Samsung S series on comtract. When I went to PAYG I tried the Samsung A series of budget phones but found then slow, poor camera quality and loaded with bloatware.

Moved to £100-£200 Motos a few years and much prefer them to Samsung. Have a G62 and it's a perfectly good phone, samera is slightly lacking compared to flagship phones, but good enough for my purposes.

I'm still using a Moto E2, bought from a mate (network supplied, not needed), in 2016, for £30. Due to google bloatware updates (and Android's well documented inability to clean up System memory; no-one seems to know what it is, or how to clear it), it's starting to run out of space, and the battery is starting to struggle.

But I can't find anything of a similar size (13*6.5 cm) to replace it; all modern phones seem to be mini phablets.

Any ideas?

Get a refurbished phone. I just got a refurb Pixel 5 for around your budget, and it's better than anything that your money would buy new. Previously I bought a refurb Pixel 2 in 2020 and it was a great phone despite being a few years old at the time.

Buying new phones is a game for people with too much money or who already have all of the rack, jackets, boots, etc that they'll ever need.

It's really hard to find a decent spec Android phone that is a sensible size nowadays. I started a thread on this a while back and ended up getting my current Samsung S10e secondhand. There was basically nothing else available for a reasonable price and size. It's a little bit bigger at about 140mm X 68mm. The Asus ZenFone looked like a good option too, but was only available new at the time I was looking. They might be affordable secondhand now.

I have had mixed results with Ulephone and Black view and another of the cheap brands that I can't remember. 

Over the years I have bought the for the lads at work and they pretty much all failed in a year. Mainly not charging or no screen display. 

As others have said, the Pixel range are great, my first one was a pixel 3a, did everything I needed it to. 

Currently posting this from a Samsung 52A, again does what I need. 

I only changed from the Pixel to the Samsung because it's waterproof and will take a SD card. 

I have around 500 word docs on my phone that I access daily. (typically a random 10 of the 500) I can't afford to lose them if the phone dies so I store them on a removable SD card.  Yes I know, cloud back up etc but I havnt found a app yet that backs up what's on the phone but leaves the files on the phone, everything I have tried moves the files to the cloud and I can't access the when I'm remote with no signal. 

I think that's a rather unnecessary and dismissive remark. The two Motos I've suggested above are available for as little as about £120, and are excellent solutions. Buying an alternative phone second-hand is not necessarily 'better.'

Funny, I've been looking at reviews all morning on sub 200€ smartphones. I had Motorolas for 12 years then my last phone was a Xiomi which was utter shite. No idea why I changed loyalty - big mistake.

So I'm about to head out this afternoon and buy a Moto G53 5G for 199€.

E

If you want small and cheap, I use a Cubot pocket.

It's been superceded by the cubot pocket 3.

If you want tough they do the kingkong mini, the new version is £130.

I've used it now for 2 years after getting fed up lugging around a Samsung.

Most cloud storage solutions (like Dropbox or Google Drive) will have a "make available offline" option that keeps the file locally as well as in the cloud. Storing a single copy of something that business-critical on an SD card is asking for trouble and seems guaranteed to bite you eventually.

If the app is focused on actual backup rather than just cloud storage, which are quite different but often conflated, then it shouldn't ever remove anything in the first place, just copy for safety.

I would definitely make several other copies even manually, if you don't like any other solution, microSD cards do have a bad tendency to die without much warning.

You can buy the previous generation top-end phone for about the same amount as a budget new phone. It will have greater performance, greater capability, and ultimately will be re-use if something already made rather than introducing more electronic waste into the world.

Is just my take on it.

I will take another look, it's been about 2 years since I last lost my rag looking at such things. 

I do a manual backup once a week to my PC and once on the PC I put a copy on the work server too. I can afford to lose the info because everything in my files is also on the job sheets for each site / machine but having instant access to what is effectively 500 plus site diaries with brife details of every visit to said site going back to 2007 saves me so much time. 

The phone is a good offline(?) backup in case your work PCs/cloud gets hacked and docs encrypted for ransom.

That happened to a local employer and 4 months later they're still having trouble.

My offline backup is usb drives - when not powered up they can't be hacked.

In reply to thread:

Thanks everyone for the tips as I too need a new cheap phone as camera bust and GPS sometimes a few km wrong for no discernible reason.

Unfortunately there isn't enough data there to run things if we did get hacked but our server is backed up physically by our It guy on to an offline system incase we do get hacked. 

Last year one of our customers was hacked and it took them down for 3 weeks, it's a multi billion pound international company. They were down 3 weeks because they refused to pay and it took 3 weeks to clean everybit of their system all around the world. Would have been far cheaper to pay up but they refused. 

Earlier this year one of our suppliers was hacked, they are one of the biggest in the world. No one is immune.