Budget Smartphone Recommendations
What's the Best Budget Smartphone?
Cutting through the clutter of smartphone options can be tough. Our updated guide aims to spotlight the best new budget smartphones just in time for your back-to-school or back-to-work needs.
There are some really dirt cheap smartphones available through major carriers like Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T. The bottom-line cost ultimately depends on the calling plan you choose and whether or not you can swallow a multiple-year contract, which normally drives down the price of the smartphone. Several budget smartphones that emerged as our top picks support 4G, which is ideal for speedy web browsing and playing multimedia. The technology is still new, however, and 4G networks are not yet set up nationwide. No problem, because all the smartphones we researched, including the 4G models, support 3G.
Our research found that the size and quality of a smartphone's display matter a lot to users and expert reviewers.
The recommended smartphones for browsing and multimedia, including two models from HTC and one from Samsung, feature displays of at least four inches, which provides ample real estate for playback and shows web pages as they appear on a computer. These displays are also high-resolution and color is rich and full. The smartphone we recommend for email and messaging is the BlackBerry Curve, which features a physical QWERTY keyboard, although its small display puts a damper on multimedia fun. All the new smartphones for cheap also include cameras that shoot decent, not prize-worthy, images. Call quality ranges from very good to impressive, depending on the model.
For some users, the choice of smartphone comes down to how many apps they could download to it. Here, iPhones reign supreme, although we aren't won over by the iPhone 3GS, which meets our criteria for cheap but seems outdated compared to our other picks. Read our full guide to the best cheap smartphones to assess your options.
