Best cheap phones: Big features for a small price

The best cheap phones on the market offer all the smartphone essentials without the hefty price tag of flagship competitors, like the Galaxy S24 or the iPhone 15. Here are three that deliver on features and performance for far less than you'll pay for any flagship phone.

WHAT Google Pixel 6a

THE COST $349

AVAILABLE FROM amazon.com

The $349 Pixel 6a holds its value well, even after Google's release of the Pixel 7a. The Pixel 6a keeps the same Tensor chip as the $339 Pixel 6, and many of the 6's best features. It is also often discounted to $299.

The phone is slightly smaller than the Pixel 6, featuring a 6.1-inch OLED display and a refresh rate of 60 Hertz. It has a similar camera system as the Pixel 5a, which includes a 12.2-megapixel main camera and a 12-megapixel ultrawide camera. The Tensor chip brings additional benefits you won't get with the Pixel 5a, such as Real Tone for more equitable skin tones, Face Unblur; Night Sight for low-light photography; and the Magic Eraser for removing unwanted elements from a photo.

WHAT Apple iPhone SE (2022)

THE COST $429 and up

AVAILABLE FROM apple.com

iPhone SE is a mix of an older design with the latest smartphone features, including Apple's A15 Bionic chip and 5G support, and is one of the few phones that includes a smaller, 4.7-inch screen. It's that throwback design that could be what you love or dislike most about this phone. 

The phone also includes only one, 12-megapixel main camera, which doesn't support night mode. Photos make up for this by including the Deep Fusion photo-processing technique to enhance medium- to low-light photos, and Smart HDR4 processing for improving color and contrast.

WHAT Samsung Galaxy A03S

THE COST $159.99

AVAILABLE FROM samsung.com

Samsung's Galaxy A03S includes great features and could be a fit for someone in need of a cheap phone that can handle essential tasks. The phone's 6.5-inch screen, capped at 720p resolution, is great for reading the news, watching videos and playing games. Despite some performance lag, the phone is good at multitasking. The tiny 32 gigabytes of storage space could fill up fast, so you might want to expand the storage with a microSD card.

Samsung also plans to support this phone with at least four years of security updates, which in this price range is as good as it gets. On the software side, it's less clear how many Android versions are scheduled, but the phone initially ships with Android 11.