How much should you pay for a budget phone?

While there are some exceptions, phones start to get good around the £200 mark. The sign of a truly great budget mobile is when you start to wonder why anyone in their right mind would consider spending four times as much for something that seems pretty similar 95% of the time. This happens quite a lot.

The closer you get to £100, the more likely you will see fundamental performance problems that may well get on your nerves. This includes sluggish typing inputs, lag when navigating or major stuttering when switching between your apps. We use our phones a lot, so you want to try and avoid these issues when possible.

Get to the £200-£300 mark, and you can take your pick of advanced features. You can have 5G, great gaming performance, higher-end design elements like a glass back cover or a surprisingly high-quality camera (or two).

No phone offers all of these in one package until you spend significantly more, so you will have to think about which matters most. And to get the most for your money, consider moving away from household names like Samsung to companies that you may never have considered before, like Xiaomi, Oppo and Realme.

Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 series, from £179.99

Best all-rounder

We are awarding the Redmi Note 11 series – which consists of two handsets – as the best all-rounder budget smartphones you can get in 2022 so far.

The £319 Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G model is what we could consider to be at the very top end of the budget category, but the specs and features are fantastic if you can stretch. You get a crisp 6.67-inch AMOLED display, 120Hz refresh rate, 108MP camera system, fingerprint scanner, classy design, solid battery life, IP52 dust and splash protection and even a headphone jack. While we found a few performance stutters during testing, we hope that can be ironed out via software updates.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 11, at just £199, has a lot of specs that make it stand out from other £200 smartphones:, including a 6.43 inch AMOLED screen, Snapdragon 680 chipset, 5000mAh battery, 50MP main camera sensor and a 90Hz refresh rate. That’s a fantastic affordable package overall, and definitely worth your consideration.