Budget Smartphones: What do you get for £100? - BBC Click By BBC Click

For the past few weeks, I've been trying out eight phones, priced between £70 and £379 to see what you can get for your money. All of these phones are Android phones. The cheapest iPhone costs more than any of these, but we have got contenders from Nokia, TCL, Xiaomi, we've got your Samsung. Honestly, it has been like a phone shop in here as I work out what these phones can do and what if anything you miss out on. First I wanted to test their performance. Generally speaking the cheapest smartphones don't have the latest and greatest chips inside them to keep costs down.

So I did some basic tasks on all of them. All of these phones were able to do these tasks, no problems at all. Even the cheapest one, the Nokia 1.3. Although this particular phone was noticeably sluggish and that made it quite frustrating to use and I feel that is falling at the first hurdle. It doesn't have to be like that because for £10 more the Alcatel phone was buttery smooth.

To push the phones a bit more I played the hit game Among Us and it wouldn't open at all on the Nokia 1.3, but here it is running on the Alcatel 1S absolutely no problem. The next challenge was to see if I could play Fortnite which is a much more demanding game with 100 players online and 3D graphics. The two cheapest phones straight up wouldn't even install it, they don't have enough memory. But it ran just fine on all the other phones, even the ones that weren't officially supported. Here it is running just fine on the Nokia 5.3, this is the cheapest phone in my test that would run it. And here I am getting Victory Royale on the TCL 10L.

I did one more test, this time with some cloud gaming on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Most of the heavy lifting is done by the remote computer server but the phone still needs to be able to handle the HD video stream and process your input quickly, otherwise the games are unplayable. So I had a go at the platformer Super Lucky's Tale. This was pushing the three cheapest phones beyond their limits. The game just stuttered too much to be playable.

But it worked beautifully on all the others, both with a touchscreen or with the Xbox controller connected. I kept replaying this time trial because there's no room for mistakes and I was able to complete it. Here's the report card and it shows you don't have to go for a top end phone for console-quality gaming. Let's take a look at the cameras. That's an area where the premium brands focus a lot of attention.

On a cheap phone, I think... if this was my mum's phone and the only way for her to send me pictures or video call me, especially right now, would I be happy with the picture quality? That's my measure of whether these phones, take good photos. Well, the picture on the cheap Nokia 1.3 was fairly poor. I don't think anyone's buying this for the camera. The other phones all took what I would say are satisfactory shots that passed my 'mum test' with the TCL one here probably being my favourite.

That shot was taken in broad daylight. What about a low-light shot? I took some of those as well. These were all varying degrees of OK, not mind-blowing but not disappointing. They all managed to take a clear and fairly bright photo, which I don't think you'd have been able to do on a super cheap phone ten years ago. Six of these phones have more than one camera lens.

The trend at the moment is to add a superwide angle camera to your phone, so you can fit a bit more in. On every one of these phones the superwide camara was noticeably worse quality than the main camera. I suppose the Samsung and OnePlus photos are OK here, but if the point of these phones is to be low cost, I sort of think why even bother with the extra lenses, do away with them and just focus on having one good main camera. In terms of video, six of the phones record ultra-high definition 4K video. The Alcatel maxes out at full HD and the Nokia 1.3 goes up to 720p. The front-facing camera has never been more important with all those video calls we are doing.

As with the other shots, the cheapest phone took a fairly low-resolution selfie and the Alcatel one was slightly better. The rest of the phones took nice sharp selfies. In terms of video from the front-facing camera, all but the very cheapest did full HD and the OnePlus could also do 4K selfie videos, although nobody needs to see my face that close up in 4K resolution. Let's talk about features. What do you lose to keep the costs down? Most of these phone casings are predominantly plastic with the exception of the OnePlus Nord which has a glass back.

This does make some of the others feel less premium, but that doesn't really matter if you put your phone in a case anyway. The two cheapest phones don't have NFC for contactless payments. None of the phones have wireless charging. Although some of them do have fast charging so you can top up your battery quickly. Sometimes paying a bit extra gets you a newer technology or something a bit fancier, so the two most expensive phones can connect to the new 5G phone networks.

And while all but one of the phones had a fingerprint reader, the Samsung and OnePlus phones had it embedded in the screen, which is a bit more fancy. I want to touch on software updates, because buying a cheap phone should not come at the expense of your security. So I asked all these companies how long they intend to provide security updates for these devices. So what conclusions can I draw from this? Well, if this is going to be somebody's only phone for taking family pictures and staying in touch with video calling and I would say it's probably worth leaning towards the more expensive end of this scale, just for a better camera. But if you want something really basic for sending emails, messages and browsing the web, the Alcatel 1S proves you can do this for under £100 pounds as long as you don't scrimp too much on the processor and the memory.

Source : BBC Click