Best Android phones under $300 2025

Who says you must break the bank to get a decent Android phone? You can get one of the best Android phones under $300 with features such as 5G connectivity, solid cameras, and extended software support. The sub-300 smartphones also include 3.5mm audio and microSD, which you don't see on the more expensive models.

At Android Central, we test a plethora of phones—including those that are pretty affordable yet packed with goodness—so first-hand testing and reviews back our recommendations.

With that said, our top vote for the best Android phone under $300 goes to the CMF Phone 1 by Nothing. With a unique modular design, this thing looks and feels far more premium than its modest price tag might have you believe. The Nothing phone has a vibrant OLED panel, solid camera quality, and up to three years of security updates, but it lacks basics like NFC. We also love the Samsung Galaxy A25 5G for its four years of OS updates and the Moto G Stylus 5G (2024), which packs an integrated stylus and wireless charging.

Written by

Written by

Nick Sutrich

Nick grew up in a telecom-savvy household and has been reviewing phones since 2011. Whether it's waxing poetic about Nokia's glory days or flipping open the latest foldable phones, he knows what makes a good phone and can help you understand which one to pick.

At a glance

Best overall

Reviewed by

Reviewed by

Nick Sutrich

Nick has been reviewing phones since 2011, using everything from dirt-cheap no-name brands to the most expensive flagships from companies like Samsung and Google. He's a huge fan of folding phones and anything breaks the mold. He's also an avid photographer and can commonly be found carrying around three or four phones at a time for camera comparisons.

The CMF Phone 1 is the most exciting budget phone I've ever used. It's also the only truly good $200 phone I've ever used and regularly feels more like a $400 phone. You can't help but notice the unique modular design and the five removable screws on the back. You can swap the screws with others with a different color to add a splash of color to the smartphone.

Nothing has also released official 3D printing guides, meaning you can make your accessories and backs or buy one from the 3D printing community! Thanks to the single large thumbscrew on the bottom right. Its unique accessories are hot-swappable, making it easy to pop on a kickstand, lanyard, or anything else you can dream up.

Aside from the design, the rest of the smartphone is simply brilliant. The bright OLED panel up front is fantastic in any light and incredibly eye-friendly. For its price class, the powerful chipset gives you a lot of power for your daily tasks and has surprisingly excellent gaming performance.

This phone doesn't win the award for the best camera under $300 because the Pixel 6a still exists, but it's barely a step down from that phone. Plus, the CMF Phone 1 takes much better portrait photos than the Pixel 6a, primarily because of the dedicated portrait sensor on the back and a better background blurring algorithm than Google's.

Finally, Nothing OS is a superb OS that I prefer over most Android flavors. It has a unique dot matrix-like style and plenty of fun home screen widgets, great features, and up to three years of promised security updates. Nothing regularly updates its OS with new features and security patches, so you'll never have to worry about feeling out of date.

Best support

In typical A-series fashion, the Samsung Galaxy A25 5G delivers excellent value for money. The super-affordable phone has a 6.5-inch Super AMOLED panel with a resolution of 1080x2340 pixels and a 120Hz refresh rate. Sure, the waterdrop-style notch has become a little long in the tooth, but the screen still gets pretty bright and works well for everyday usage.

Powered by the company's homegrown Exynos 1280 SoC, the Samsung Galaxy A25 5G has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. While these are not top-of-the-line specifications, they're more than enough to handle tasks such as web browsing and casual gaming. You even get an expansion slot that can take up microSD cards of up to 1TB, allowing you to carry your entire media library in your pocket.

Samsung provides four years of OS and five years of security updates. The phone runs Android 14 (with Samsung's One UI 6 overlay), so you will receive updates until Android 18! This excellent update policy alone makes the Samsung Galaxy A25 5G one of the best Android phones in its price segment.

Speaking of cameras, the smartphone has a triple-lens rear system with a 50MP primary unit, an 8MP ultra-wide module, and a 2MP macro sensor. The smartphone can shoot decent images in well-lit conditions, but low-light photos are largely unimpressive. As expected, the macro lens is primarily useless and only exists to pad the spec sheet. There's a 13MP unit for selfies and video calls. Samsung also adds a 5,000mAh battery with 25W wired charging support.

Best design

Reviewed by

Reviewed by

Harish Jonnalagadda

Harish Jonnalagadda tries to make sense of the befuddling maze that is the Asian smartphone industry. Before switching to phones, he used to write about PC hardware, covering motherboards and video cards. When he's not playing with the latest phones, he's either reading on his Kindle or trying to clear his backlog of games on Steam. He can also be found shouting at the TV over the weekends at Arsenal's continued woes.

If the picture above doesn't convince you, the Poco X6 Pro has the look to kill and the build quality to match. The yellow colorway looks striking and elegant with its vegan leather back, and the AMOLED panel on the front is easily one of the best you'll find on any mid-range phone, much less in the sub-$300 price bracket.

The inclusion of a super-fast SoC, 8GB or 12GB of RAM, and speedy UFS 4.0 storage means this phone feels snappier than most in its class while giving you loads of power for multitasking and gaming alike. The downside is that the chipset is too powerful to run without a more expensive internal cooling solution, so the phone gets hot during longer gaming sessions.

Thankfully, the Mediatek Dimensity 8300 Ultra processor doesn't negatively affect battery life—quite the opposite! Our reviewer, Harish, noted that the Poco X6 featured "standout battery life" and ultra-fast 67W wired charging support.

The Poco X6 comes with Xiaomi's HyperOS on top of Android 14. This OS sports plenty of convenient features, an excellent UI design, and three years of promised updates. That means you'll see Android 16 plus one additional year of security updates before you consider upgrading again.

Lastly, the primary camera is quite good, but the rest aren't worth using—particularly that useless 2MP macro unit. We're still unsure why companies think a 2MP sensor is worth putting on any phone in 2024, but we recommend not using it.

Best camera

Reviewed by

Reviewed by

Nick Sutrich

Nick has been reviewing phones since 2011, using everything from dirt-cheap no-name brands to the most expensive flagships from companies like Samsung and Google. He's a huge fan of folding phones and anything breaks the mold. He's also an avid photographer and can commonly be found carrying around three or four phones at a time for camera comparisons.

For generations, the Pixel lineup has been the first choice when looking for a smartphone with good cameras. That's mainly due to Google's incredible software, which utilizes an intelligent HDR+ algorithm that constantly takes photos and combines several into one amazing picture with little to no effort.

If you compare the spec sheet for this phone to other phones—even ones on this list—you'll probably wonder how a 12MP camera could outclass a 50MP or higher sensor. The answer is that Google doesn't need more megapixels to make a great photo, and that's all because of what I said in the paragraph above.

I've regularly called Pixel phones the best phones for parents and pet owners because of their ability to capture crisp images of objects in motion—in this case, that means the kids and the pets that refuse to hold still for a photo.

But while the camera is best-in-class, you'll also be pleasantly surprised at the overall performance of the Tensor G1 SoC inside the Pixel 6a. It's twice as fast as the chipset in the Galaxy A25 above and, thus, can handle games and multitasking better. Tensor is known for getting a bit on the warm side, so don't plan on playing cutting-edge games for too long.

The real downside to picking up a Pixel 6a is that Android 15 will be the last major OS update this phone gets, as official OS updates will end in July 2025. You'll still get two more years of security updates, but know that the new features you get next summer will be the last ones you'll get.

Best display

Reviewed by

Reviewed by

Harish Jonnalagadda

Harish Jonnalagadda tries to make sense of the befuddling maze that is the Asian smartphone industry. Before switching to phones, he used to write about PC hardware, covering motherboards and video cards. When he's not playing with the latest phones, he's either reading on his Kindle or trying to clear his backlog of games on Steam. He can also be found shouting at the TV over the weekends at Arsenal's continued woes.

When it comes to displays, few look as good as the one on the Redmi Note 13 Pro—this gorgeous 6.67-inch AMOLED panel with a 1220 x 2712 resolution and 1,800 peak brightness. The display also features the deep blacks and vibrant colors that AMOLEDs are known for, and it punches that second part up a notch with 12-bit Dolby Vision support.

If you love watching movies on your phone, this is the one to get, as that display will deliver the most accurate colors, the widest dynamic range, and plenty of brightness to see even in bright sunlight. Xiaomi outfitted the display with eye-friendly capabilities, including TÜV Rheinland certifications for low blue light, circadian friendly, and even flicker-free thanks to DC-like dimming at high brightness and 1920Hz PWM dimming at low brightness.

On top of that display is the super durable Gorilla Glass Victus, a type of glass typically only found on smartphones and is hundreds of dollars more expensive. Last but certainly not least is Xiaomi's Wet Touch feature, which makes it easy to use the touchscreen even when your hands are wet. Try that with your current phone; you'll find it impossible to type or swipe accurately when water is on the screen.

While our reviewer Harish wasn't too impressed with the phone when it launched in September 2023, Xiaomi has since updated the phone with Android 14, fixing tons of issues, and the new lower price makes this a significantly better value than it used to be.

Xiaomi was very slow to update this phone to Android 14—seven months after the phone and Android 14 officially launched. It also gives the Redmi Note 13 Pro two more years of OS and security updates, so Xiaomi has plenty of time to make up for the slow first platform update.

Best with stylus

Reviewed by

Reviewed by

Derrek Lee

Derrek resides on the Best Coast, originally from San Diego, and now living in Seattle. He's a long-time mobile tech enthusiast, starting with an obsession with Nokia that began at the age of 12. Since then, he's been lovingly known by most of his friends as the "Phone Guy." When he's not talking tech, he's either working out, hiking, playing video games (Playstation), or making videos.

In a remarkable turn of events, Motorola has redefined its brand. Motorola created and released the best foldable phone we've seen so far and launched various phones that look and feel amazing. The Moto G Stylus 5G (2024) is the ideal example, sporting a stylish design clad in vegan leather and a lovely stylus inside its svelte frame.

The Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset inside isn't the fastest SoC on this list, but it's still faster than the one found in the Samsung Galaxy A25 5G near the top of this list. Of course, the main draw of this smartphone isn't the performance; it's the stylus that comes bundled with it.

Motorola has a suite of software features custom-designed to work with the stylus. Although this isn't an active stylus like you'll find on the uber-premium Samsung phones, it's still nice to have one to jot down quick notes or annotate images and screenshots. You can quickly grab it since it's always inside the phone!

Motorola has also upgraded the cameras this time, outfitting the phone with surprisingly good image-capturing hardware, including an ultrawide-angle lens. Our reviewer, Derrek, was really impressed with the image quality and specifically lauded the phone for that feature. The Moto G Stylus 5G has a 48MP wide, 8MP ultrawide, 5MP macro, and a 2MO depth camera.

While Motorola ships this one with Android 14 and its excellent Hello UX—complete with all our favorite Motorola gestures such as double-chop to turn on the flashlight—the Moto G Stylus 5G (2024) will only get updated to Android 15, plus three years of security updates to ensure you feel safe online. So, If you don't care about many updates and want to prioritize stylus support, this is an excellent choice for under $300.

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How to choose

While there's no doubt that the best Android phones offer you an unpaired user experience—complete with features such as top-tier cameras and wireless charging—these devices don't really come cheap. If you can't (or simply don't want to!) spend thousands of dollars on a flagship smartphone, we suggest looking at one of the many options available under the $300 price point. The downside to the more budget-friendly phone is you miss out on the latest features and don't get support for too long. But the good news is that you get all the necessary features while having some extras. So, before deciding, look at what features you need the most.

Our top choice is the CMF Phone 1, a brilliant pick at just over $200, with an option to upgrade the RAM and the storage for a little more. Even at that price, it's still a better phone than any other on this list, featuring a bright and beautiful—but also eye-friendly—OLED display, a powerful SoC, the second-best camera(s) on this list, and a special modular design that you can 3D print parts for. It's an unbelievably fun phone that blew Android Central's Nicholas Sutrich away from the moment he tried it.

The Samsung Galaxy A25 5G is the ideal choice if you're looking for serious long-term value. While the chipset isn't the fastest on this list, it promises five years of extended software support! That means Samsung updates it to Android 18 before dropping support, something no other phone on the list can claim. That's great if you like holding your phone for a long time.

Lastly, if we compare affordable phones with those that aren't so affordable, we can't ignore the Moto G Stylus 5G (2024). This phone has a swanky vegan leather back panel and an integrated stylus that makes it look and feel extremely premium. It even supports NFC for contactless payments, another feature commonly found in flagship phones.

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