Top Cell Phones 2023

The realme Narzo 50A Prime offers a good equipment package at a very low price.

With fierce competition in the mid-range, the X4 GT doesn’t quite offer enough to stand out, but it still offers great value for money, especially if you care about speed.

The Nothing Phone 1’s unique design includes lights on the back panel that illuminate in combinations called glyphs. Otherwise, it’s a perfectly good, perfectly normal midrange Android phone with a 6.5-inch screen, 50-megapixel camera with OIS, and fast wired charging.

An attractive design and comfortable build make the Realme 9 5G a nice phone to use. It’s got long battery life but if 5G isn’t a must then the 4G version and various rivals are better deals.

The Realme 9i is one of the best budget Android phones available to buy right now. It’s not quite the best, but it offers great value-for-money and more than adequate performance if you just want a basic, inexpensive 4G smartphone.

The Sony Xperia 5 III successfully scales things back from the lavish Xperia 1 III, with comparable performance and almost equal photographic potential wrapped up in a more compact body. Battery life is even better, too. It’s still lacking in a few fundamental areas, however, and those omissions sting all the more in light of flagship pricing.

The P40 is a great bit of the kit that, although missing out on some of the high-end features of the Pro and Pro+ variants, can still take on most 2020 flagships in terms of photography and raw performance. Whether that makes up for the lack of Google Play is another story altogether, but that’ll depend on just how tech-savvy you are.

The Motorola One Macro has proved once again that you don’t need to spend hundreds of pounds to get a great smartphone.  The display, battery life and speakers are all a pleasant surprise, while the undeniable shortcomings in some areas of the camera shouldn’t be a dealbreaker at this price point. Budget offerings from the likes of Xiaomi, Oppo and Honor might outdo it on the spec sheet, but if stock Android’s your thing this is hard to beat. 

The Google Pixel 4 XL features the best Android has to offer along with a big screen and top-performing camera.

The Motorola One is a slightly confusing device, hovering around the same price as the firm’s excellent Moto G6 Plus. What’s on offer here is a display with a notch and Android One, but in the context of the competitive mid-range market, the Motorola One doesn’t quite match up to rivals in various ways. It’s good but not great.