Budget phone advice - ideally, around £150.00 but below £200.00.

Whiffle

Whiffle

Whiffle

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27 Jul 2009
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386
Hello,

My other half is after a new mobile for Christmas and I would be really grateful for some advice on what to get.

She currently has a first generation Moto G 4G and loved it but for the fact that the internal memory is just too small, at 8GB, and the phone is starting to slow down.

What should I get her?

She specifically said that she wanted a phone that was cheap enough that it would not be the end of the world if it was dropped/nicked - she suggested around £150.00 but definitely no more than £200.00 (her figures not mine).

She isn't a slave to any particular brands so anything decent would be considered.

Any advice would be much appreciated.
 
Nokia 6 hands down for £199.

The Huawei's have nice build quality but the software is awful, bloaty and updates are slower than treacle in mud.
The Motorola G5 is ok for the money but the Nokia has a bigger battery, more ram, more storage, faster updates and better build quality.

Also don't buy direct from a network if you value OS and security updates, they are generally loaded up with pointless network specific garbage, locked and the updates are rolled out by the networks which are 100% of the time slower than they should be. Buy sim free and avoid any of that crap.
 
Nokia 6, Huawei P10 Lite 2017 or Moto G5 Plus.

The Nokia 6 is top of the list due to software updates being way quicker than the other two. The other two will hardly see any update beyond what's out of the box.
 
silverblack said:
I would avoid the Nokia 6 it might get quicker updates but the lowly SD430 chip same as the Nokia 5 is slow.

https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=6885&idPhone3=8571&idPhone2=8598
Click to expand...

But yet is absolutely fine for the vast majority of people. Most people buying this phone won't even know what the Snapdragon 430 is or more importantly care one jot.
Wife has one, it takes pictures, phone calls, emails and texts just fine with zero slowdown and the battery life is great.

No it won't run VR, record super duper 4k video or play intensive games as well as others but neither should it at this price point.

She had the P8 lite before it bit the dust and it didnt have a single security or OS update all the time she owned, Nokia are rolling out the security updates mere days after Google release them.
 
I was looking to buy one myself so looked at reviews and the majority of them slated it for the SD430 chip and how slow it is.
You could see in reviews the lag in switching between apps and scrolling.
 
The problem with Lenovo's Moto, is although they have good hardware at a decent price, they will stop supporting a phone as little as 12 months after they've sold it to you. Not just failing to update Android, but security patches too. They will just tell you the phone is no longer supported and they won't put out any patches at all.

That's pretty unacceptable to me in this day and age, so I won't be buying another Moto.
 
Steampunk said:
The problem with Lenovo's Moto, is although they have good hardware at a decent price, they will stop supporting a phone as little as 12 months after they've sold it to you. Not just failing to update Android, but security patches too. They will just tell you the phone is no longer supported and they won't put out any patches at all.

That's pretty unacceptable to me in this day and age, so I won't be buying another Moto.
Click to expand...

From my experience you can also forget about Customer Support from day one. They appear to use bots or very stupid people in first line support and the forums are just a list of problems with no solutions (from Lenovo).
 
There were HotUKdeals links to £89 more basic Moto G5 version last week, being sold at O2.
 
Thank you all for your input on this.

The point about Motorola support is very interesting and something that I hadn't considered at all - I also have a first generation Moto G 4G and, come to think of it, I cannot remember the last time I actually got an update for it.

I did go through a period of messing around with custom ROMs on the phone for a bit, so did get updates then. However, I quickly realised that (personally) it was not worth messing around with ROMs as none seemed to be anywhere as good as stock (perhaps this was purely down to the specs of the phone of the quality of the ROMs).

It does seem that the Nokia 6 is a very well regarded phone - can be purchased for less than £200.00 with a bit of hunting on the net.

I also read that the Wileyfox Swift 2 Plus is a good phone too - is that even worth considering or is the Nokia 6 still the best bet?
 
The P10 Lite has been solid for the OH. It's runs quick, hasn't slowed down since the summer and was purchased for a bit more than they are going for now. It has extra apps which you just hide and install Nova Launcher and you are good to go.
 
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