While the average selling price of a smartphone in India increased to around Rs 11,000, the budget segment under Rs 10,000 wasn't really ignored. Budget phones were made more powerful with last year’s mid-range chipsets trickling down to the budget segment. Even though these phones are never meant to topple more expensive offerings, the best budget smartphones surprised us with their performance.
There were also a lot of phones to choose from this year with brands like Xiaomi, Honor, Nokia, and Asus flooding the market with multiple options. With features like display notches, dual cameras (and even quad cameras), glass designs and more, the budget segment saw a lot of action.
Despite a rich set of features, only a handful of phones among those we reviewed this year were stable performers. And here at Digit, we look beyond the spec-sheet and focus purely on performance. With most phones launched in the budget segment coming out as duds, these are the best budget smartphones this year. Needless to say, these will be the budget phones to beat next year.
The Xiaomi Redmi Y2 was positioned as a selfie-centric phone, but while reviewing it we felt it also doubled up as a reliable daily driver. With the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 powering the phone, it offers performance similar to the Redmi Note 4 that was the winner in this segment in 2017. However, with deep-level optimisations in MIUI 9, the Redmi Y2 makes better use of the resources to offer a better experience, even though games like PubG Mobile still stuttered a bit on low graphics. The 16MP front camera bins four pixels into one to take the best low-light selfies in this price segment while the 12+5MP dual cameras, borrowed from the Redmi Note 5 Pro also performed surprisingly good. The only thing really lacking in the Redmi Y2 is long battery life and fast charging, but the chipset’s efficiency more than makes up for it. The newer Redmi 6 Pro with a notched display also offered similar performance but it lost out for its relatively underwhelming 5MP front camera that couldn’t do the pixel binning magic.
The Nokia 3.1 Plus looks starkly different from the rest of the crop of budget phones launched this year, but that’s not the only reason why it’s worth considering. The MediaTek Helio P22 powering the phone almost the same performance as the Snapdragon 625, but with higher efficiency thanks to its 12nm manufacturing process. As a result, even with a 3,500mAh battery, the Nokia 3.1 Plus offered eight hours of screen-on time in our review. It’s a classic Nokia phone with fairly stable performance (although don’t expect too much from it), and a long battery life. The screen is also bright and Nokia uses its patent Pure Black technology to make the panel look richer with higher contrast. If that’s not enough, there’s also the pure stock Android that doesn’t eat up resources a lot. It’s also Android One certified and Nokia has stuck to its promise of regular updates. The 13+5MP dual camera at the back isn’t the best in the segment, but you can’t always get what you want.
India-made Smartron really offered a robust, all-rounder in a budget. With an entry-level Snapdragon 435 chipset, it may not be as responsive to heavy usage as the winner and the runners up in this segment, but it does over a clean, stock Android interface along with a giant 5,000mAh battery. Needless to say, this was the longest lasting smartphone you can buy under Rs 10,000 with 11 hours of screen-on time. The camera on the Smartron T.Phone P was also quite decent with social-media worthy photos under good lighting, but don’t expect good low-light performance from this one. The 5.2-inch display is pretty average too and has a traditional 16:9 aspect ratio, but what it lacks in design, it more than makes up for it in terms of the value proposition. As a result, the Smartron T.Phone P is our best buy.