Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Top 5 Smartphones Under $300! (2015)”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here, and we like to focus here on the highest end flagship smartphones, the best ones of the top of the budgets that are really pushing the boundaries of tech and that’s great. But that also usually makes us forget about the wave of awesome smartphones that fills in that lower budget in its wake. They take awesome tech from the higher end flagship brothers and bring it down into that lower price point one or two years later. So while it’s nice to focus on those high-end flagships for seven eight, nine hundred dollars because they’re so incredible, it’s also nice to take a look at these sub 300 flagships that are taking those awesome killer, features and bringing them down to the much more affordable level. So from my personal experience, these are the top five smartphones under 300 bucks number five is the xiaomi me 4i at 250.
This is one of the best looking best designed budget smartphones out there. The cost will be inflated a little bit by importing it, but still for less than 300 bucks. You get this slim sleek seven and a half millimeter thick frame with a soft touch back. That actually reminds me a lot of the nexus 5 and it’s really lightweight and easy to hold it’s rocking a pretty quality, 5-inch 1080p display and it has a quad-core, snapdragon, 615 2 gigabytes of ram and believe it or not a huge 3030 milliamp hour battery.
A lot of it in and the design and the features it’s getting come from its older cousin. The xiaomi me note – and it even has this awesome adaptive display technology, just a really impressive phone to look at and hold also that is a regular usb port on the bottom, even though it kind of looks like usb-c, this was definitely running a heavier skin. It’S running something called my ui 6 on top of android 5.0 lollipop. It has these crazy, wicked icons. It’S very colorful. There is no app drawer, it’ll take a little bit of getting used to. But again it is a very nice looking and very well designed smartphone for the price point.
So number four is the 2015 second generation moto g at 180. This guy borrows a lot from the flagship moto x, but is designed specifically to be low cost and it delivers at a pretty ludicrously low price. It still manages to actually feel pretty premium in the hands, so it’s well built and you get features like the stereo front-facing speakers and the near stock android experience with a few enhancements thanks to that moto x.
Now they couldn’t bring moto maker down to this level, but you actually get a removable back with this phone, which made room for swappable back covers of different colors whenever you want, and they threw in a micro sd card slot for expandable storage over the stock 8 Gigabytes and the specs are pretty alright, too, you will suffer with a slightly subpar 720p display and a pretty weak camera, but i mean everything else for the price. You really can’t go wrong here, oh and shout out to the even cheaper moto e, which brings back 4g and subtracts 30 more dollars from the price of the already awesome, moto g. So that brings us to number three and it’s actually a relatively new phone. That’S come out this year, it’s the alcatel one touch idol 3 and it’s 250 bucks. The idol burst onto the scene really a few weeks ago and has quickly become a budget favorite thanks to its big, bright 5.5 inch, 1080p display and great performance. It’S pretty decent, build too, not too tall for a 5.5 inch screen, but also pretty thin, which is kind of nice, and it has a front facing speakers and a 2 910 milliamp hour battery, not bad and honestly, it’s a pretty fast phone too.
It’S rocking what initially looks like a super skinned version of android, but it’s really just an icon pack and then some other smaller tweaks, and it’s been one of the best performers on this list. It also has a 13 megapixel camera on the back, which is nothing too crazy in terms of quality, but it’s definitely also quite fast. Also a neat feature up its sleeve, since it is a completely symmetrical phone on the front.
If, for some reason you want to flip the button placement or something it has what’s called a reversible mode where it just flips the entire ui upside down and works exactly the same, so the number two best budget phone and it’s actually another one that just came Out this year, for the first time is the asus zenfone 2 and it’s 300 bucks. This one was actually first announced a while ago, and most of its hype came from being the first smartphone with four gigabytes of ram, which is great, but i haven’t personally noticed the difference versus three gigabytes, but i’ll take it, and this is another budget phone that Shines for its build and its performance, it has a decent 5.5 inch 1080p display. Although viewing angles, i guess, are a little bit weak and then you get a quad core processor, 16, gigs of storage and a 3 000 milliamp hour battery, and it’s built well with a matte brushed, look on the back and a pretty hefty weight to it.
It’S definitely not lightweight, and it has a removable back too so revealing a dual sim card slot and you guessed it a micro sd card slot. Asus went uh with rear facing volume buttons to keep the sides clean, which i really like they’re, not quite as tactile or as big as lg’s buttons, but they’re still pretty good, and then they, for some reason, went with a power button in the worst imaginable spot. On a 2015 smartphone top middle, i don’t know who decided to do this, but you know at least you get double tapping the screen to wake and double tapping to sleep, and the software itself, like i said, works pretty well, it’s a skin for sure. On top of android 5.0 lollipop – and it has an intel quad core chip inside that kept everything moving pretty smoothly. I could game on this thing too. You got some some pre-loaded asus stuff, but overall, pretty nice experience and definitely feels in the hand like a lot more than what you pay for it.
So the number one best smartphone you can buy on a budget under 300 bucks for the second year running is the oh, so popular oneplus one, it’s gotten a permanent price drop recently. You can now buy it without an invite system, and it’s now exactly 300. This guy needs pretty much no introduction.
I’Ve done multiple other videos about this phone. It’S just a freak. Basically, it has a quality.
5.5 inch 1080p display a fast quad-core snapdragon 801 chip, three gigabytes of ram, a huge 3100 milliamp hour battery with a pretty ridiculous like industry-leading battery life and awesome performance from its choice of roms based on stock android and the phone itself is built pretty well too. It feels great in the hand the unique texture of the sandstone black version is pretty interesting. It’S not too huge for a 5.5 inch phone there’s a reason why this guy won best budget smartphone for 2014 from me last year.
This thing is legit the oneplus one. Also has a 13 megapixel camera, that’s really good and that’s a nice bonus because, usually when you go down in price, you really start to sacrifice on the camera. So this actually has a nice camera that sort of competes with at least in the image quality department.
Some of the other much higher end flagships. That’S basically it it’s the oneplus one and it’s it’s kind of funny, because it’s not really built off of another high-end flagship where it gets its features from it is its own flagship, which is pretty awesome for the price. So there you have it, those are the best smartphones you can get at a low budget in 2015 right now, uh also, i want to give an honorable mention to first of all the sony xperia m2, which is cut from the same cloth as the sony. Xperia z, flagships, so you get that waterproofing at a low budget, also the microsoft lumia 640, which is hands down the best cheap windows phone and has an awesome display and a pretty decent battery life, and also the sharp aquas crystal which i did an entire video About it’s the best designed budget smartphone by far i’ll leave a link to that, along with all the other smartphones. I’Ve talked about right below that like button. If you want to check any of them out, uh and yeah, that’s basically it so moral of the story.
Here is a lot of the smartphones that we can get for 300 today, rival the experience you get from the phones, we would have spent six or seven hundred dollars on three or four years ago. So that’s something to be pretty happy about. Thanks for watching and i’ll talk to you guys, the next one peace you .