We asked, you told us: Here's the feature you look for most in budget phones

When it comes to shopping for budget phones, you have a ton of options (especially if you don’t live in the United States). While having plenty of choices is a good thing, it can be a bit overwhelming, too.

That’s why many people shopping for budget phones tend to prioritize one or two things. They may care less about the camera and more about battery life, or vice versa. In fact, they may care more about the color of the phone than any of its internal specs — every buyer is different.

Related: The best budget Android phones you can buy at the moment

With that in mind, we wanted to know how Android Authority readers felt about this and what their top priorities are when it comes to budget phones.

The most important feature for budget phones is…

We ran a poll in a recent article about the upcoming slate of Redmi 9 phones. Those phones will be pretty cheap, with the Redmi 9A expected to cost somewhere around €100 to €120 (~$111 to ~$134). You don’t get much more of a budget phone than that.

The poll asked a simple question: “What do you look for most in a low-end (sub-$150) phone?” There were four possible answers:

• A great camera
• Fast performance
• Long-lasting battery
• Plenty of internal storage

Here’s how Android Authority readers answered the poll. You can easily see which answer is the most important aspect of budget phones for them:

With just over 45% of the vote, it appears fast performance is the biggest factor when choosing a device amongst a slate of budget phones. The camera quality and battery life came in pretty evenly at 23% and 25% respectively, while the amount of internal storage was the distant fourth-place winner at just under 7% of votes.

Interestingly, getting fast performance out of budget phones is one of the trickiest things to do, because performance is so heavily dependent on the included processor. The SoC in a smartphone is one of the most expensive components, so it is incredibly difficult to make cheaper phones fast while still keeping them cheap.

Let’s find out what you had to say about this, though.

Some of your comments

As mentioned earlier, this poll ran in an article about the Redmi 9 series, an upcoming slate of budget phones. We also ran the poll on Twitter with very similar results. Through the comments on the original article as well as your tweets, we can get a good idea of how you all think about this.

Check out some choice comments below.

Djanta:
How can you look for fast performance in a low-end phone?

said_what:
This is excellent Xiaomi. My Redmi Note 5 is still going strong. I am waiting for the future entry-level Redmi phones to gain 5G and Wi-Fi 6 support. Then I am all aboard the upgrade train.

@matix1000000:

1. Performance – when it’s bad every other aspect of phone is worse to use
2. Memory – if you don’t have enough you can’t do as much
3. Screen – when everything works you want to consume it in better quality
4. Camera – you can begin to create
5. Battery – less charging needed

@JunaydAnsari:
Honestly at $150 I’d not expect much from performance. Consuming media and social media is more than enough for a phone. Literally any phone can do that. But you can expect good cameras from a phone at that price and there are many options out there so yeah, camera

There you have it, that’s how you all feel about budget phones. Hopefully, there’s a cheap Android phone out there for you!