So long, bargains. The budget smartphone era is ending: A Practical Look

At the risk of stating the obvious, the tech industry is in a bad state right now. Google and Samsung have increased the prices of their flagship phones over the last year (with Apple soon to follow suit) and for the first time in living memory, I’ve seen the prices of games consoles go up instead of down. Like a fine wine, the Xbox Series S I bought a few years ago has increased in value, but if you’re someone who’s pondering upgrading to a newer smartphone, then heed my advice: get it done now because this whole thing isn’t getting better anytime soon.

I know that’s a fairly bleak assessment of what’s happening but there’s plenty of evidence hinting at what’s to come, particularly at the budget end of the market. One of the best phones we tested last year was the CMF Phone 2 Pro, which managed to cram unbelievable value (including a 2x telephoto camera) into a device that was only priced at £219/$279. It stood proudly as our favourite budget phone for quite some time, but good luck finding it now – it has all but vanished.

Nothing has scrubbed the phone’s landing page from its website and, to make matters worse, it also cancelled a planned follow-up, specifically citing the increased cost of RAM as the reason why a CMF Phone 3 Pro is unlikely to ever see the light of day. It’s a sign that the budget phone market could be about to shrink. Unfortunately, that outcome is backed up by a fair amount of data.

Analysis from Uswitch has shown that the prices of budget smartphones have increased by 23.5% on average in the last four years, managing to overtake an average 16.2% price rise amongst flagships.

Adding further insight, a new report from IDC states that prices of flagship phones are only expected to further increase next year, in spite of all that customers have had to deal with thus far. The AI-fuelled RAM crisis isn’t expected to stabilise until 2028.

So, where do we go from here?

Although the best time to upgrade was arguably a year or two ago, I don’t think that anyone is going to do themselves any favours by holding off any longer now. Thankfully, there are a few ways to soften the blow.

Because prices for buying a phone newly minted are astronomical right now, I recommend going down the refurbished route. Sites such as Giffgaff, The iOutlet and Back Market all provide professionally refurbished phones for just a fraction of their original price. This is particularly handy if you want to upgrade to a more recent iPhone as Apple’s handsets rarely see any major discounts when bought new.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

To make your cash stretch even further and to help you get through the worst of the ongoing crisis, it’s also worth checking to see how many years of support a particular phone will receive.

Apple, Samsung and Google lead the charge here, but they’re followed closely by the likes of Honor, Oppo and Xiaomi. After all, if your chosen device will continue to receive OS updates and security patches for the next couple of years, you don’t have to worry about upgrading again during an even worse period of the ongoing crisis.

It’s a sad state of affairs, and I really hope that some degree of normality returns after the so-called RAMaggedon has subsided, but it’s better to be proactive now to avoid contending with an even higher bill down the line.