Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Best Cheap Android Phone?

My best phone ever was the Motorola Moto E2. It did everything well. Was the perfect size. Had a grippy texture to it's body. And cost$38...

I used that one for 3 years and it started to wear out so I bought the Moto E4
Î was almost as good. Almost as cheap. And I've been using it now for about 3 years. Just had my first ever real issue with it today. Seems OK now, but wanna be ready.

There are no more Moto E2 s or E4s. The wife and I both bought Moto E5s, and she's been using hers for about 4 months. Neither of us like it.

What is the best Cheap Android phone out there?

Some E4's listed here https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Motorola+Moto+E4&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

If your carrier is GSM then probably Honor or Xiaomi. If CDMA then the Moto E. You could just get a pre-owned high end phone off of woot.com or similar sites.

Never heard of Honor or Xiaomi phones.

Never used any high end phone that was anywhere near as good as the moto e2 or e4

Got a buddy that always runs the newest iPhone. No... Sorry...

Work with several guys who run the high end Samsungs. No... ...

I would not deal with the stress these guys' phones cause them...

I currently use the Moto G7 and love it. It is an unlocked phone and has long battery life. Not under $100 but you can find them on Amazon for around $160. The ones with all the bells and whistles run about $250. I just looked up the E4 and you can get one on Amazon for under $80. They say they have 9 left. Good luck.

I have a Moto G7 Power. It's a pretty good phone. About getting it from Amazon...I did. I found that Amazon had loaded a bunch of their crap on it, Alexis, shopping, music, and who knows what else. You can't remove it but I was able to disable it all, I think. Who knows what it's doing in the background.
If you want a clean one, pay a little more and get it somewhere else.

The better question is, Will your carrier still support that older tech phone.

I am with Verizon. A couple years ago I upgraded from a Samsung S4 to an S6
.
The S6 was a POS with pizz poor antenna function so I attempted to reactivate my old trusty S4 which was actually a very good cell phone.

Nothing doing: "No longer supported on this network." And I discovered Verizon was intending to soon drop support for the S6 as well.

So I ran down to Best Buy and purchased a new unlocked S9 for $350. It is, I have to admit, the best phone I have owned.

Just out of curiosity, but what is your measure of good? Both Samsung and Apple smoke the E2 and E4 in every spec possible.

I currently have a Galaxy A10e for a second business. It is adequate. Much slower than my S9+. Battery life is very good. No complaints so far, but I've only run it a month or so. Good luck.

I've had my e5 Play for 14 months (my first upgrade from a flip-phone), and I'm still very pleased with it, no problems. Main reason I upgraded was that I wanted to take photos bigger than a postage stamp, and this one takes great pics. Admittedly, I'm not much into hi-tech, and the e5 fulfills my needs.

My backup is a Moto G5 CDMA/GSM that I bought new and run on Trac Fone. No issues, works well and super cheap to own. My main is a CDMA S8 that I bought new on Amazon about a year ago. it replaced a GSM S6 Active that I had for a few years. I switched from AT&T to Verizon due to coverage issues. The S8 is worlds better than the S6, and being 2 generations old is hundreds less. I would do this exact same thing again, buy a new older model.

Xiaomi is a very popular brand in China.

When I wanted to get cheap phones for my kids, I started researching CPU's/GPU's and found some korean brand that was selling essentially a Samsung S5 (when Samsung had the S7) so it was maybe 4 years behind but had a high end CPU and middle of the pack GPU, with 1080P (when most of the cheap phones were 800 or 720).It had a micro SD card port so we could upgrade the memory and they came with 16gb.

I ended up paying $99 for each phone. They weren't perfect but they lasted the kids for about 2 years before they dropped them or whatever. The phone worked on 4 of the major networks.

We bought it off Amazon.

We also had Moto's for the kids. I think it was G3? not sure, I don't remember. Once they got old enough to buy their own they opted for an iPhone 7 which is what they still have now.

The name brand companies like Samsung and LG have cheaper versions of phones that are scaled back in camera pixels, CPU and memory. You can often get them in the $100 to $200 range at the local phone store. If you aren't in need of camera editing and what not, they do a great job of standard phone actions - calling, text, wifi and running basic apps.

Good luck. Eventually youll have to bite the bullet and get a real phone. What youve been using is total junk IMO. But hey, if thats as much tech as you can handle, so be it. Verizon is shutting down CDMA. Youll be limited what you can activate on their system or any MVNO that uses their system.



If youre on a "traditional" GSM carrier(Verizons LTE is GSM also) like AT&T, TMO, etc...youll still be able to use some older tech. But even those companies are restricting certain devices.

Good is compact. A screen size of <5" is best. Good is grippy with no need of an aftermarket case. Good runs youtube and common video platforms without difficulty. Good takes a decent point and shoot photo. Good has decent data storage w/micro sd slot.

The best I ever used was the moto e2, and it's only real fault was that it only came with 8G of data storage which limited the number off apps usable. I took and stored multiple thousands of images on micro sd with it, plus an extensive music library.

Curious as to what you'd consider a "real" phone to be. What are the attributes that you look for?

I'm in the same boat. I want (actually not really) a glowing rectangle of my very own to massage. Its gonna get to the point that you have to have one of the damn things to get along. Right now I have a tracfone and a landline. Might as well get rid of both of them and get the rectangle. Don't really know where to start.

Now I know how the older people back in the 90's felt when I had to teach them how to use a mouse!

I don't think you can buy a better phone than the Pixel 3a or 3a xl for the money..The 3a will soon be less than $300 brand new just before the pixel 4a comes out in May...Excellent battery life and top shelf camera with monthly security updates..You can buy the original Pixel for less than $100 renewed on amazon and the pixel 2 and pixel 2 xl for around $200 plus or minus..All have one of the best cameras on the market and steller battery life with no bloatware like Samasung puts on there devices...

I've had an $199 Honor 7x now for two years. Great phone. Runs Android 8. Continues to get monthly security updates OTA.

Bought it before all the hoopla about Huawei.