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Getting a solid Android phone doesn't necessitate spending a small fortune. The best budget models strike a great balance between price and performance, giving you smooth everyday use without cutting too many corners. Whether you're scrolling social media, streaming your favorite shows or snapping photos of a night out, there's an affordable Android phone that can handle it all.
Cheaper phones have come a long way in recent years. Many now feature bright, fast displays, reliable cameras and battery life that lasts well into the next day. You might miss out on top-tier extras like the latest processor or ultra-high-resolution zoom, but what you get instead is value that makes sense. Some models even surprise with cameras that rival far pricier flagships, making them ideal for casual photographers or anyone who just wants to capture a great shot on the go.
We've tested budget Android phones from brands like Google, Samsung and OnePlus to find the ones that deliver the most for less. These are the models that prove you don't need a flagship price tag to get a dependable Android phone.
Best budget Android phones for 2026
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 West Virginia's Attorney General JB McCuskey today announced a lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of knowingly allowing iCloud to be used to distribute and store child sexual abuse material (CSAM). McCuskey says that Apple has opted to "do nothing about it" for years.
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Starting Thursday, Gemini 3.1 Pro can be accessed via the AI app, NotebookLM and more.
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Mark Zuckerberg defended Meta's social media platforms and addressed his public persona in a Los Angeles courtroom.
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A surprising new study shows that baby chickens react the same way that humans do when tested for something called the "bouba-kiki effect," which has been linked to the emergence of language.
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A study led by MIT researchers found that agentic AI developers seldom publish detailed information about how these tools were tested for safety.
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The office of the Attorney General for West Virginia announced Thursday that it has filed a lawsuit against Apple alleging that the company had "knowingly" allowed its iCloud platform "to be used as a vehicle for distributing and storing child sexual abuse material." The state alleges this went on for years but drew no action from the tech giant "under the guise of user privacy."
In the lawsuit, the state repeatedly cites a text from Apple executive Eric Friedman, in which he calls iCloud "the greatest platform for distributing child porn" in a conversation with another Apple executive. These messages were first uncovered by The Verge in 2021 within discovery documents for the Epic Games v. Apple trial. In the conversation, Friedman says while some other platforms prioritize safety over privacy, Apple's priorities "are the inverse."
The state further alleges that detection technology to help root out and report CSAM exists, but that Apple chooses not to implement it. Apple indeed considered scanning iCloud Photos for CSAM in 2021, but
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NEW RESOURCES Radio Free Europe: Archaeologists Launch ‘Virtual Museum' To Ukraine's Ancient Heritage. "An online museum launched on February 18 aims to make Ukraine's heritage accessible to the public, while many of […]
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The Meta CEO stuck to a playbook of repetitive answers and buzzwords in a landmark trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
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 Amazon this week has a pair of discounts on a few AirPods models, including the AirPods 4 and AirPods Max. You can get the AirPods 4 for $99.00, down from $129.00.
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OpenAI's GPT-4o may have survived its first brush with going offline, but it won't be as lucky this time. OpenAI has officially retired GPT-4o, the ChatGPT model that was seen as more conversational and notoriously sycophantic, on February 13. The news of GPT-4o's end was first announced in a post on the OpenAI website in January, but the discontinuation also included GPT-5, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini from ChatGPT.
It's not the first time that OpenAI has delisted GPT-4o as an option for ChatGPT. In August, the AI giant sunsetted the GPT-4o model in favor of rolling out and prioritizing the latest GPT-5 model at the time. However, a wave of user complaints led OpenAI to restore access to GPT-4o but with no guarantee that it'll be around forever.
This time around, OpenAI doesn't seem very open to preserving access to GPT-4o, especially since it'll serve only a small portion of the user base. The company wrote on its website that "the vast majority of usage has shifted to GPT-5.2, with only 0.1 percent of users still choosing GPT-4o each day." On top of that, OpenAI is facing several
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