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Top 5 best gaming phones for less than £400 (Autumn 2016)

Not cheap, but great value

Top 5 best gaming phones for less than £400 (Autumn 2016)
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Modern flagship phones are expensive. Even more than they used to be.

Our recommendation for the very best gaming smartphone money can buy, the iPhone 7 Plus, starts from £719 / $769. Starts!

It's no better on Android, either. If we were to name the top Google phone for gaming right now, it would be the new Google Pixel XL, which starts from exactly the same price as the iPhone 7 Plus.

Even our top Android pick from before the Pixel's launch, the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, still goes for £639 - and it's been on the market since March.

It's little wonder, then, that there's growing demand for smartphones that offer many of the same qualities of a flagship phone, but for significantly less money. There's an emerging tier that slots in between flagship and mid-range pricing.

So, which of these sub-£400 phones should a committed mobile gamer consider? Try these for starters.

OnePlus 3T

Just a couple of months ago we featured the OnePlus 3 as our alternative or left field pick in a round-up of the very best gaming smartphones on the market. It offered top-end performance for a price that was considerably lower than that of the other entries.

OnePlus has since announced a souped-up version of the OnePlus 3, the OnePlus 3T. Think of its as the iPhone 6S to the iPhone 6 - externally nigh-on identical, but with a significant internal performance boost.

What's remarkable about this is that the new and improved OnePlus 3T still qualifies for this sub-£400 piece. Just. It's available from £399, and that gets you a Snapdragon 821 CPU (the same chip as the Google Pixel, only clocked faster), a whopping 6GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a 5.5-inch 1080p AMOLED display, and a 16MP camera.

Essentially, we could be looking the most potent Android gaming phone on the market, yet it costs hundreds less than its flagship rivals.

iPhone SE

As we've explained before, it's tough to look past the iPhone in these round-ups if you're after the best gaming phone. The App Store simply sees more top quality releases than the Google Play Store, and usually much sooner.

The trouble, as we mentioned in the intro, is that iPhones are really expensive. It's easy to forget that there is a new(ish) iPhone option for less than £400 - though it does involve compromises. The iPhone SE was launched earlier in 2016, and it can be summed up in one short sentence: the body of an iPhone 5S and the guts of an iPhone 6S.

Opting for the iPhone SE means stepping back to a teeny-tiny 4-inch display, which undoubtedly makes for an inferior gaming experience. However, there's no questioning the phone's ability to run those games - Apple's A9 CPU is still more than up to the task of running the latest games without breaking into a sweat.

LG G5

Let's be brutally honest here. The LG G5 is only on this list because it's been a bit of a failure. Its early-2016 Android flagship peers, the Samsung Galaxy S7 and the HTC 10, still retail for around the £500 mark, but you don't need to shop around much to find the LG G5 for just under the £400 mark.

What's more, you may find retailers bundling in some tasty extras, such as a decent set of earphones and some of those quirky modular add-ons that failed to capture the public's imagination. These modules can add more battery life, superior audio, an improved camera experience and the like.

The modules are by the by, though. The point is that the LG G5 is a very accomplished top-end phone, with an all-metal build, a powerful Snapdragon 820 CPU, a lovely 5.3-inch QHD display, 4GB of RAM, and a very good iPhone 7 Plus-like dual-lens camera. It's a bit of a steal, really, but LG's loss can be your gain.

Samsung Galaxy S6

This list is mostly about newish phones launched in 2016, but we should really give a nod to another good source of sub-£400 mobile gaming power: last year's flagships.

In truth, you could pick up any of the class of 2015 from the usual manufacturing contenders and have yourself an excellent gaming smartphone for an attractive price. But we're going to pick out one in particular - the Samsung Galaxy S6.

It's got a drop-dead gorgeous design (much like the S7's) and a brilliant camera. More importantly, the phone has a 5.1-inch QHD display that remains one of the best in the business, and a custom Exynos CPU that was the fastest Android chip of its day, and continues to eat high-end 3D games for breakfast.

Vodafone Smart Platinum 7

Hopefully you've already seen that you can get flagship performance for around the £400 mark. But what about if you want flagship performance for under the £300 mark?

Well, tough. You can't have it. But the Vodafone Smart Platinum 7 gets damned close. It's got a metal body, a beautiful 5.5-inch QHD AMOLED display, and a Snapdragon 652 CPU that - while not a top-end chip - is powerful enough that you'll struggle to notice the difference even when gaming.

Also, you get stereo speakers, and a pretty much stock version of Android 6.0. What's not to like? Well, the fact that it's stuck on Vodafone for one thing. Also, the phone's fingerprint sensor, camera, and all-round design fall short (though not ridiculously) of the flagship level set elsewhere. Still, for less than £300 there's an awful lot of phone here.

Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.