Top 5 best gaming smartphones for less than £250 (Spring 2020)

Huawei squeezed out the Nova 5T late last year in what appeared to be a cheeky attempt to circumvent US sanctions. We won't bore you with the details, suffice to say that this is essentially the exact same phone as the previously released Honor 20.

This is very exciting news for pocket gamers on a budget. The Huawei Nova 5T runs on the same Kirin 980 chip that was powering flagship phones as recently as last year. It blitzes everything else on this list for performance, not to mention most phones selling for double the price.

Its display lacks the sheer colour-pop of the AMOLED phones found elsewhere, but it's a very well balanced 6.26-inch Full HD LCD all the same. And yes, it does have access to the Google Play Store.

All this and it's been heavily discounted to less than £250 from a certain online retail giant. With a due nod to the security concerns surrounding Huawei (which largely relates to 5G infrastructure), this is a bit of an anomaly on the price-performance scale.

Remember what we said in the intro: you're looking for a decent display and a capable processor when shopping for a gaming-ready phone at this price point.

There are certain manufacturers who will give you a classy-seeming phone and cut corners with the processor, or lump you with a limited display. Which can be fine for general use, but it's not so good for gaming.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 9S ticks both those main boxes, with a huge edge-to-edge 6.67-inch FHD+ LCD display and a fast, modern Snapdragon 720G CPU built to an efficient 8nm standard. It gets bonus points for a massive 5020 mAh battery and 18W fast charge support.

Realme has two entries on this list, demonstrating how the brand is really delivering the affordable phone goods right now. The Chinese manufacturer offers genuinely interesting and varied hardware at an affordable price, which is rather unusual.

The Realme X2 would probably be second on this list were it not for the fact that it seems a little tricky to track down from mainstream sources at the time of writing. But you should be able to find it for less than £250 if you're willing to pursue less well-traveled online avenues.

And boy is it worth the extra effort: a 6.4-inch Full HD+ AMOLED display and a gaming-boosted Snapdragon 730G backed by 8GB of RAM gives a distinctly flagship-esque feel when playing the latest games.

There are typically few frills when shopping for a £250 gaming phone. You tend to have to focus on the components that matter, and should treat any additional gimmicks with due caution.

But the Realme 6 is a little different: its 6.5-inch Full HD+ display offers a 90Hz refresh rate display. That's something we expect to see in phones that cost £500 and above, and it has the potential to make a number of games feel way smoother.

Looking at the cheap Mediatek MT6785 Helio G90T CPU, you might wonder whether the phone can actually cash the checks its 90Hz screen is writing. But it seems to be a surprisingly capable chip that can reportedly mix it with Qualcomm's more mainstream Snapdragon 720G, and which blitzes the Snapdragon 670 that powers the (significantly more expensive) Google Pixel 3a.

The Oppo Reno Z shuffles the balance of those two main components towards the screen somewhat. As a result, you get a much better display than usual, but a lesser CPU.

That display is a 6.4-inch FHD+ AMOLED, no less. Typically, at this end of the market, we're dealing with LCD. The provision of Dolby Atmos stereo speakers is another uncommon touch, resulting in games that look and sound far better than normal on a £200 handset.

The trade off is a slightly less than stellar Mediatek MT6779 Helio P90 CPU, which is an older iteration of the chip used in the Realme 6. Still, this chip is competitive with the Snapdragon 670 that runs Google's Pixel 3a, and that phone would cost you well north of £300.