Tech
I’ve Been Testing Budget Phones for a Decade. These Are the Best Cheap Phones Right Now
Samsung Galaxy A36 for $400: With a higher price, you’d think the A36 would be even better than the A26, right? Wrong. The Galaxy A36 (6/10, WIRED Review) hits many highs, including a brighter display, good battery life, and solid cameras, but storage is not expandable, and performance was bizarrely more choppy. The 6 years of software support is nice, but if the phone is already annoying to operate, I can’t imagine what it’ll be like in 6 years. It’s an OK phone, but you can do better.
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
TCL 60 XE Nxtpaper 5G for $250: TCL’s 60 XE (7/10, WIRED Recommends) has an anti-reflective matte screen called Nxtpaper to limit the blue light entering your eyes for better sleep and reduced eye fatigue. There’s no evidence to suggest that blue-light blockers work, but if you ignore those claims, this is still a great budget phone with a pleasing matte screen. There is a switch on the side that lets you flip between different display modes that turn the screen closer to a monochrome or color E Ink experience, great for fans of e-readers. Performance is good, the camera is decent, and there are extras like a headphone jack and microSD card slot. The only problem is that the screen is hard to read in direct sunlight.
Motorola Moto G Power 2025 for $300: The Moto G Power (7/10, WIRED Recommends) is a rung below the Moto G Stylus 2025 above, and while I think it’s a good smartphone, performance is more sluggish than competitors like the CMF Phone 2 Pro. You do get some of the same perks as the Stylus, like an IP68 water resistance rating, headphone jack, microSD card slot, and wireless charging, but it sports an LCD panel, and the starting storage is 128 GB.
Moto G Play 2026 for $180: Motorola’s new Moto G Play 2026 adds 5G connectivity for the first time. However, performance is still quite sluggish, with apps and webpages taking several seconds to load. If you want to pay very little money, this will do the job, but I think you should buy the Moto G Power 2025 instead, because it’s often on sale for nearly the same price. While the Power’s performance isn’t amazing, it’s much better than the Play, and has stronger cameras and more features.
Motorola Edge 2025 for $400: The Edge has a waterfall display, which is a cool effect where the glass edges of the phone bleed into the sides, creating a bezel-less effect. It’s a dying breed of phone because, turns out, glass edges can interrupt the touchscreen and can make phones annoying to use. It’s not as much of a problem here, but my main issue is that performance is a little too stuttery for a phone at this price. The lackluster software update policy also just makes it hard to recommend over competitors like the Pixel 9a.
Minimal Phone for $499: Want to reduce your reliance on a smartphone? The Minimal Phone (6/10, WIRED Review) has an e-paper touchscreen and a physical keyboard, but it runs Android. That means you can still access every app you’d want via the Google Play Store, but the experience is going to be inferior, due to the phone’s low refresh rate (good luck watching videos on this thing) and the tiny monochrome screen. Still, this is a decent alternative (or maybe even a second phone) if you just want to get away from doomscrolling.
Samsung Galaxy A16 for $200: Samsung’s Galaxy A16 still doesn’t reach the highs of the Galaxy A14, and that’s largely due to sluggish performance. Sure, Samsung is promising six years of software updates, but that remarkable update window doesn’t matter when the phone is frustratingly slow, and you want to throw it out the window. If you barely plan on using this device but want something from a reliable brand that will stay secure, the Galaxy A16 is OK. Its performance just isn’t competitive with other similarly priced phones.
Nuu N20 for $130: Right after I tested the Galaxy A16, I moved on to the cheaper Nuu N20. Color me surprised. Yes, it can still be sluggish, but performance on this nearly $100 phone is far better and manageable. I used it for a week with no major problems. Well, except one: GPS on this device isn’t great. The few times I used it for car navigation, it struggled to find my location, and it was slow to update the map. The other big problem? The N20 currently runs Android 14, so it’s already out of date, and the company tells me there is no “exact schedule for software updates.”
Sonim XP Pro 5G for $550: This rugged phone is sold through Verizon only, but I tested it on Google Fi and didn’t have any connectivity issues. (Fi is powered by T-Mobile’s network.) I have dropped this Android phone multiple times on the sidewalk (on purpose), and the screen has not cracked. It’s quite durable, and that’s largely the reason to buy it. On its own, it’s not wholly impressive—you can buy more powerful, feature-rich phones for the money. The camera is especially bad, consistently delivering blurry shots unless you stay as still as a statue. But performance is decent, it comes with 256 GB of storage with a microSD card slot, and there’s a customizable button you can set to trigger a shortcut or open an app.
Nothing Phone (3a) Lite for £249: Nothing’s Phone (3a) Lite (6/10, WIRED Review) is a confusing smartphone in its lineup. The CMF Phone 2 Pro exists and is similar in price (CMF is Nothing’s sub-brand), and in general, there are better phones you can buy for the money. The cameras are lackluster, and there’s a lot of bloatware, which feels like the opposite of Nothing’s philosophy. Performance is decent, as is its battery life, but this phone also isn’t launching in the US.
What Phones Should You Avoid?
If you’re eyeing a cheap phone, try to stick to name brands. There are several smartphones you’ll find for dirt cheap on Amazon, but you’re about to load up whatever you buy with your personal information and photos—it’s important to make sure it’s a reputable brand with good security practices (or at least some kind of record that it does issue security patches).
Tech
Lenovo’s Latest Wacky Concepts Include a Laptop With a Built-In Portable Monitor
Do you like having a second screen with your computer setup? What if your laptop could carry a second screen for you? That’s the idea behind Lenovo’s latest proof of concept, the ThinkBook Modular AI PC, announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Lenovo is never shy to show off wacky, weird concept laptops. We’ve seen a PC with a transparent screen, one with a rollable OLED screen, a swiveling screen, and another with a flippy screen. At CES earlier this year, the company showed off a gaming laptop with a display that expands at the push of a button. Sometimes, these concepts turn into real products that go on sale (often in limited quantities).
At MWC 2026, Lenovo trotted out three concepts. While it’s unclear whether any of them will become real, purchasable products, there’s some unique utility here, and a peek at how computing experiences could change in the future.
A Laptop With a Built-In Portable Screen
As someone with a multi-screen setup at home and a fondness for portable monitors, the ThinkBook Modular AI PC appeals to me the most. At first glance, it looks like a normal laptop. Take a look behind, and you’ll notice there’s a second screen magnetically hanging off the back of the laptop, like a koala carrying a baby on its back.
The screen is connected to the laptop using pogo-pin connectors, so you can use it in this state to display content to people in front of you, say, if you were making a presentation during a meeting. Alternatively, you can pop this second screen off, remove a hidden kickstand resting under the laptop, and magnetically attach it to the 14-inch screen so that you have a traditional portable monitor experience. (You’ll need to connect this to the laptop via a USB-C cable in this orientation.)
If you don’t have the desk space for that orientation, you can always remove the keyboard from the base and pop the second screen there—it’ll auto-connect to the laptop via the pogo pins, and you’ll be able to use the Bluetooth keyboard to type on a dual-screen setup that resembles the Asus ZenBook Duo. The whole system is a fantastically portable method of improving productivity on the go, and the laptop isn’t too thick or cumbersome.
Tech
The 5 Big ‘Known Unknowns’ of Donald Trump’s New War With Iran
More recently, Iran has been a regular adversary in cyberspace—and while it hasn’t demonstrated quite the acuity of Russia or China, Iran is “good at finding ways to maximize the impact of their capabilities,” says Jeff Greene, the former executive assistant director of cybersecurity at CISA. Iran, in particular, famously was responsible for a series of distributed-denial-of-service attacks on Wall Street institutions that worried financial markets, and its 2012 attack on Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s Rasgas marked some of the earliest destructive infrastructure cyberattacks.
Today, surely, Iran is weighing which of these tools, networks, and operatives it might press into a response—and where, exactly, that response might come. Given its history of terror campaigns and cyberattacks, there’s no reason to think that Iran’s retaliatory options are limited to missiles alone—or even to the Middle East at all.
Which leads to the biggest known unknown of all:
5. How does this end? There’s an apocryphal story about a 1970s conversation between Henry Kissinger and a Chinese leader—it’s told variously as either Mao-Tse Tung or Zhou Enlai. Asked about the legacy of the French revolution, the Chinese leader quipped, “Too soon to tell.” The story almost surely didn’t happen, but it’s useful in speaking to a larger truth particularly in societies as old as the 2,500-year-old Persian empire: History has a long tail.
As much as Trump (and the world) might hope that democracy breaks out in Iran this spring, the CIA’s official assessment in February was that if Khamenei was killed, he would be likely replaced with hardline figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And indeed, the fact that Iran’s retaliatory strikes against other targets in the Middle East continued throughout Saturday, even after the death of many senior regime officials—including, purportedly, the defense minister—belied the hope that the government was close to collapse.
The post-World War II history of Iran has surely hinged on three moments and its intersections with American foreign policy—the 1953 CIA coup, the 1979 revolution that removed the shah, and now the 2026 US attacks that have killed its supreme leader. In his recent bestselling book King of Kings, on the fall of the shah, longtime foreign correspondent Scott Anderson writes of 1979, “If one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French, and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”
It is hard not to think today that we are living through a moment equally important in ways that we cannot yet fathom or imagine—and that we should be especially wary of any premature celebration or declarations of success given just how far-reaching Iran’s past turmoils have been.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly bragged about how he sees the military and Trump administration’s foreign policy as sending a message to America’s adversaries: “F-A-F-O,” playing off the vulgar colloquialism. Now, though, it’s the US doing the “F-A” portion in the skies over Iran—and the long arc of Iran’s history tells us that we’re a long, long way from the “F-O” part where we understand the consequences.
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.
Tech
This Backyard Smoker Delivers Results Even a Pitmaster Would Approve Of
While my love of smoked meats is well-documented, my own journey into actually tending the fire started just last spring when I jumped at the opportunity to review the Traeger Woodridge Pro. When Recteq came calling with a similar offer to check out the Flagship 1600, I figured it would be a good way to stay warm all winter.
While the two smokers have a lot in common, the Recteq definitely feels like an upgrade from the Traeger I’ve been using. Not only does it have nearly twice the cooking space, but the huge pellet hopper, rounded barrel, and proper smokestack help me feel like a real pitmaster.
The trade-off is losing some of the usability features that make the Woodridge Pro a great first smoker. The setup isn’t as quite as simple, and the larger footprint and less ergonomic conditions require a little more experience or patience. With both options, excellent smoked meat is just a few button presses away, but speaking as someone with both in their backyard, I’ve been firing up the Recteq more often.
Getting Settled
Photograph: Brad Bourque
Setting up the Recteq wasn’t as time-consuming as the Woodridge, but it was more difficult to manage on my own. Some of the steps, like attaching the bull horns to the lid, or flipping the barrel onto its stand, would really benefit from a patient friend or loved one. Like most smokers, you’ll need to run a burn-in cycle at 400 degrees Fahrenheit to make sure there’s nothing left over from manufacturing or shipping. Given the amount of setup time and need to cool down the smoker after, I would recommend setting this up Friday afternoon if you want to smoke on a Saturday.
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