Pros: Stellar performance for its price, premium 90Hz OLED screen, solid battery life, offers wireless charging

Cons: Relatively expensive for a budget phone, costs more for mmWave 5G model, heavy for its size 

Google’s .

Pros: Largest display, excellent four-camera system, improved selfie camera, smooth 120Hz display, S Pen stylus

Cons: Pricey compared to competition, may be too large for some people, some unwanted bloatware

.

Pros: Lightweight, excellent cameras, stellar performance, excellent battery life, smooth 120Hz display

Cons: Occasional shutter lag, slower charging speed (25W) than expected, some unwanted bloatware

The Android phone market is flooded with large screens, and you’d think fans of smaller phones in the 6.1-inch range are underserved, but not when .

We test Android phones as if they were our daily drivers for at least several days, and often much longer. That way, we can get the best anecdotal feel for their performance, battery life, cameras, and new features.

We also conduct standard tests on all the phones we review and include in our guides.

For performance, we put the phones through a gamut of benchmarking apps to check for performance discrepancies between phones, at least on paper. These benchmark tests also help us evaluate how many years a phone could maintain its performance compared to other phones. We use Geekbench 6 for general performance, and the 3DMark Wild Life Stress Test to get a sense of extended heavy gaming performance. 

For camera testing, we photograph a set gamut of scenes with every phone; you may have seen our barn photos over and over again. We take photos with each lens on each phone and compare them to their direct competitors. We even compare premium phone cameras to budget options to evaluate the difference. 

For battery life, we run each phone through a stress test that simulates a mixture of typical daily workloads, like streaming a video and music, as well as high intensity workloads, like playing demanding games. The battery stress test includes five runs of the Geekbench 6 app, two runs of the 3DMark Wildlife Stress Test, two hours of video streaming at a set average brightness, and one hour of music streaming with Bluetooth headphones connected. At the end of the test, we note the remaining battery percentage on the phone.

Who owns Android? 

In simple terms, Google owns the Android operating system. Other companies like Samsung and OnePlus can run Android on their phones because Google makes it freely available as an open source operating system for anyone to use on their phones. Even you, the reader, could build your own phone that legally runs the Android operating system.  

The Android operating system looks and works differently on phones from different companies because phone makers modify the operating system by adding their own layers of software on top of Android for users to interact with.

For example, while Samsung phones run the core Android operating system that gives them access to the Google Play Store apps, they also run Samsung’s own user interface (UI) layer called One UI, which adds a distinctive look and feel to the company’s phones. 

Which Android phone gets the most updates?

In general, the best Android phones get a maximum of four years of Android operating system updates, and up to five years of security updates. 

Among the phones on our list, recent flagship phones from Samsung and OnePlus have the best support windows. Samsung has said its flagship Galaxy S23 series phones will get four years of Android software updates and five years of security updates following their February 2023 release. The OnePlus 11 is also slated to get four years of software updates and five years of security patches from its February 2023 release.

On the other hand, Google offers a slightly smaller support window for the Pixel 6a, Pixel 7a, and Pixel Fold, each of which will get three years of Android updates and five years of security updates from their respective release dates.