Best Smartphones of 2024: The Ultimate Showdown Between Android and Apple Devices

 The top Android and Apple smartphones to buy this year, thoroughly tested and reviewed by our experts.

As the cost of living keeps rising, choosing the right smartphone – and not paying more than you need to – is more important than ever. Happily, in 2024 you can get nippy performance, impressive battery life and a fantastic camera without having to spend a fortune.

We’ve painstakingly assessed and reviewed all the best smartphones on the market, putting each one through the most comprehensive testing process in the UK. We’re constantly updating entries for this list – last year alone, we tested around 50 new handsets – so you can be sure that our recommendations are informed and up to date.

How we test smartphones

We thoroughly test every phone that comes into our labs, with a number of benchmarking methods. We typically start with CPU and GPU processing, using the Geekbench 5 and GFXBench applications found in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store; these provide us with a set of standardised scores which we use to compare rival handsets.

Each phone’s screen is then tested using DisplayCAL software and a display colorimeter. This gives us a precise reading of the screen’s maximum brightness and contrast, and how good it is at reproducing colours; again, we use this to objectively identify which phones have the best displays.

Next up is battery life. Here we use our in-house video rundown test, which displays a looped video with flight mode enabled and the screen set to a standard brightness of 170cd/m2 – and times how long it takes the battery to go from full to shutdown.

Finally, each phone’s cameras are put to the test in a variety of shooting scenarios, including scenic shots, low-light and indoor photography, plus rapid video panning in a range of modes.