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How we pick a winner

Most comparison tools rank phones on the specs printed on the box. That works right up until the moment you keep the phone, because the spec that decides whether a phone is still worth owning in three years isn't on the box at all — it's the date the manufacturer stops shipping security patches.

So our comparison runs in two passes. The first scores six categories — display, performance, camera, battery, software longevity and overall value — and each category gets a one-line explanation of why it landed where it did. The second pass is the one that usually matters: if the two phones have different Safe-to-Buy ratings, or if one costs more than twice as much per month of safe use, longevity overrides the spec sheet outright. A phone with eight months of patches left does not tie with a phone that has six years, however good its camera is.

Here's what that looks like in practice. In the $250–500 bracket the Xiaomi POCO M8 Pro 5G works out at $4.12 per month of safe use, while the Nothing Phone (2) costs $31.00 — around 8× more, despite sitting in the same price bracket on the shelf. The difference is almost entirely how long each one keeps getting updates.

Every score is computed from the same verified database that powers the rest of the site, and every support date links to the manufacturer document it came from. Read the full methodology.

What to do with the answer

A comparison tells you which of two phones is the better buy. It doesn't tell you whether you should be buying either one right now, whether the model you're looking at is about to be replaced, or how much of the price gap you'd claw back by waiting. Those are the questions our guides cover: