Just tell me which phone to buy
Six quick questions. Five picks with reasons. Scored on what others ignore — how long each phone will actually stay safe to use.
How the Finder decides
Most “which phone should I buy” tools rank on price and a spec score, which is how people end up with a cheap phone that is unusable in three years. This one scores every phone in our 1,016-phone database on five things, then weights them according to the answers you give.
- Software longevity
- How many months of security patches the phone has left, from its verified end-of-support date. This is the input nobody else uses, and it is weighted heaviest when you tell us you keep phones a long time.
- TrueCost
- Street price divided by those remaining months — the real cost per month of safe use. It is what stops a $180 phone with 18 months of support from looking cheaper than a $500 phone with five years.
- Camera, battery and performance
- Scored from sensor configuration, capacity and chipset tier respectively, and weighted by whichever priorities you pick. These are the conventional inputs, and deliberately not the deciding ones.
- Size and brand filters
- Applied as hard constraints rather than scores — if you ask for a compact phone or exclude a brand, nothing that fails the filter appears, regardless of how well it scores otherwise.
Every pick comes with a one-line reason explaining which factor got it there, and one result is always a deliberate wildcard — a phone that scores well on a dimension you did not prioritise, so the tool can tell you something you were not already looking for.
Nothing here is paid placement. The scoring formulas are published in full on our methodology page, and there is no editorial override on the results — which means there is nothing anyone could buy.
If you would rather browse
The Finder is for when you want an answer. If you would rather look around, these are the useful starting points: