We look at the best Android phones available to buy right now
Choosing the best Android phone means choosing from a lot of different handsets, as Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world.
There are a vast array of Android smartphones on the market from a whole host of manufacturers, and with more Android phones being released every week a consumer’s choice becomes ever more bewildering.
To help you decide on one we've picked out the best Android phones available to buy right now. Every one of the smartphones on this list is great in its own right and they were picked after considering every aspect of the phone including design, performance, and price.
Samsung can always be relied upon to make some of the best Android phones of a given year, and the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus is one of its best of 2022.
This phone has top-end power from its Exynos 2200 chipset and 8GB of RAM, a bold and bright 6.6-inch 1080 x 2340 AMOLED screen (with a 120Hz refresh rate), a premium build, water resistance, a 4,500mAh battery, and a triple-lens camera.
That camera consists of a 50MP f/1.8 main sensor, a 12MP f/2.2 ultra-wide one, and a 10MP f/2.4 telephoto, with 3x optical zoom. That’s not the most exciting of camera setups, but the photos it can take are among the best you’ll get from a phone.
There’s the usual flagship features here too, like wireless charging and an in-screen fingerprint scanner, all of which makes this a top Samsung phone – if still a step down from the S22 Ultra.
The Honor Magic 4 Pro is a top Android flagship from a brand that deserves more attention. But this phone in particular demands attention, with a stylish circular camera block and a superb 6.81-inch 1312 x 2848 120Hz OLED screen.
The cameras include a 50MP main one, a 50MP ultra-wide, and a 64MP telephoto, offering 3.5x optical zoom, and – in decent light at least – they perform brilliantly well.
The Honor Magic 4 Pro also has a high-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset, so it’s plenty powerful, and with 100W charging (whether wired or wireless) you can juice it up faster than most phones.
The battery life from its 4,600mAh juice pack isn’t special, which is the main reason this doesn’t rank even higher, but overall it’s a fantastic phone.
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The OnePlus 10 Pro is the best OnePlus phone you can get and very nearly the best Android phone. As with so many top-tier Android handsets though, the camera is one of its biggest highlights.
It has a triple-lens camera with a 48MP f/1.8 main snapper, a 50MP f/2.2 ultra-wide one, and an 8MP f/2.4 telephoto one (with 3.3x optical zoom).
It’s really the ultra-wide that stands out here, as it has an incredibly wide 150-degree field of view, which allows you to take fish-eye images (though you can of course take normal ultra-wide snaps too). But the whole camera package impresses.
The rest of the phone does too, with a 6.7-inch 1440 x 3216 AMOLED screen, a 120Hz refresh rate, a high-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset, up to 12GB of RAM, a 5,000mAh battery with 80W fast charging and 50W wireless charging, water resistance, and more. The OnePlus 10 Pro really is the complete flagship package.
The Google Pixel 7 Pro is Google’s best ever phone at the time of writing, and it comes very close to being the best Android phone.
It has broadly the same iconic design as the Pixel 6 Pro, but it’s even better this time, with a premium sheen that was previously lacking.
Its specs are better too, especially the camera, which includes a 50MP primary snapper, a 12MP ultra-wide one, and a 48MP telephoto one, offering an impressive 5x optical zoom.
These are among the best cameras you’ll find on a smartphone, and the 6.7-inch 1440 x 3120 120Hz AMOLED screen is excellent too.
This being a Google phone it also has superb software of course. It’s running one of the most attractive and intuitive takes on Android, and has the promise of day one software updates when new versions are released.
All of that is powered by an intelligent Tensor G2 chipset, that you won’t find in phones outside the Pixel 7 range.
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There are many great Android phones, but no others quite as great as the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, a phone which if you can stomach its premium price, really does have it all.
There’s its 6.8-inch 1440 x 3088 AMOLED screen for one, with a 120Hz refresh rate and a super-high 1,750-nit maximum brightness. Then there’s its top-tier Exynos 2200 chipset, up to 12GB of RAM, up to 1TB of storage, and its massive 5,000mAh battery.
The camera is remarkable too. There’s a quad-lens one on the back, consisting of a 108MP f/1.8 main sensor, a 12MP f/2.2 ultra-wide one, a 10MP f/4.9 periscope one (with 10x optical zoom), and a 10MP f/2.4 telephoto one (with 3x optical zoom). That means it can optically zoom to two different distances, where most phones can only manage one at most.
The design and build excel too of course, and there are all sorts of extras, like a DeX mode to hook the phone up to a monitor, and support for Samsung’s S Pen stylus. In fact, for the first time in a Galaxy S phone, the stylus comes included and has a slot to house it.
So with its big, brilliant screen, oodles of power, exceptional, versatile cameras, long-lasting battery, and ability to use it with a stylus or a bigger external screen, the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra excels at just about every possible use case.
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The above phones then are the five best Android handsets you can get at the time of writing, and if you need a top-tier phone then any one of them should serve you well.
From the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus in fifth place, with its excellent balance of price and specs, to the Honor Magic 4 Pro at four, with its superb charging speeds. Then there’s the OnePlus 10 Pro at three, which is a cutting-edge phone, and then we have the Google Pixel 7 Pro at two – a top all-round flagship with no real weaknesses.
Then in first place it’s the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. The price here is high, but no other phone can match this for features, and it beats out most of the competition in any other area too, from its screen to its camera and beyond.
