Picture the scene: you’re at a music festival raving it up when suddenly the unthinkable happens. Your beloved iPhone 6, the fruits of your labour, drops into the sludge and gets kicked around by a bunch of alcohol induced teenagers.
In a moment of panic, you frantically crawl around on your hands and knees, desperate to find the device. With sweaty crotches shoved into your face and damp hands slapping you round the back of the head, you finally see that familiar candy-bar shape hiding in a puddle of vomit. After immediately fishing it out to inspect the damage, you realise that the huge vertical crack down the screen wasn’t there before and it smells funny. Sadly, your iPhone 6 is ruined.
If this has indeed happened to you, chances are that you won’t be bringing an expensive smartphone to a festival with you again. In fact, you’ll be wanting something fairly cheap that still manages to pull off all the features of your daily workhorse. Well never fear because we’ve got good news, Whatmobile has you covered. We scoured the web to find the most competent smartphones for under £100 which should pull off almost everything that your priceless iPhone or Samsung can do. Let’s get to it!
HTC Desire 510: £70 from Vodafone.co.uk
A competent HTC for under a hundred quid? Yes, please. The 510 shares its aesthetics with the more expensive One Series, so it looks deceptively pricier on first impression. With a quad-core Cortex A53 and 1GB RAM, it’s also more than good enough to handle most basic tasks without too much difficulty. It features a MicroSD slot, so you can take plenty of festival pics for your photo album.
Moto E 2nd Generation: £99 from Tesco Mobile
The second generation Moto E builds on the popular first-gen to feature a faster processor and better build quality. Available in a multitude of colours, it has the personalised feel that free-spirited festival goers are sure to lap up. Using the same Quad-core processor as the 510, it should also be more than capable of checking facebook and instagramming those festival selfies. The pictures should also be of a reasonable quality, thanks to the 5mp camera with autofocus. With the biggest battery of the five at a whopping 2390mAh, it should also get you through the entire weekend without needing to carry a backup charge pack.
Nokia Lumia 635: £90 from Vodafone.co.uk
Microsoft has a few Nokia handsets that we could add to this list but the 635 is easily the most feature-packed of the bunch. With a choice of bright colours and a tough, polycarbonate design, it should be able to withstand all the festival abuse that you can throw at it in a weekend. While it does feature the older Quad-core cortex A7, it should make little difference in the Windows Phone environment as the OS is highly optimised for lower-end hardware. The app store is still lacking, but the main social applications for sharing your festival experience should be there.
Sony Xperia E4: £90 from Vodafone.co.uk
Sony handsets always look attractive and even at this price-point, the theme follows through with the E4. With a Quad-core Cortex A7 that runs at a slightly higher 1.3GHZ, it should be a little quicker, were it not for the Mediatek chipset. Still, it should be more than up to the job of all but the most demanding of uses. With a MicroSD slot and 1GB ram, it should also be able to hold plenty of selfies without getting the dreaded ‘no memory’ message.
The standout feature on the Sony is it’s camera, which will happily record in full HD at 30FPS, meaning your favourite bands will look crisper than any of the competition in the list. The front camera even records 720p video, so you can Skype the experience to your friends in HD.
Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini: £89.99 from O2.co.uk
The Galaxy S3 may be an old phone by todays standards but few can argue the impact it had on the smartphone market when it first arrived back in 2012. The S3 mini was its little brother, having a more attractive pricetag with reduced specs and size. Even so, it was still a very powerful device with plenty of attractive features. Featuring a 1GHZ cortex A9, it may only be a dual-core but it almost matches the Quad-core A7 for all-round performance. A MicroSD slot and 1GB RAM are included as well, so you can expect plenty of storage and a relatively lag-free experience. It may be old, but this is still a powerful device for the price.
