Last time I bought one it was a Huawei from 2017. It lasted me 6 years despite dropping it a lot. Don't need something with ton of power, I just wanna know what brands have good medium price range products.
Is xiami good? 
Pixel 7a. It'll have custom roms for years if you are into that
On Xiaomi side, Poco F5 pro prolly
If want to go lower look for oneplus 7 Pro or one plus 8 on ebay
The 6a is another great alternative. Not a huge drop off of what the 7a is aside from the cameras and it already has a bunch of custom roms. Usually about 100-150 less than the 7a.
I use Moto because they are insanely cheap and more than good enough for my purpose. Also they are made of shitty plastic and they are basically drop-proof.
Xiaomi's Redmi brand is super cheap. You get what you pay for, but it's got to be an improvement over a six year old phone.
The best smartphone is one that was a flagship 3 years ago, in my opinion. Bought myself a refurbished S10, and it's honestly a fantastic phone, for the price of a mid-low range new phone.
Last year's flagships phones brand new, but on a stock clearance discount, are usually the best bang for buck in terms of performance to price ratio. So like a Galaxy s22 or s21FE. The s21FE base model should be really cheap for the hardware you're getting if you can find it for sale, I think it's under 250USD on websites like Amazon now.
For medium range there's the Xiaomi Redmi series and the Samsung Galaxy A series. The a52s and a73 being the highest end of the midrange from Samsung. Ideally at minimum you want something with at least 4 high performance cores for the CPU (most really cheap phones only have 2) and a high refresh rate display. The cheapest phone with this functionality seems to be the Xiaomi Redmi note 12 4g. It's 160 USD on Amazon. I strongly recommend against getting anything cheaper, you'll miss out on key features, and the phone will feel really slow to use if it only has 2 high performance CPU cores and a 60hz refresh rate display.
Also check what comes in the box, some phones come with a case and charger, some don't. And that's important if you're on a budget.
But seriously avoid at all costs any Android phone with only 2 big/high performance CPU cores. You can check the specs on websites like gsma arena. It will lag for eternity. 4 high performance cores at minimum, and if you have the money to splurge, a chipset with one ultra performance core among the rest would be ideal. Also stick to Snapdragon chipsets and avoid in house chipsets like Exynos and MediaTek if you can.
Xiaomi is still good. Pixels are good. If you live in NA you might be able to pick up Samsung phones for very cheap as well.
Xiaomi redmis are amazing. Their pro line's cameras are great
I currently have a OnePlus 8t (flagship from 3/4 years ago) new for 300USD
It has a 120fps screen, something that even the recently released Pixel 7 for 600USD doesn't have lol
Software is also great if it still has their OxygenOS
Xiaomi is better than Huawei, I think.
Also, nice, another Huawei fan; I also had one.
I like Xiaomi phones because, on top of good specs for the price, they are really easy to disassemble and you can get cheap replacement parts in dragon-tt.com. The software sucks, but it's not worse than Huawei's, and the models based on Qualcomm chips work well with Lineage. I wish they made another Android One model.
I've got a Xiaomi Redmi Note 10s. The battery life is great. It overheats if I play Hearthstone on it on a hot day, but it was probably for the best that I deleted that game anyway. Every other phone I've had has been like that too.
My only hangup is the camera. It's just shit. I hate iPhones but their image quality blows every other device out of the water. Yeah, Samsung and Pixel and Huawei all claim theirs is better, but the software fucks the image up. I've tried out all of the phone brands over the years. They all capture ugly pictures, especially of faces, compared to the iPhone.
I find the pixel software takes the best pictures, even of faces, even better than iPhone in some cases. I installed the pixel camera app and software on my Samsung. You're right about the Samsung and Xiaomi software being shit though.
Interesting. I'll give it a go. When I had the pixel it did take pretty decent pictures, but there was just something slightly off about it.
I don't know what you consider adorable but I've been running various Pixel xa models for as long as they've been around and if you find a decent sale on them they're great value for money I think
I got the new moto g stylus (5g version) for free by doing three months of Google Fi. Not sure what they have in offer now but this is a fairly solid mid/upper end phone.
