Top 5 best gaming phones for under £250 (Autumn 2016)

We recently updated our advice on the best gaming smartphones around. Yep, it's an iPhone. Sorry, but it just is.

The only thing is, Apple's latest smartphone starts from the elevated base price of £600. Not everyone can afford (or wants) such an extravagance - especially not in these financially challenging times.

We're going to let you in on a little secret here: you don't need to spend that much money to get a good phone. In fact, you need to spend about a third of that price.

What's more, thanks to the rapid improvement in mobile processor technology and a vastly improved Android ecosystem, these cheap phones are great at playing the latest games.

The truth is that you're spoilt for choice at this price point, but here are five of our favourite gaming phones for under £250.

Ah, the good old dependable Moto G. I've written a lot of these things over the years, and it seems that every year I feature Motorola's entry-level phone either at or near the top.

Motorola simply gets all the basics right. Take the current Moto G4.

It's got a crisp 5.5-inch 1080p display, which is the same basic spec as the iPhone 7 Plus (starting price £719). Its Snapdragon 617 CPU isn't the fastest on the market, of course, but it's more than up to the task of playing even graphically demanding 3D games like Vainglory and Real Racing 3.

Besides that it's just a pleasant phone to use, with a solid build, a version of Android that hasn't been excessively tinkered with, and a competent camera.

The OnePlus 2 is right at the top end of our budget at £249, and it's more than a year old now. But don't let that fool you - it's a classy customer.

You might not have heard of OnePlus, but it's a young and innovative Chinese manufacturer that eschews traditional retail models and even marketing to sell its phones at cut-down prices.

The OnePlus 2 was last year's flagship, which means it has a still-extremely-competent Snapdragon 810 CPU, plenty of storage (64GB), a good 5.5-inch 1080p display, a decent camera (13MP with OIS), and even a nice metal frame.

Games will fly on this one.

Wileyfox is a relatively new name on the smartphone scene. The company is based in Britain, which is obviously no guarantee of quality (China is churning out many of the best budget phones), but it's an interesting point to note nonetheless.

The Wileyfox Storm is a sharp performer, with another 5.5-inch 1080p screen and a competent Snapdragon 615 CPU backed by 3GB of RAM. More than enough for strong gaming performance. It also benefits from a good 20MP camera and 32GB of storage.

It also runs on Cyanogen OS, which is an interesting Android UI that started out life as an open source project. As such, it makes Android even more flexible - though it doesn't mess with the look of it too much.

Here's another one of those strong, affordable smartphones from China we were talking about. The Honor 5X has a 5.5-inch 1080p display and a Snapdragon 616 CPU, so it's more than up to scratch on the gaming front.

But it also has an all-metal body, which is the kind of thing you would have expected to see in a premium phone up until very recently.

The main drawback with the Honor 5X is fairly common with these Chinese phones - its heavily skinned Android UI, which takes some getting used to. And also kind of sucks.

I've put the Nexus 5X near the bottom of this list because its official price over on the Google Store is £300. But a little shopping around (or an Amazon visit) will bring you well below that magic £250 mark.

And if you do so, you'll be getting a very nice phone that runs on a very capable Snapdragon 808 CPU - so it's second only to the OnePlus 2 on gaming performance.

Besides that you get a fine camera and - big point this - the very latest version of Google's Android OS, with no ugly custom UI.