Years ago I bought the cheapest smartphone I could find at Walmart. I thought it might be fun to do an update and see what the cheapest phone is these days. A quick trip to Walmart landed me the $30 Tracfone Blu View 2. See my review here and find one here at Walmart (compensated affiliate link)
When purchasing a $30 smartphone it’s important to keep set expectations appropriately. There are some compromises here like being locked to Tracfone, no 5G or 5ghz Wifi, a super slow processor, and not-so-great cameras.
But for $30 the phone will work without having to activate it with Tracfone first. Connect it to Wifi and you’ve got yourself a functional Android phone for less than the cost of a case for most other devices. It has a nice IPS 720p equivelent screen, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, expandability via an SD card slot, a headphone jack and a user swappable battery!
Performance is about what I expected – sluggish. This sluggishness will be especially evident when you first start operating the phone as it will go through a ton of updates. But after those updates basic apps like Gmail, YouTube and Chrome all work great.
This phone is definitely not for enthusiasts. But for someone looking for something functional and simple this phone offers a lot for next to nothing.