10 cheap smartphones from companies you've actually heard of (2013 edition)

Smartphones are awesome, there's no doubt about that. They take photos, play music, run apps, and do all kinds of neat things that weren't even imaginable just a few years ago. But at the same time, they can be pretty expensive. A top-of-the-line smartphone may cost well over $600 unlocked, and many people just aren't willing or able to pay that much to own one.

Thankfully, there's the low-end spectrum of the smartphone market. There's a whole bunch of not-so-expensive devices that offer many of the core features expected from a smartphone without costing an arm and a leg. And we aren't talking about those no-name Androids shipped in white boxes directly from China. There's a fair number of affordable brand-name smartphones, and in this post we've put together some of the cheapest among them. All of the smartphones listed here have been launched on the market in 2013 so they are all pretty new models running recent versions of their operating systems. Check them out in the slideshow below!