The best big phones have a lot of overlap with the best phones overall, due to how phone makers have been gradually enlarging their phones over the past few years. But if screen size or battery size are your particular priorities when purchasing a new phone, this is the guide you need.

Alongside their more expansive displays and improved longevity on a charge, the best big phones pack more elaborate cameras, with a greater quantity of lenses and the best optics and sensors on the market. Rest assured, we’ve tested them all.

If you’re ready to go big on your next phone, we’ve put together a list of some of our super-sized favorites. And should you want one of the best small phones instead, we’ve got you covered there, too.

The quick list

Best big phone overall

The Galaxy S24 Ultra deserves its status at the top of the big phones list. First off, with a 6.8-inch, 120Hz QHD OLED and impressive color and brightness levels, its display makes great use of the handset’s size.  The rest of the phone’s excellent too, offering top-quality cameras, battery life, benchmark results and software update schedule. And that’s not to mention the new Galaxy AI features, or the included S Pen.

Samsung has made the Galaxy S24 Ultra more expensive than last year,  and the 5x telephoto does feel like a downgrade compared to Samsung’s old 10x camera. This is still the ultimate phone if you want to live large.

Read our full Galaxy S24 Ultra review.

Best big iPhone

The iPhone 15 Pro Max is one of the best big phones around, and without doubt the best big iPhone, which may be all you need to hear to convince it’s worth buying.

Thanks to a customizable Action button, a better chipset,a lighter design and an improved zoom camera, you will want for nothing with the iPhone 15 Pro Max. It’s a shame it’s so expensive though. And that the charging is a bit slow. This is forgivable to some degree though, considering how much you still get.

Read our full iPhone 15 Pro Max review.

Best big phone value

OnePlus always offers a great value when it comes to flagship phones, which makes the OnePlus 12 the perfect option for wanting a top-quality display for less than the competition. As well as offering a 6.8-inch 2K OLED display with 120Hz, you also get one of the biggest batteries of any current smartphone, and other cutting-edge tech like a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, 80W or 100W wired charging (depending on the region), 50W wireless charging and RAM and storage to spare.

The cameras on the OnePlus 12 perform well thanks to their Hasselblad tuning, although we weren’t that impressed with what they capture in dark conditions. And OnePlus is currently steering away from AI features, which you could see as neglecting a key developing area of smartphone tech. There’s little in terms of actual complaints to make about this phone though, and it should suit a wide variety of users very well.

Read our full OnePlus 12 review.

Best big phone for cameras

It’s not just the Pixel 8 Pro’s display that’s large – it’s also got a big brain thanks to Google’s latest AI trickery. Photo editing, productivity and call screening have all gotten smarter in the latest pro Pixel, and will continue to develop thanks to a very generous seven years of promised updates.

Google’s also put effort into improving the Pixel 8 Pro’s cameras, offering more granular « Pro » controls for users who know what they’re doing with their cameras. The new Super Actua display is very bright too, helping you read the display in strong sunlight and enjoy its vivid colors.

The two key issues with the Pixel 8 Pro are that its battery life, while much better than last year’s Pixel 7 Pro, is still a little too short compared to rival phones. And similarly its Tensor G3 chip can’t keep up when it comes to CPU and GPU performance, making this an underwhelming phone for gaming or other processor-intensive apps. But if you prioritize brains over brawn, the Pixel 8 Pro is still likely the right big phone for you.

Read our full Pixel 8 Pro review.

Best big foldable phone

You can’t get a phone much bigger than a full-size folding phone, and the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 is our current favorite.

Opening up to 7.8 inches, but weighing less than last year and offering a lighter design, the practical concerns of using a phone of this size have been reduced. It’s still expensive and fragile, but being able to open up to four apps at once and interact with them via touch (or optional stylus) is the kind of multitasking no other phone can match.

While its cameras and battery life are improved, they still can’t match the best regular smartphones for performance here. Some people searching for big phones will want greater balance, but if size is all that matters, the Galaxy Z Fold 5 delivers.

Read our full Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 review.

Best big iPhone value

The iPhone 15 Plus is here to let you get an iPhone that’s the same size as the iPhone 15 Pro Max, but for $300 less.

Unfortunately for this larger basic iPhone, it doesn’t have a 120Hz display refresh rate, a telephoto camera, or particularly fast charging. These are all things that its Android-using rivals all have, meaning it’s a hard sell in some ways.

Lucky for Apple, there’s still plenty to like about the iPhone 15 Plus. Its main, 2x ultrawide and selfie photos are all very strong, its A16 Bionic chipset still outperforms anything excluding the iPhone 15 Pro, and it’s surprisingly light for its size. Plus, with all the standard iPhone software and UI polish, including a new Dynamic Island on the display, it’s still a joy to use.

Read our full iPhone 15 Plus review.

Best big phone refresh rate

Fast-refreshing displays are becoming a more common feature among flagship phones, though most of the phones on this list top out at a 120Hz rate. The Motorola Edge Plus (2022) does that one better with a 6.7-inch panel that refreshes at 144Hz when your on-screen activity demands it. That makes for smoother scrolling and more immersive graphics.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset powering Motorola’s flagship can keep up with any Android phone released in 2022, and the 50MP main camera can produce some great shots in the right conditions. We wish the 4,800 mAh battery in the Motorola Edge Plus was better equipped to last long on a charge, and Motorola’s software upgrade policy lags behind Samsung’s. But if you can find this flagship at the right price, the Motorola Edge Plus has some appeal to gamers who like big displays.

Read our full Motorola Edge Plus (2022) review.

How to choose the best big phone for you

• Android or iPhone? Android phones give you more choice in terms of price, size and innovative designs — many of them happen to be larger, too. However, iPhones offer speedier software updates, better games and apps and better security and privacy. See our iPhone vs Android face-off.
• Unlocked or carrier? Most shoppers in the U.S. buy new phones through their wireless carrier. But an unlocked phone gives you the freedom to buy the device without any sort of contract and then bring it to the provider you want to use.
• Screen size: For fans of big phones, 6 inches and up is a good place to start. The biggest phones are 6.5 to just under 7 inches. If you want something you can easily use with one hand, go with one of the best small phones with a screen under 6 inches.
• Cameras: Don’t pay attention to the megapixel count. Instead, look at camera face-offs between phones to see the photo quality and look for special features like Night Mode to get better quality in low light. Also see our best camera phone roundup.
• Battery life: Generally, phones with larger batteries (measured in mAh) offer the longest battery life, but that’s not always the case. That’s why we run our own custom battery tests, where phones repeatedly load webpages over a T-Mobile data connection while set to 150 nits of display brightness until they run out of juice.

How we test smartphones

In order for a smartphone to make our best phone list, it needs to excel on several tests that we run on every handset. We perform some of these tests in our labs and some in the real world.

When it comes to performance, we rely on such synthetic benchmarks as Geekbench 5 and 3DMark to measure graphics performance. These tests allow us to compare performance across iPhones and Android devices. We also run a real-world video transcoding test on each phone using the Adobe Premiere Rush app and time the result. (We unfortunately have to skip this test on some phones due to app compatibility issues, but we attempt this benchmark with each device we get in to review.)

To measure the quality of a phone’s display, we perform lab tests to determine the brightness of the panel (in nits), as well as how colorful each screen is (DCI-P3 color gamut). In these cases, higher numbers are better. We also measure color accuracy of each panel with a Delta-E rating, where lower numbers are better and score of 0 is perfect.

One of the most important tests we run is the Tom’s Guide battery test. We run a web surfing test over 5G (or 4G if the phone doesn’t have 5G support) at 150 nits of screen brightness until the battery gives out. In general, a phone that lasts 10 hours or more is good, and anything above 11 hours makes our list of the best phone battery life.

Last but not least, we take the best phones out in the field to take photos outdoors, indoors and at night in low light to see how they perform versus their closest competitors. We take shots of landscapes, food, portraits and more, and also allow you to be the judge with side-by-side comparisons in our reviews.