Best big phones 2024

The best big phones curated by us for this list will hopefully satisfy any user who is prioritizing size for their next purchase. 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.

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

At 6.8 inches, the Pixel 9 Pro XL remains about the same size as the Pixel 8 Pro before it, but with a new subtitle and redesigned flat sides, it wears its big phone status much more openly. I still find it comfortable enough to handle though, and it's still a reasonable weight too.

More importantly though, the Pixel 9 Pro XL is a fantastic phone for photos. Even if the cameras haven't changed all that much from last year, Google's well-balanced color science, and high resolution sensors still produce great images. And if you don't like them, you can easily edit them to tidy up parts you don't like, or add whole new elements with generative AI tools. While I've tried Samsung's equivalents of these features and appreciated them, the Pixel 9 Pro XL's are on another level.

Praise also has to be given to Google for improving the Pixel 9 Pro XL's battery life significantly, after years of lagging behind the competition. Big phones should last you a full day of constant use, and the Pixel can now claim that too. If only it offered a higher basic storage capacity, it would earn a higher spot on this list through its sheer value.

Read our full Pixel 9 Pro XL review.

Best big foldable phone

The first-ever OnePlus foldable is an amazing first attempt, so if you need the biggest-possible screen in your pocket, we recommend the OnePlus Open.

It's the most expensive phone on this list, but it is at least cheaper than an equivalent foldable from a brand like Samsung. It's also got a surprisingly long battery life for its size, and speedy 67W charging. And on the software front, the Open Canvas system lets you open multiple windows more flexibly to suit whatever tasks you need to do at the same time.

Our main complaints are that the night mode photos are lagging behind the quality of the Open's other shots. Plus OnePlus has once again forgotten to offer wireless charging. Thought you'll probably forget all about that once you open up the 7.8-inch main display and start enjoying your apps, photos and videos in all that space.

Read our full OnePlus Open 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 budget big phone

Sitting at the top of the Motorola Moto G series, but at the bottom of the price list for the phones on this page, the latest Moto G Stylus is a cost-effective way to get a big display on your new phone.

The spacious screen is especially useful here since, as the name suggests, the phone comes with a built-in stylus for all your doodling needs. With increased brightness and excellent color reproduction, stunning battery life and and decent photo capabilities, the Moto G Stylus covers most of your bases.

We say most because its underpowered chipset will make running demanding apps a little difficult, and its single year of guaranteed updates may mean you need to replace it sooner than the other options we've listed here. But that $400 start price may be all you needed to hear to know this is the big phone for you.

Read our full Moto G Stylus 5G (2024) 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.