5 phones I’d consider instead of the Apple iPhone 17

By Nirave Gondhia and Andrew Williams Updated November 3, 2025

The last quarter of each year brings us a new iPhone family. They arrive as reliably as your birthday. And certainly more reliably than your friends remembering it. But does the iPhone 17 mark the time to jump off the upgrade cycle? We have five top reasons to consider defecting. 

The iPhone 17’s big generational change this year was a mostly superficial one. We got a genuinely new look for the first time in ages. Apple elongated the camera housing to make the bottom half look as though someone glued a credit card to the rear. And guess what? The base iPhone 17 didn’t even get that sideways upgrade. 

It’s a case of faster processor, higher-resolution ultra-wide camera, upgraded selfie camera and a brighter screen. Total snooze-fest. 

Full disclosure time — we do think the iPhone 17 is a brilliant phone. We are huge fans of Apple’s battery life increase this year, and its boosting of both the cabled and wireless charging speeds. But for the purposes of debate we’ll be waving two fingers at the iPhone 17 for the next four minutes of reading time. Let’s go. 

Price: From $999.99

Is the iPhone 17 Pro worth an additional $200? One key draw is this is a superior phone without entirely dropping a core appeal of the vanilla iPhone 17: it is a relatively petite thing. 

The two have 6.3-inch screens. Same resolution. Same 3000 nit peak brightness — not that your eyes will see such heights in real-world use. 

Shallow as it sounds, you need the iPhone 17 Pro upgrade if you want to fully participate in 2025/2026’s collective iPhone mania. It has the new long camera housing that Xiaomi has already shamelessly cribbed, and comes in the bold orange shade made many go “ooh” about back in September 2025. 

On the more substantive side, the iPhone 17 Pro’s A19 Pro processor has a more powerful graphics chipset, and it has a substantially superior camera array. 

Not only does the iPhone 17 Pro have a 4x zoom camera completely absent from the iPhone 17, its primary camera is better too. It has a larger sensor, one with 1.22 micron sensor pixels to the 1-micron iPhone 17. This does not result in a huge difference in image quality but does lead to an appreciable lift to dynamic range in some instances. 

Zoom quality is an order of magnitude more important, though. iPhone 17 images captured at a 4x field of view will look very soft and low on detail because they are effectively just tweaked digital crops of the main camera’s view. No so with the Pro.

Price: From $799.99 with 128GB of storage, $899.99 with 256GB of storage.

Some phone fans mourn the departure of the “pocket rocket,” the powerful but small phone, without realising one of the most famous mobiles in the world is one. The base Samsung Galaxy S25 is smaller, lighter and thinner than the iPhone 17.

It also does not feature the obvious camera compromise of the iPhone 17, because Androids simply cannot afford to. The Samsung Galaxy S25 has three rear cameras, not two, including a solid 3x 10MP zoom. This is massively handy for gig photography, for holidays, for everything. 

If there’s one key direct rival to the iPhone 17, it is this. They both have super-bright OLED panels, top-tier processors and mixed glass and metal designs. One area the iPhone maintains the upper hand, in most use cases at least, is battery life. However, if you want to try the clearest iPhone 17 equivalent from the other side of the fence, the Galaxy S25 is it. 

Price: From $799.99 with 128GB of storage, $899.99 with 256GB of storage.

If you don’t like this recent trend of extra-large camera housings, you can at least apportion some of the blame to the Google Pixel family. 2021’s Pixel 6 went big with the idea, and that continues in the camera-platform-tastic Google Pixel 10. 

An additional 3.4mm of platform-heeled thickness takes the Pixel 10 from the 8mm on its spec sheet to around 12mm in reality. The Pixel 10 is also a little larger than the iPhone 17 in each dimension despite having a similar 6.3-inch screen, as its bezels are less slender. 

This is no Pixel-bashing session, just something to be aware of. And while we’ve said the Galaxy S25 is the iPhone’s closest rival, the Pixel 10 actually is in an important sense. It’s a phone made by the company that also makes the software inside it. And Google has more interesting AI software features than Apple does, at least as of late 2025. 

It has hardware benefits too. The base Google Pixel 10 has a 5x camera, letting it take zoomed photos comparable with the iPhone 17 Pro’s. And its ultra-wide is stronger too, despite its unimpressive-sounding 13-megapixel resolution. 

Price: $799

Nothing’s most expensive phone, the Phone (3), costs the same amount as the cheapest iPhone 17. But the vibes this thing gives off are entirely different. 

Nothing’s modus operandi is all about doing things differently, usually while promising more tech per dollar than the biggest names. In the Nothing Phone (3) this plays out in its rear Glyph display. 

Previous Nothing phones had a network of LEDs across the back, but this one has a Glyph Matrix. It’s a little round screen used to display animations or bits of info like the battery life or time, when a button on the rear is pressed. 

Quirky gimmicks aside, the Nothing Phone (3) is significantly larger than an iPhone 17. It has a bigger 6.67-inch screen, a 3x zoom camera and more punchy 65W cabled charging. Opinions vary on whether it looks cool or just plain ugly. 

The iPhone 17 offers a better camera experience all-round, although having a dedicated zoom in the Nothing is not to be ignored. Apple’s biggest win, though, is in sheer power. Nothing uses the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, which has roughly 75-80% the CPU and GPU power of the iPhone’s A19 chipset.

Price: From £1099/AU$2,299

Oppo’s most direct alternative to the iPhone 17 is the Find X9. But if you can afford a little more outlay, the Find X9 Pro has some special skills in its arsenal. 

It’s one of the leading lights of silicon-carbon battery technology, which enables far more milliampere hours to be squeezed into each cubic millimeter. The Find X9 Pro is a perfectly ordinary 8.3mm thick but has a 7500mAh battery. This is an extra 50% on top of the capacity typical of a phone like this. 

Charging times won’t suffer as a result either as the Find X9 Pro supports up to 80W power using Oppo’s SuperVOOC standard. And there’s 50W wireless charging too. 

Those after a bit more pizzazz rather than convenience will want to hear about the Oppo Find X9 Pro camera. It has a 200-megapixel 3x zoom, a very large 50MP primary and 50MP ultra-wide, tuned in partnership with Hasselblad. 

There’s even extra zoom accessory that looks like a tiny telescope. It costs a small fortune, but is a sign of how hard Oppo wants to push at the borders of what mobile phone cameras can do. 

There is a significant snag. The Oppo Find X9 Pro is not launching the US. It’s not impossible to get for buyers, of course, but comes with extra logistical headaches.