Looking to use it as a 5g dongle hence the ask for battery bypass as it will be plugged in for long durations. Prefer to have -
a)5g support for both Airtel and Jio
b)Dual sim
c)Little or no bloatware
d)Smaller size will be a bonus
Budget : 6-7k max, lesser the better
Cheapest 5G costs about 7.7k, Poco C75 which doesnāt support Airtel 5G. Next up is Lava Storm Lite which costs about 8k but doesnāt have bypass charging. Infinix 50x is the cheapest that ticks all your criteria but budget, itās priced about 11k.
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Might be worth looking at second hand market.
Is there one with headphones jack + sd card slot expansion?
Thereās another level to this, how about one that also supports display alt mode with usb c? At any price point
Yes but which phone models?
I am not really concerned about these features. I would prefer a 5g dongle but given their stupid pricing, a phone makes sense.
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Iām gonna tell you what I would do if I were in your situation, buy a used 5G phone,a flagship killer from 2021 will work, like the Oneplus 8. Why a flagship? because flagships have the highest end mobile and wifi modems, so the reception will be better and the hotspot speed will certainly be faster than any budget chip from 2025, these phones are quite old by now and probably have received updates to allow them to connect to pretty much any 5G network. You can of course do a simple search to confirm if it does. If itās got a cracked screen thatās even better, you can get it for dirt cheap.
Iāll give you a couple more phones to look out for below in order of priority
Oneplus 8 (Or any other phone model that's got a snapdragon 865)
Oneplus 9R/Mi 11X 5G (Or any other phone model that's got a snapdragon 870)
Realme GT (Or any other phone model that's got a snapdragon 888), although be warned the 888 runs a bit hot)
Realme GT Neo/ Realme X7 Max (These have mediatek chips and modems, so similar phones should be lower priority)
Similarly priced flagships should also do the job
One thing to note, these phones donāt have āBypass Chargingā as an explicit feature AFAIK, but the Oneplus 8ās bootloader can be unlocked rather easily and with a magisk module called Advanced Charging Controller, you can trigger the phone to go into bypass mode, hence itās on a higher priority.
Of course thatās a pretty complicated process but Iād gladly help you out if you end up going that route
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Curious to know ,what is cheapest 5g dongle we can get now?
but in hotspot speeds gets reduced a lot, you can use usb to ethernet for better speeds.
but in hotspot speeds gets reduced a lot
Wrong, most phones, run USB 2.0 with maximum speed of 480Mbits/S or something similar. The 5ghz wifi modem on a decent phone can most often than not, transfer data at speeds exceeding this via 5GHz wifi.
Try comparing transfer speeds for files over your 5GHz wifi network vs a USB connection and youāll be surprised how fast wireless data transfer has gotten, plus you donāt have to mess with cables, of course if your motherboard/ laptop doesnāt have 5Ghz wifi capabilities youād have to resort to the cable. Of course all this only matters if your mobile 5G is giving you enough download speeds.
My S23 has battery bypass but itās limited to only gaming.
I couldnāt use battery bypass in the manner you want.
The battery bypass on my model isnāt general purpose use but only specific use case.
It would be great if it was general purpose 
My S23 has battery bypass but itās limited to only gaming.
If Iām not wrong, you can set any app as a game from the game dashboard or whatever Samsung calls it. So you could make it so that your gallery app is considered a game. Then you could download a pure black photo and open your gallery to enable bypass charging, while viewing the black photo with your screen timeout set to never so that the display doesnāt turn off(Iām assuming the bypass charging turns off when the phone locks). Since the S23 has an OLED screen, this should turn off all the pixels on the display when youāre viewing the photo so your phone wonāt heat as much either. Can you try this and let me know if it works?
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Max i can gave screen stay on is 10 minutes under display timeout
So Iām assuming the other things worked? by that I mean the bypass charging when gallery is open part.
You can enable developer mode and then at the bottom of your screen a new ādeveloper optionsā will appear. In here you will find an option called āstay awakeā this will cause your screen to never sleep while charging.
Or you can install a third party app called Caffeine from play store, it gives you a quick setting tile that allows infinite screen timeout.
Iād recommend this over the developer options because some apps like to act up if that setting is enabled.
jio airtel slows down speed when other device is connected to hotspot. try a speed test with hotspot connected device and tetered device.
I donāt think thereās any ability for your network service provider to check if your hotspot is on or not and throttle your connection accordingly.
What I believe is actually happening is that your hotspot is defaulting to 2.4 GHz (Which has greatly reduced speeds compared to 5GHz) for some reason.
Try disabling an option similar to āImprove compatibilityā in your hotspot settings, that should let it switch to a 5GHz connection, allowing it to transfer at full speeds.
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No, there is no way I can see to add Gallery as a game. This is what I meant by gaming only
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Needs a PPS compatible charger to be able to āPause USB charging when gamingā which is greyed out otherwise. That would be the 25W one which Samsung offers extra that I donāt have.
Right, thereās still a method to achieve this outside a game though, a little more complicated, uses wireless ADB to do it, but once you have wADB access to your device, the following commands will change the state of bypass charging:
To toggle on bypass charging
adb shell settings put system pass_through 1
To toggle off bypass charging
adb shell settings put system pass_through 0
Although this works only on a PPS compatible charger like you mentioned.
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I have my eyes on an Anker powerbank that has PD3.0
Just need to decide whether to get the 87W version or the 250W model 
Off topic, but Advantages :
- 5g download speeds.
- Cheaper plans compared to wifi.
Disadvantages :
- Overheating due to 5g + hotspot + multiple connected devices + charger, simultaneously.
- Heating will throttle speeds/switch off randomly/drop hotspot connectivity.
- Upload speeds are not that great.
- Budget phone modems arenāt the best. (May blow up or throttle speeds?)
Is this better than just using hotspot from regular phone when required? Iāll be interested if it can be made to work reliably with some jugaad cooling solution.
I guess the onboard radios will be fried soon if using the phone exclusively as a hotspot.