Rants are welcome, even encouraged :)
Feel free to skip the following text
The last 4 phones I had were just a mess. I am starting to loose hope of there being something that would work well. I just recently got a new phone, it’s a mess as usual. Maybe what I am experiencing is enough for a warranty claim, maybe it’s just a quirk to be dealt with…
Every couple years every newer phone I try is just worse and worse. I thought that maybe once PinePhone and available software gets mature enough…, but at this point, maybe other phones will just get crap enough.
My last good phone was ironically an ultra-cheap Lark Cumulus 5HD. It was just 50 EUR new. No lags, no crashes, swappable battery, a just works experience. 50 bucks…
Chronologically…
Moto G5s Plus
Great hardware, except that focus on my camera was kind-of broken, but I was too lazy to get that repaired under warranty.
But SW, god damn Motorola. Slow buggy mess. Crashes, freezes, battery drain. BUT, I was able to fix it with ✨a custom ROM✨
Poco X3 Pro
If you had any MIUI device, you know. Alarm clock may get killed optimized, ton of bugs to learn working around, built-in ads and spyware. Lots of it, based on blocked DNS logs.
HW - cheap and powerful. Average lifespan of the motherboard being whopping… 9 months. The phone ate 3 of them.
Moto G54 5G Power
Once again, great HW, SW not so much. The 3 button navigation was completely broken in high DPI and what made me return it - non-skippable updates. Just full-screen permanent update notifications. Only option: update. Nope.
Ulefone Armor 24
Few SW issues: Long-pressing dock icons while an app is open crashes “Quickstep”, in turn killing navigation (both gesture and buttons…). Alarm clock gets killed most of the time even with all optimizations off.
HW, least I think I should classify it as such: The phone has a chance to negotiate (?) 12V for split-second intervals using QC 2.0 (based on my USB tester) which it doesn’t expect, and throws overvoltage error. This happens with all QC-compatible chargers I tried, even the original one when used with OTG adapter.
The original one otherwise uses USB-C with PD, which works, sure. But after using it data transfer to PC via cable is broken until reboot.
I was very much a full-time phone person, but now it’s too much. I got a cheap touchscreen ThinkPad and use it with KDE Plasma (wayland). I was doing basically everything on a phone before, now I instead try not to, but with everything being an app, damn.
Pixel 6. Upgraded from a pixel 4a.
Where’s my fucking headphone jack.
I’ve got a Fairphone 4. Had quite the headache, cause I had a slightly broken one. I don’t want to go into detail, but I can say the support on Fairphones side is excelent, they were super friendly and helped to fix the issues as best as they could. And the nice thing is that you can repair most things yourself. But it is still a “nerdy” product. Fairphone doesn’t have the best flagship with the fastes processor. But if you value something, where you own your hardware, and can repair stuff easily, you should consider it.
I have an iPhone 12 Mini.
I am an IT guy, I just want a phone that works.
It is not amazing, it is not horrible, it has good cameras, it’s fine.
CarPlay is awesome, the size is great, the battery is too small. The notch isn’t as annoying as I first thought.
It’s a fine phone.
Same here. iPhone 12 Mini, was an Android user before but this is probably the best Phone I ever had.
Android phones always had the issues with no more Android updates and getting slow with time.
Now my only problem is a battery which gets weaker every year and I don’t know what I will get next since this form factor is pretty much dead but I don’t want a bigger phone.
I spend all day work on software. I am now a PM after spending 15 years writing code, but totally agree with wanting to not have to worry about hardware/software once I’m done working.
My personal phone is a Pixel 3a. I would classify it as not amazing/not horrible/decent camera and just works. I personally like some of the UX patterns in Android more than iOS, but these days the two are more or less in parity. Unless you get an OE ROM. Those can be a wreck.
Pixel 4a. It has a headphone jack, the bootloader is easy to unlock, and it’s well supported by third party developers (I run LineageOS on it).
The stock kernel doesn’t support ExFAT, which is annoying. I’d prefer if it was a little smaller.
Rant: every newer phone is worse in terms of bootloader, size, or headphone jack.
Fairphone 4. No complaints at all
