You won't get a 4x for that price, but you can get a 5A for under $100. For that price you'll get a Snapdragon 425, 2GB of RAM, a surprisingly bright 720p display and a non-awful camera. I can only assume that these devices will sell for vastly below the listed price in their target markets, otherwise they're going to flop miserably.
These phones seem like really good deals... too good to be true? I'm in the market for a cheap phone coming from a moto E 1st gen and these seem like promising options.
The Xiaomi phones absolutely work. They're amazing for the price, and very popular as imports here in Ireland. There's always the chance they might have Chinese govt spyware however, as has been alleged with Huawei https://mashable.com/2018/02/14/huawei-prove-phones-not-spyi...
My Xiaomi Mi5 won't power on after 2 months of use. My friend's Mi5 won't power on after less than a year. It seems it's a common problem: google "Xiaomi Sudden Death". For warranty I have to ship it to China, which I knew when I bought it so I'm not complaining, just not recommending Xiaomi in light of the "sudden death" issue.
I own a Xiaomi Note 4. It's a fantastic device for the price and has given me no trouble at all. Xiaomi's Android skin (MiUI) is nicely designed, performs well and is regularly updated even on older devices. Xiaomi aren't well known in the west, but they're the fifth largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world.
Depending on your country, you may have to pay import charges if you buy direct from China or Hong Kong. Even with import charges, Xiaomi phones still usually work out to be a good deal. Warranty coverage is limited if you're outside of Xiaomi's core markets, but parts are cheap and readily available if you need to replace a cracked screen or a weak battery.
I wouldn't recommend other Chinese brands like Doogee, Leagoo or UMI. The hardware is usually good, but the software is often poor and you can forget about updates.
Must say I've had kind of the opposite experience - I found that the MiUI skin was actually quite confusing and definitely didn't add anything useful.
Otoh, my Leagoo T5 has been a great phone, has better specs, a gorilla glass screen (RedMi Note 4X has regular glass and cracked within days of getting it), and has been getting system updates about once per month from Leagoo, all for less than the price of the Xiaomi.
ymmv I guess, but that's been my experience so far.
Moto E4 can be had for ~$130 unlocked. I got one as a temporary replacement for my beloved Moto G LTE until I could find a decent 4.5" phone. I'm mostly happy with it other than I wish it was smaller.
The Samsung 2017 A3 is what I wish I could get but thanks to pointless market segmentation, the only variant that works well in North America is impossible to buy and it's now being obsoleted by a replacement with a 5" screen.
I too have a Moto E4 and it works beautifully. I don't play games on it, but for everything else its very snappy and it takes pretty good photos. I got mine for $99 when it first came out. I have yet to run out of internal storage (16GB for those who don't know). 2GB RAM seems good enough atm. I can plug pretty much anything into the usb port and it will work with the device too.
For people who just like their Android flavour, they also provide ROMs for other devices: http://en.miui.com/getrom.php?m=yes&mobile=2 Presumably the same suspicion of Chinese goods coming packaged with spyware would apply to those images too I guess.
LTE band support isnt great for the US market. Its supports exactly zero of Tmobile's 5 LTE bands, for example. 3G should work fine just about anywhere though.
You have other manufacturers like Ulefone, Doogee, Leagoo, Wiko, Bq, Archos, Zoji, ZTE, Bluboo, Cubot, Oukitel, Fantec, HomTom, Kazam, BlackView, Elephone, Umidigi, Wieppo, GigaSet, HiSense, Gretel, Nabo, Siswoo, Hafury, Coolpad, STK, Keecoo, Meizu etc. offering better specs than any Go phone. Go just seems like a rebranding of what couldn't sell and got outdated.
Even compared to a $5 Android Tracfone you can get at any Safeway, these are pretty underwhelming. Why would I pay 12x more and only get double the RAM & LTE compared to a $5 Alcatel Android phone?
Essentially the only reason is for modern Android, but its not as though any of these Android phones (except the Nokia) will ever see multiple years of software updates.
Brick and mortar only though, and stock varies. I usually power dial all the local stores, then go to the ones with the most stock and clean 'em out. Easy way to get a few dozen Androids in short order.
Sadly, at the $5 price point Amazon and eBay will never beat Brick & Mortar stores, as shipping is more than half the cost.
Crazy if you compare this with Raspberry Pi Zero at $5 - you get: better CPU, 1 GB RAM, 8 GB storage, display, 2 cameras, GSM, GPS, microphone, speakers, battery, enclosure and a charger... if this continues, in 5-10 years you will get a solid machine for $5...
The Raspberry Pi Zero is a board of compromises. Look at what the OrangePi Zero is in comparison, then wonder why Broadcom couldn't compete with two guys in Shenzen on features, price or getting their hardware mainlined into the kernel.
Isn't LG sunrise complete garbage because of the 16bit screen? It can't properly display more than 65k colors and has to use dithering which effectively turns the 320p screen into a 160p screen.
Hence buying in store. Plus, pay in cash and your new burner phone is way less traceable! Use the White House Switchboard phone number (202-456-1414) when prompted for a rewards card for bonus confusion points :P
can they be flashed with a custom rom and still be usable? 10 years ago I had half a dozen firefox browser open with hundreds of tabs, now I can barely have one or two with a dozen tabs -- same with mobile, I buy the cheapest phone and do the minimal I need, but sometimes I need a special app and I expect it to work a year later and not get hung up on required upgrades and then get locked out with a useless phone. I just want a phone I can buy and not worry about evil corporations forcing me to upgrade or that it will be slower then stuff I used 10 years ago.
Every American phone is underwhelming compared to what Chinese manufacturers are doing.
They make all of the phones, actually. You have to pay hella licensing to get a cell chip that works in the west. Then, they sell that phone to the company wholesale. Then the American company upcharges for retail.
You can get a Samsung S whatever for 1/3 the price if you don't want to connect to a cell network and don't mind waiting 3 months for it to ship.
Can one "downgrade" a normal android to go? Would be interesting to see what it does to your battery runtime, for people like me, who use their phones mainly for different forms of text messaging, some news browsing and some once in a while google maps routing.
Doubtful, this seems to just be another soon to be orphaned Android variant (like Android One). Uninstalling Google Play Newsstand and most of the other Google Crapware should get you close, perhaps replace Google Play Services Framework with microG to save a few hundred megs of space?
Go apps are stripped down version of their normal counterpart. These stripped down versions are smaller in size and maybe be optimized for slower internet services.
Android Ones is still going well in places like India but Google usually has a say in what hardware is used on Android One phones as they push the updates for these devices.
With Android Go any hardware can be used.
> Go apps are stripped down version of their normal counterpart.
They're slightly smaller, but the update model is still a total mess. You can never uninstall the baked in Google Apps, and updates are extremely bulky (basically storing a 2nd copy of each Google app).
> Android Ones is still going well in places like India
The #1 & #2 non-Apple phone manufacturers are totally uninterested, and Xiaomi (the current Android One leader) is effectively banned from India after spying on millions.
But yet they're also bringing back FirefoxOS since low performing Android devices at high price points aren't pushing great volume: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/26/kaios/
> With Android Go any hardware can be used.
Sounds like a great way to orphan a device with no software updates!
The hope for running Android go versions on a nicer phone isn't to save space (nice phones have plenty) or make updates not suck (that's unlikely to change), it's that the experience might be faster because it's doing less.
There's an open bug in Chrome to put it in Go mode on regular hardware (crbug.com/747143).
Not sure if that would help though. The performance constraints on low-end hardware are different than on others. For instance, you want as many layers as possible on regular hardware (so transitions are smooth). However, those layers eat up RAM that low-end hardware can't afford.
Hah. I have a phone with 5GB (probably marketed as 6 but I don't remember) and you really can not have many apps installed at once. Add to it the fact that if you run something like Spotify it will cache like 1GB of data over a few days. I have something different every week. As a bonus, it keeps my home screen free of almost any icons...
It almost certainly has 8GB of storage, but Android + Google Apps eats a bit under 3GB of space. Worst part is, when you update those Google Apps, the version of Gapps your phone shipped with isn't deleted :(
They key is to get a phone with microSD support. Then Spotify and other apps can put their data on the card and relieve pressure from the limited on board storage.
You can also go for LineageOS with minimal to no GApps to free up some space on small memory phones.
It's the perpetual software treadmill, bloat because the hardware can support bloat. If phones were not all 64GB monsters, devs would learn to be disciplined.
Until the day phones give me next level miracles, there is no need for the specs they have. A good camera, a large battery, good ungimped radio bands, thems be thar necessities.
Not sure what the point of this article is. There are plenty of Quad core, 2gb ram, 16gb phones for under $100 already available in the US. Of course some are initially locked but they are locked to MVNO that have relatively cheap plans $20-$40 a month.
This configuration (Quad,2gb,16gb) seems like a good minimum that you can use most apps without major problems and have enough space to not uninstall stuff all the time.
Plus now the used market has many high quality phones that are available. A used Samsung S5 should meet most people's basic needs. The difference between a 2018 phone and a 2015 phone is much smaller than 2015 and a 2012 phone.
As for place like India, there are plenty of phones in the $80-$99 range that meet these specs. And many that are at the $40-50 price points that have worse specs but still usable.
I'm pretty much through buying "flagship" devices due to the pathetically short software support lifetime they have, I bought a second hand Xperia Z5 Compact for £150 about 6 months ago and loaded Lineage OS onto it.
Even my old Xperia Z3 has a port of Oreo available, and its perfectly functional.
I'm not buying any phones anymore unless they come from Google or Apple. Even manufacturers that do update their phones can be very slow getting security fixes out.
They are the best of all the Android devices though. Of all phones Apple probably do the best job of supporting their phones. If Google Fi doesn't work well, I'm going to order an iPhone because I know I'll be happy with that. All I really want are security fixes for 2-3 years and a very good and fast camera.
Coming to Android from WebOS with Preware (where you could install an LDXE chroot in one click) felt the same way.
But my tastes have changed over the years, now if I want a pocket computer I’ll just get a pocket computer. My phone needs to make phone calls and not annoy me. The same freedom that makes Android not an iOS clone can be (and is often) abused, and now Google is cracking down on said freedom try and save us all from apps abusing the features that let Android apps do amazing things (like background processing and hidden APIs).
I’m an Android Developer but I use an iPhone because at the end of the day it does what it needs to and no app will ever be able to show ads on my lockscreen.
I know what you mean, sadly users sometimes don't have the awareness to take care of themselves properly, and will be taken advantage of by malicious software.
Even though I know Androids rather flexible API's and Intents system are all exploitable, I really appreciate the freedom they give me.
While I find Apple's approach to functionality and UX condescending, there is a large swath of users who either want somebody else to take all the effort away from them, or need it.
I guess its nice that both kinds of users have something to cater to their needs, but I wish the mobile OS space wasn't a duopoly.
>sadly users sometimes don't have the awareness to take care of themselves properly, and will be taken advantage of by malicious software
Or they have better things to do.
One of the top 3 non-AD listings for a file manager on Android is an app that takes over your lockscreen, integrates performance killing, crash inducing “memory optimizes”, and (my favorite) takes over system wide touch events to implement a (vey easy to accidentally trigger) gesture to open a full screen menu that draws over all your current apps.
On my PCs I’m able to stay safe and those aren’t nearly as locked down as either, but I have better things to do than start figuring out which apps I’m downloading from a walled garden are malware... that kind of defeats the purpose of a walled garden.
The difference isn't just the price. It's that all of these phones are also running an optimized version of Android that is going to run on the lower specs better than anything else. It doesn't matter if the specs seem the same between devices, if the vendor adds a bunch of crap or just drops aosp without optimizing for the hardware, the phone is going to run terribly. This is the current state of most low end android phone's which they appear to be addressing with Android Go phones.
I wonder if these are a good solution to phone addiction, ie can still let you use maps, uber and check email without being good for FB & games. If only they had a good camera...
Yes of course any modern smart phone can do this by just not installing apps. But there is absolutely a need for a minimal or 'dumb' smart phone. Just having Google Play with everything available is enough to get you distracted enough to go into a never ending pool of distractions and wasted time. Yes, I should certainly have the control to stop myself and I even do an application detox occasionally when I get the will power. But if I couldn't get into that useless stuff in the first place, I wouldn't need to worry about it.
I have seriously considered going straight to a dumb phone and had one much longer than most of my friends, but then I need to carry a GPS, MP3 player, and a not shitty camera. I just want a phone that actually fits in my hand with email, a light weight web browser, Spotify/Pandora, Maps, maybe some health/fitness trackers, and a half decent camera. And of course the actual phone functions to text and call when needed.
> This also means the battery is—get this—replaceable! When you take off the back you can actually pull the battery out and—if you have an extra on hand—replace it with a fully charged battery. Amazing.
Not sure if this is meant to be a joke... My understanding that most lower-tier phones have replacable batteries, at least my last phones (from the Moto G series) had.
I've been a Moto G fan since the first one, but the current one I have (3rd Generation, falcon) does not have replacable batteries. But instead it has space for a sd-card. I was not sure which one was best to have, but after having the phone for a while and the battery loosing it's juice, I would definitely be happier with a replaceable battery compared to upgradable storage.
I have the recent one (G5), and it has both. 2 Sim card slots, SD card slot, replacable battery. The first one also had a replacable battery. Didn't know the 3rd Generation didn't! In that case I'm glad they reverted their design in that regard.
Oh, seems you convinced me to upgrade again, forgot my phone outside in the rain, it still works but cameras are all foggy and battery is acting weird (loosing 100% in just a couple of idle hours) so time for a new one! Thanks!
I'm now on my third "budget" phone, my last previous premium phone being a Nexus 4. I used a Moto G4 until I broke it, a Moto G5 until I broke it, and now have a new G5, which given my history will last me about 6 months. I break phones too often to fork out anything over about £150.
If I can get a sub £100 phone, that will run Google maps, an email client, a web browser and give me the ability to tether then sign me up.
No, I'm fairly clumsy and get through phones, laptops, e-cigs etc at an alarming rate.
My phone costs me the equivalent of £25 a month plus an additional £10 for 4G from my provider. After 6 months, it's just the £10. This is far cheaper than the £50/month 2 year contracts on most premium phones.
From a fellow clumsy person (hands like cows t#ts) I invested in a decent case for my iPhone. It looks ridiculous but has kept my iPhone 6+ immaculate after many drops and tumbles. Takes away from the sleek design but means I'm still using mu 6+ today.
As far as I'm concerned, the only question that matters is "What is the chain of responsibility for making security updates get to my phone?"
If the answer is "Google-Carrier-Me" or "Google-Vendor-Carrier-Me" and not "Google-Me", then fuck it sideways. I'm so done with Android until the update model stops being garbage.
I do find it interesting though, as someone who through work has deployed a lot of cell phones for field ops - the situation seems to be kind of, sort of getting better in that respect.
We bought a ton of Moto G4s and G5s in last 18 months, and for the first year, I saw maybe one OS update and a couple security patches?. In the past six months, it's been noticably different (and these phones are only getting older, mind).
I'm writing this on a Moto G5+ which has 7.1.1 and the January security patches, including fix for KRACK vulnerability. G4 models have the same patch level and 7.0. Updates have been deployed fairly regularly lately (if still not quite on a monthly cycle).
This from Lenovo, who have historically been terrible for issuing updates in a timely manner.
I wonder if the message is finally getting to these OEMs that they can't afford to let current models wither on the vine in this IT security climate, even if only for their own selfish ends (e.g. avoiding bad press).
I'd prefer a more classical model of having a group of volunteers work with semi-independent groups of vendors - along the lines of Debian Gnu/Linux. Rather than some semi-closed Linux + Google+hw-vendor Android.
I like the direction Google one + lineage Os seem to be taking us; even if the baseband are still a problem / back-door.
PostmarketOS is a Linux distribution for phones that tries to bring as much device support into mainline as possible. Device support is documented in their wiki: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
The only non-obscure device in that list that has a "Yes" in the "mainline" column seems to be the Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet.
Ah, my point was that I would prefer to run mainline Linux (among other things). And I'm hoping we'll get there. Didn't mean to imply we were there yet.
I had a Pixel XL and now have a Pixel XL 2; both get monthly security patches (including the XL, although it isn't hooked up to any carrier), generally on the 5th of each month.
The Pixel 2 XL seems like a nice phone, apart from the screen manufacturing defect that affects a large percentage of them. It appears that it got worse in phones manufactured in December. I can't find any news about whether things have improved in more recently manufactured phones.
I didn't get mine right at launch, so this might be due to fixes, but I honestly haven't noticed anything drastic. Occasionally when the screen brightness is very low the dark colors start to blend together a little, but I haven't noticed any burn-in or retention on my display. (I also actually prefer sRGB and still have my display set to that, but there was a patch months back that let you make the color profile more vivid, and the default no longer is sRGB).
None. The state of smart phones in 2018 is complete bullshit. You either get fucked in the wallet or you get fucked in maintenance. It's extremely frustrating if you aren't wealthy.
The closest right now is maybe a used iPhone SE? Or maybe something old that happens to be well supported by LineageOS, if ADB is your idea of a fun time. Neither seem like great options to me. I don't have a good answer.
If the option of installing your own OS isn't available, eg due to insufficient community interest or DRM-based fraud, then don't buy the brick in the first place.
You should consider Android One [1] phones. There's plenty of them now, including all the latest Nokia released ones. They have vanilla Android and receive all updates directly from Google.
I personally own a Xiaomi Mi A1[2] that I purchased from Amazon for under CAD$320. Solid phone and overall great specs for this price range. The only thing missing is NFC, but I don't miss it too much since the rollout of Android Pay (Google Pay) in Canada extends only to few financial institutions.
I had Android One phones back when they were called Nexus 4 and Nexus 5, and they stopped getting updates after 18 months. I know that things have gotten a little better on paper, but Google really has to prove itself to me now. They've been dicking around too much for too long. Fool me once, etc.
Android One says "two years of upgrades", but I see no promises about patch schedule reliability. Motorola also promised to bring Android 8 to the G5+. Maybe it will happen in 2018. We'll see. That's just not good enough.
Also...2 years is an impoverished standard compared to the 5 years that iPhones get.
having used androids and always getting frustrated at them getting super laggy, i finally took my friends advice and bought a used 5s for $80. runs like butter for the last year.
unbelievable to me we still can't keep garbage processes and excessive ui down enough to have a budget phone run like crap
It is too bad it was a private conversation, I would love to be able to point to a published form, but I discussed with one of the Googlers in charge of optimizing Android.
He did not exactly have nice things to say about how OEMs are optimizing their phones.
Basically they optimize in order to get higher benchmark score but it very often goes against general smoothness.
In the end he published a detailed article detailing how his team had optimized the pixel phone rendering pipeline so OEMs could try to do it correctly as well.
And that's for a high end phone.
However, I have got to say that after using iOS phones recently, I have not exactly been impressed with their smoothness either. Even system apps miss frames.
That's not shocking in itself, mobile computing is pretty hard, you can't even table on a stable cpu frequency (thermal throttle) but not what I expected due to the reputation of apple phones.
I was confused by some of the comments here before I realized that I was confusing "Android Go" (for low-ram devices) with "Android One" (stock android with guaranteed updates, usually for budget devices). For all the folks asking for a good cheap phone that gets Android updates, look at Android One devices.
I remember the Treo from 2004 where my contacts and appointments opened immediately. Now we have these things where you wait a second for it to do a little dance before you can dial the number.
That, and considering the amount of information they're scraping, Google should be paying me to use their awful phones.
I don't get the RAM requirements here. I can buy a 1GB DDR3L chip for around $6.20 (and closer to $5.50 per 1000). Another layer on the PCB (if even necessary) would only add a couple dollars more. I think even people without much money would pay an extra 10 for 2x the RAM and 1/2 the frustration because things like web pages can't really be optimized too much no matter Android Go's aims.
This smells of companies making phones because certain Google execs recommended they do so.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadhttps://www.banggood.com/Xiaomi-Redmi-5A-Global-Edition-5_0-...
A sample search: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mi+5+not+turning...
Depending on your country, you may have to pay import charges if you buy direct from China or Hong Kong. Even with import charges, Xiaomi phones still usually work out to be a good deal. Warranty coverage is limited if you're outside of Xiaomi's core markets, but parts are cheap and readily available if you need to replace a cracked screen or a weak battery.
I wouldn't recommend other Chinese brands like Doogee, Leagoo or UMI. The hardware is usually good, but the software is often poor and you can forget about updates.
Those names sound like Dodgy and Leakgoo, easy to remember, don't get those. Thanks.
The Samsung 2017 A3 is what I wish I could get but thanks to pointless market segmentation, the only variant that works well in North America is impossible to buy and it's now being obsoleted by a replacement with a 5" screen.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7748542
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12171276
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12787766
For people who just like their Android flavour, they also provide ROMs for other devices: http://en.miui.com/getrom.php?m=yes&mobile=2 Presumably the same suspicion of Chinese goods coming packaged with spyware would apply to those images too I guess.
Essentially the only reason is for modern Android, but its not as though any of these Android phones (except the Nokia) will ever see multiple years of software updates.
Brick and mortar only though, and stock varies. I usually power dial all the local stores, then go to the ones with the most stock and clean 'em out. Easy way to get a few dozen Androids in short order.
Sadly, at the $5 price point Amazon and eBay will never beat Brick & Mortar stores, as shipping is more than half the cost.
They make all of the phones, actually. You have to pay hella licensing to get a cell chip that works in the west. Then, they sell that phone to the company wholesale. Then the American company upcharges for retail.
You can get a Samsung S whatever for 1/3 the price if you don't want to connect to a cell network and don't mind waiting 3 months for it to ship.
They're slightly smaller, but the update model is still a total mess. You can never uninstall the baked in Google Apps, and updates are extremely bulky (basically storing a 2nd copy of each Google app).
> Android Ones is still going well in places like India
The #1 & #2 non-Apple phone manufacturers are totally uninterested, and Xiaomi (the current Android One leader) is effectively banned from India after spying on millions.
Nokia, the #3 phone manufacturer (excluding Apple), is showing tepid interest in Android One: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/25/hmd-android-one-nokia/
But yet they're also bringing back FirefoxOS since low performing Android devices at high price points aren't pushing great volume: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/26/kaios/
> With Android Go any hardware can be used.
Sounds like a great way to orphan a device with no software updates!
How are they banned? they have the best selling phones in India. They now beating Samsung https://www.neowin.net/news/xioami-trumps-samsung-in-indian-...
Not sure if that would help though. The performance constraints on low-end hardware are different than on others. For instance, you want as many layers as possible on regular hardware (so transitions are smooth). However, those layers eat up RAM that low-end hardware can't afford.
You can also go for LineageOS with minimal to no GApps to free up some space on small memory phones.
Until the day phones give me next level miracles, there is no need for the specs they have. A good camera, a large battery, good ungimped radio bands, thems be thar necessities.
This configuration (Quad,2gb,16gb) seems like a good minimum that you can use most apps without major problems and have enough space to not uninstall stuff all the time.
Plus now the used market has many high quality phones that are available. A used Samsung S5 should meet most people's basic needs. The difference between a 2018 phone and a 2015 phone is much smaller than 2015 and a 2012 phone.
As for place like India, there are plenty of phones in the $80-$99 range that meet these specs. And many that are at the $40-50 price points that have worse specs but still usable.
Even my old Xperia Z3 has a port of Oreo available, and its perfectly functional.
But my tastes have changed over the years, now if I want a pocket computer I’ll just get a pocket computer. My phone needs to make phone calls and not annoy me. The same freedom that makes Android not an iOS clone can be (and is often) abused, and now Google is cracking down on said freedom try and save us all from apps abusing the features that let Android apps do amazing things (like background processing and hidden APIs).
I’m an Android Developer but I use an iPhone because at the end of the day it does what it needs to and no app will ever be able to show ads on my lockscreen.
Even though I know Androids rather flexible API's and Intents system are all exploitable, I really appreciate the freedom they give me.
While I find Apple's approach to functionality and UX condescending, there is a large swath of users who either want somebody else to take all the effort away from them, or need it.
I guess its nice that both kinds of users have something to cater to their needs, but I wish the mobile OS space wasn't a duopoly.
Or they have better things to do.
One of the top 3 non-AD listings for a file manager on Android is an app that takes over your lockscreen, integrates performance killing, crash inducing “memory optimizes”, and (my favorite) takes over system wide touch events to implement a (vey easy to accidentally trigger) gesture to open a full screen menu that draws over all your current apps.
On my PCs I’m able to stay safe and those aren’t nearly as locked down as either, but I have better things to do than start figuring out which apps I’m downloading from a walled garden are malware... that kind of defeats the purpose of a walled garden.
I have seriously considered going straight to a dumb phone and had one much longer than most of my friends, but then I need to carry a GPS, MP3 player, and a not shitty camera. I just want a phone that actually fits in my hand with email, a light weight web browser, Spotify/Pandora, Maps, maybe some health/fitness trackers, and a half decent camera. And of course the actual phone functions to text and call when needed.
Not sure if this is meant to be a joke... My understanding that most lower-tier phones have replacable batteries, at least my last phones (from the Moto G series) had.
If I can get a sub £100 phone, that will run Google maps, an email client, a web browser and give me the ability to tether then sign me up.
Could you stop doing that? Or get insurance that covers accidental damage. The premium will cost less than £150 every 6 months.
No, I'm fairly clumsy and get through phones, laptops, e-cigs etc at an alarming rate.
My phone costs me the equivalent of £25 a month plus an additional £10 for 4G from my provider. After 6 months, it's just the £10. This is far cheaper than the £50/month 2 year contracts on most premium phones.
If the answer is "Google-Carrier-Me" or "Google-Vendor-Carrier-Me" and not "Google-Me", then fuck it sideways. I'm so done with Android until the update model stops being garbage.
I do find it interesting though, as someone who through work has deployed a lot of cell phones for field ops - the situation seems to be kind of, sort of getting better in that respect.
We bought a ton of Moto G4s and G5s in last 18 months, and for the first year, I saw maybe one OS update and a couple security patches?. In the past six months, it's been noticably different (and these phones are only getting older, mind).
I'm writing this on a Moto G5+ which has 7.1.1 and the January security patches, including fix for KRACK vulnerability. G4 models have the same patch level and 7.0. Updates have been deployed fairly regularly lately (if still not quite on a monthly cycle).
This from Lenovo, who have historically been terrible for issuing updates in a timely manner.
I wonder if the message is finally getting to these OEMs that they can't afford to let current models wither on the vine in this IT security climate, even if only for their own selfish ends (e.g. avoiding bad press).
I really hope so. It's way overdue.
Disclaimer: total anecdata, handle with gloves.
Well my G5+ says it's still on 7.0, and 7.1.1 still isn't the 8 update that was promised many months ago.
> and the January security patches
If you want to sleep at night, don't count the number of critical severity CVEs fixed in the February and March updates that you don't have.
I like the direction Google one + lineage Os seem to be taking us; even if the baseband are still a problem / back-door.
The only non-obscure device in that list that has a "Yes" in the "mainline" column seems to be the Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet.
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/1/15/16889854/p...
The closest right now is maybe a used iPhone SE? Or maybe something old that happens to be well supported by LineageOS, if ADB is your idea of a fun time. Neither seem like great options to me. I don't have a good answer.
If the option of installing your own OS isn't available, eg due to insufficient community interest or DRM-based fraud, then don't buy the brick in the first place.
I personally own a Xiaomi Mi A1[2] that I purchased from Amazon for under CAD$320. Solid phone and overall great specs for this price range. The only thing missing is NFC, but I don't miss it too much since the rollout of Android Pay (Google Pay) in Canada extends only to few financial institutions.
[1] https://android.com/one
[2] https://www.amazon.ca/Xiaomi-Android-Cameras-Unlocked-Versio...
Android One says "two years of upgrades", but I see no promises about patch schedule reliability. Motorola also promised to bring Android 8 to the G5+. Maybe it will happen in 2018. We'll see. That's just not good enough.
Also...2 years is an impoverished standard compared to the 5 years that iPhones get.
Huh? I see the Moto X4 as 350 USD without a service contract.
I think you're using carrier rebates on only one side of your equation.
Not a lot, as it turns out, unsurprising to most.
unbelievable to me we still can't keep garbage processes and excessive ui down enough to have a budget phone run like crap
He did not exactly have nice things to say about how OEMs are optimizing their phones.
Basically they optimize in order to get higher benchmark score but it very often goes against general smoothness.
In the end he published a detailed article detailing how his team had optimized the pixel phone rendering pipeline so OEMs could try to do it correctly as well.
And that's for a high end phone.
However, I have got to say that after using iOS phones recently, I have not exactly been impressed with their smoothness either. Even system apps miss frames.
That's not shocking in itself, mobile computing is pretty hard, you can't even table on a stable cpu frequency (thermal throttle) but not what I expected due to the reputation of apple phones.
That, and considering the amount of information they're scraping, Google should be paying me to use their awful phones.
This smells of companies making phones because certain Google execs recommended they do so.