High Midrange or old Top Range. £450 - £850 ish.
I went from a LG G3 to OnePlus 3T to a Xiaomi K30 Ultra (variant of a Poco F2 Pro, Chinese ROM). My partner went from and old iPhone to the same. Loved the phone and the pop up camera, but the Chinese ROM, and in many aspects, Xiaomi bloatware drove us batty. Awful user experience. Is their Global ROM also rubbish?
Now it’s time for a new phone, I liked Xiaomi bang for buck but I’m wary of its software experience on their global devices (does Google assistant work out the box? Does clicking on a link in a browser route you to their horrible GetApps store? Does G maps locations work? Do they lock out custom launchers? Do notifications and syncing get pushed correctly or does the battery Optimizer aggressively shut all things down in the background?)
Our priority list as follows:
- AMOLED 6.5 - 6.7 inch
- Great camera, ideally with a telephoto
- Waterproof
- Not too plasticy a build
- A smooth android experience with minimal bloatware
- Not flagship prices but mid tier, to mid upper tier.
- She wants a pretty colour like purple
So my question is, what phones should be on my radar?
Current list:
Pixel 7 / pro (8 I think is too pricey, but that phone is my personal benchmark)
OPPO Reno 10+ (also a bit steep but she wants the purple)
OnePlus 12 (how’s the camera? I loved my 3T but have heard they aren’t as good as they used to be)
S22+ or S22 Ultra refurbed (cons a year old but has purple an IP68 is it a better pick than the OPPO?)
Xiaomi 12T or similar, suggestions?
Realme GT5 pro looks sick, but I have Chinese ROM ptsd
Thanks for advice. My phone knowledge is a bit rusty and their must be a bunch out there that I would never think to look at.
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Good shout. Yeah I’m struggling to comprehend that people pay top tier laptop / second hand car prices for a phone. The 8 pro is basically perfect otherwise. 7 or maybe 8 vanilla could be the way to go.
Agree. I think you’ll be :) with the Pixel 7 or 8.
With the deals I got for trade in and their black friday deal the pixel 8 costs me less than $300. But it doesn’t have a telephoto lens so I didn’t mention it. The 8a should be launching around May or so and will be cheaper. But it will possibly have a plastic body. Don’t know how much or a deal breaker that is considering the coating on all the pixels that are out right now. The 7a is what one of my friends has and we compared phones and his just about the same size as my 8 and the only thing he complains about is the lack of headphone jack. If you’re feeling froggy you could put Graphene OS on either one and my understanding is that this does wonders for usability for a lot of power users on either phone.
A used Pixel could be good like other people have said but the 8a should be coming out sometime this year and will probably be well within your price range. If you buy it directly, you can even install GrapheneOS on it if you want extra privacy!
i’ve heard Google killed the A series, the 7A was the last one
It might, it might not: https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/google-pixel-phones/google-pixel-8a
If you buy it directly, you can even install GrapheneOS on it
Only if you buy directly?
Most carriers with lock the bootloader so it’s best practice to get the phone either A) directly from Google, B) from Best buy or some other second party seller, or C) make sure that whoever you’re buying from did A or B.
The Samsung galaxy a54 could be a good fit.
Priced well, performs well, decent , and has 80% features (compared to a flagship ) of what 80% of people want in a phone.
Thanks. Added to my research pile!
I have a z fold 3, this may be anecdotal, but I’ve dropped it constantly and it still has no cracks on the screen. I was also able to remove most bloatware using adb.
It doesnt tick all the exterior things, but a Pixel 8 has very good security, GrapheneOS support (the only bloat free and secure Android you can get)
I am sure she can get a purple case lol, please dont use phones without cases, but okay please do I want to get a cheap used Pixel 8
Haha! I think I’ve convinced her that the colour doesn’t matter as much as she thinks.
There may also be purple protective cases.
Some answers for my xiaomi exerience with global ROM.
To change wallpaper or deafult ringtone you need to consent for data harvesting. I am using custom luncher no problem. There are couple of very annoing bugs: reboot messes the layout of quick actions. Sometimes open apps are missaligned. Battery optimization is so bad that sometimes my timer won’t ring to remind me that my laundry is ready. I had overslept couple of times due to this. Xiaomi really pushes for their native video, gallery and app store but it doesn’t prevent from changing the deafults.
I also got bad QA and audio DAC was broken for me.
I don’t use assistant but it always pops up and wants my attention
G maps works good and links to google play open in google play.
Pixel 7 / pro (8 I think is too pricey, but that phone is my personal benchmark)
8th generation Pixels provide a minimum guarantee of 7 years of support from launch instead of the previous 5 year minimum guarantee. 8th generation Pixels also bring support for the incredibly powerful hardware memory tagging security feature as part of moving to new ARMv9 CPU cores. GrapheneOS uses hardware memory tagging by default to protect the base OS and known compatible user installed apps against exploitation, with the option to use it for all apps and opt-out on a case-by-case basis for the few incompatible with it.
Not sure if the screens are OLED but a lot of people sleep on Xperia phones and the flagships are pretty nice. I’ve used them for years and only switched to a Pixel 8 because it was on sale for $350 and included a year of unlimited service.
I am very happy with OP12. It’s not flashy or anything but it’s clean, does the job, holds the battery well, does great photos. It’s quite frankly really boring, but in a good way.
One feature that is a big wow for me is that it charges really fast. I plug it in at 5-10% and I have a fully charged phone after half an hour which holds for 2 daysFrom my experience, Google mobile services all work fine with Xiaomi phones.
Bloatware you can disable with ADB.
Yeah. I imagine the Global’s are less of a hassle. The Chinese ROM was horrific. Got most of it to work eventually but could never get the assistant to work at all pretty much. MIUI in general I found to be a bit of a hack experience.
The only telephoto/periscope smartphones in the midrange tier at 6.7 inch display I know are from realme. Realme 12 pro(2x telephoto) and pro+(3x periscope).
It checks almost all your boxes easily from 1, 2, 3, 4(vegan leather), 5, 6. But, it doesn’t have a purple color being limited to blue, beige, and red.
