There are many ways and tools to choose your next device, but some are better than others. How do you do it?
I’ll begin - I tend to use Kimovil, however it lacks pricing for many devices and thus makes the process harder. Has many filters though, from headphone jack to different 5G and 4G bands.
I’m a farmer and need a rugged phone that can fall off a tractor into an irrigation ditch on a regular basis. So I buy Sonim, end of story. Usually replace them every 5 years as they never get updates and the Android version starts getting obsolete.
Unfortunately the Sonim XP10 looks to be not as sturdy as previous versions and they have walked back their previous bulletproof warranty. So I guess I’m in the market for a new ultra-rugged phone, luckily the XP8 I’m using should last for years yet
I’ve heard good things about them online but sadly they aren’t supported by my Canadian carrier at this time, and as my carrier gatekeeps services like VoLTE and VoWifi with their firmware for some reason it’s not really worth the risk of importing one especially at full price…
But I’m hoping they make it out here soon to provide us with another rugged option for sure. I’ve been so happy with Sonim for years that I’m quite disappointed in their latest offering.
A smartphone is the ultimate, single-user personal computer. Choosing a device is too intimate for me to use any sort of tabular comparison tool. The device needs to be right for me qualitatively also.
I strongly recommend picking a handful of devices and getting a variety of opinions from reviewers. Then, weigh those opinions against what features are most important to you.
If this is your main computer which most likely it is for most people, it’s worthwhile to spend some time on selection.
GSMArena has nice phone search functionality, I was using it often when thinking about upgrading, but to be frank I bought 2 of my last phones basically on release date based off specs, unboxings and first impressions I saw online, even not full reviews were online, those phones were:
Motorola One Vision - May 2019 - 128GB of UFS storage, modern punch hole display and OIS equipped camera sounded cool, unfortunately the camera was kind of sub par, slight zoom resulted in garbage photo, also apparently Motorola couldn’t optimize for exynos because despite somewhat satisfying performance, stuttering was frequent
OnePlus Nord 3 - July 2023 - powerful SoC, 16GB of RAM, OnePlus declares 3 years of software support, fast 80W charging, looks nice on paper, my only gripe is battery drain but they keep optimizing the software
I mostly use GSMarena to compare features and check out reviews of shortlisted phones on amazon and youtube. Kimovil looks interesting. Will try it out next time.
I don’t use a tool, I just check the sizes to narrow down if the phone can be used comfortably in one hand. This narrows the results down to 0 and I just decide to keep my current device for longer.
I look up what I like in a phone (headphone jack, expandable storage, led, Snapdragon…, plastic back, etc.) and use gsmsarena’s advanced search feature.
The quality has skyrocketed lately, a working bacon(my current main phone), then a working addison(which now supports treble thanks to lineageOS and Xperience teams!), then my next main phone, the oxygen
I look at the supported devices list for LineageOS or Graphene, compare the specs to find the smallest one that’s current, then hit the classifieds to buy a used phone. Because I’m just going to break it anyway and I’ll be fucked if I use stock Android.
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