What would your recommended budget ($200-400) phones be?
Not looking for me personally, so leaving the specs/features open, and generally interested in what people might recommend. Imo there’s almost always some surprising budget phones floating around to learn about. Only condition I might add is that preferably they’re from 2022-2023, and if not, mention their release year to help know its version/update situation.
seems its successors aren’t that well suited for custom ROMs
what do you mean?
Get a previous gen / 2 gen Pixel. They are often on sale especially this time of the year.
Pixel 6a was on sale for about $299CAD during Black Friday.
I agree that cheap would be <$100, but when it comes to smartphones I was thinking in terms of something that would be considered more performant, and that that might have you looking more at options over $100. I may be whiffing on some decent cheaper models though, so feel free to mention them!
Budget in the title was for the range mentioned, but not meant to exclude anything cheap or cheaper, by any means.
Poco F5. Great 120hz oled hdr 10+ screen, insane soc for the money(snapdragon 7+ gen 2), amazing fingerprint sensor on the power button instead of those shitty underscreen ones. And yes, even samsung s23 underscreen one is shitty in comparison, both in terms of speed and precision.
I dont understand why so many android phones force an objectively inferior experience on their users with those underscreen fingerprint sensors. And it isnt a small thing, it is something that you use dozens of times per day.
If you really care about photographs, then get a pixel. But i dont, i care about performance, so poco phones always offer best value for money(and the f5 actually has decent cameras too).
Alternatively, during Black Friday, you could buy really cheap oneplus 10t or 9 and 9pro(for around 350-450€). Also old sony flagships can be sometimes found at a significant discount too.
I’ve been using Xiaomi phones now. They’re Redmi Note phones are fully featured phones with good hardware. The camera leaves something to be desired but HDR high refresh, fast SoC make up for that.
The android distro is very bloaty so I’d recommend installing a custom launcher for it, the added settings and battery optimizations are really good though.
Just be aware with Xiaomi phones that you might be restricted for certain things.
My memory’s not great, so I can’t remember if it was unlocking the bootloader or root, but Xiaomi locked it behind an account. You can’t unlock without setting up a Xiaomi account that includes, from memory, your email address, phone number, and date of birth.
I’ve read that newer phones are going to be even more locked down, but I don’t know if there are going to be workarounds.
It’s unfortunate yeah. A lot of data goes to Xiaomi instead of Samsung, Google and Apple. Rooting is more of a hassle than on other phones but definitely possible.
That’s still a trade off I’m willing to make to get a mid-range phone for half price of a comparable Samsung.
I’ve found the article I mentioned earlier. It’s the bootloader that currently needs a Xiaomi account to unlock.
https://xiaomiui.net/how-to-unlock-xiaomi-bootloader-and-install-custom-rom-7098/
I’m sure that I’ve read that they are going to restrict rooting and bootloader unlocking though, probably on here somewhere. I just can’t find the post.
Just be aware with Xiaomi phones that you might be restricted for certain things.
You can’t unlock without setting up a Xiaomi account that includes, from memory, your email address, phone number, and date of birth.
Your memory really is not great, and you can use throwaway emails to deal with registering/receiving codes from them.
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