Phone help! ipnone vs Android vs blackberry vs whatever else

[frapjap]

Alright- the age old story. Well, not age old, but the common debate over what phone do I need has finally hit our household.

I currently have an iphone 6s and am not opposed to another, but am interested in learning the differences from first hand users.
My uses are mainly texts, phone calls, typing random notes, Waze, Pandora, FB, Amazon music app, and pictures. Basically in that order.

Things I want:
-reliability. I will not mod this phone, nor do I care to. It literally just needs to work.
- easy to operate OS.
- decent internet speed (though this has more to do with the carrier I think?)
- the camera on my 6 is fine. If its better, great, but I do not care that much so long as photos don't look like 2005.
- storage. I store way to many stupid photos, but never music, on my phone.
- headphone jack. I hate having to charge another device.
- Quick bluetooth
- Long battery life
- Good internet browser
- Multi task. I like to run Waze and Pandora/streaming music at the same time.

Things I don't need badly:
- Updates. Though they're probably a fact of life no matter what anymore.
- music player. They probably all have it, but I dont care.
- I'm not an app whore, but am okay when they do show up conveniently. Things like currency converters or units of measure converters.

This probably encompasses the capability of most phones sold these days, but figured that y'all could lend a hand.

Drop some suggestions and ask some questions that I didn't know I needed to mention!

[MinisterofDOOM]

https://www.amazon.com/ZTE-Axon-Unlocke ... th=1&psc=1

Bam. More phone than other brands are selling for $800+, with a better warranty, fully carrier unlocked, straight from the manufacturer, for $350.

The software lacks Apple or even Google levels of polish, bit it's workable and for most things (sms, camera, etc.) there are plenty of alternatives on the Play store. It's dependable, though.

My first one had a mechanical fault in the optical OIC (camera stabilization actuation). Got an advance replacement overnighted free, no hassle, very helpful costumer service.

Has a gorgeous 5.5" qhd OLED display, sd slot, QC 3.0, 802.11ac, GSM and CDMA SIM support (even both at once if you want--which I do), Android 7.1.1, fingerprint reader, and a relatively big 3200mAh battery.

Also has front facing stereo speakers and a headphone jack with a dedicated DAC and several configurable options for audio processing to suit your tastes. It's thin, with a metal unibody that feels nice in-hand (though a tiny bit too small for my tastes).

Camera hardware is great, camera software is meh. Pictures are alright, but certainly not iPhone/Samsung good.

[centralcoaster33]

I don't have much info to aid in your review, but I do have my first smart phone here. It's a Droid Moto Z. It has awesome battery life and a large, clear display (great for maps and Waze) and is not an Apple Product. It charges up pretty quick (I only charge about once a week). My only complaint, and it's a small one, is the size of the thing can feel cumbersome at times. It's kind of a large device, but it's slim and feels quit sturdy with a nice weight to it. It is fast with programs and apps. It takes better pictures day and night than our sole purpose digital camera. It integrates with all your google stuff if that's your thing (it's not for me, but is huge for my wife).

[elwesso]

Ray- I just upgraded to the iPhone 7 plus. I got the 7 plus red, 128 GB. Sounds like we use phones for similar purposes. I am not that big of a phone geek, so I don't really care if it has the latest tech or whatever, I want it to work and be 9.5/10 reliable. Basically I'm OK with the Toyota Corolla of phones.

I was happy with my previous iphone, and despite my hatred for Apple in general, I still think it's overall the best product on the market. I can count on 1 hand the number of times I've had to reboot my last 3 iphones over the last 7 years. All of my friends with Android based products are constantly rebooting, freezing, etc... I very seldom have any issues like that, the dang thing works.

The 7 plus has AWESOME battery life (like almost flip phone good), and the camera is wicked nice. For instance, if I go somewhere on the weekend and I start with a full charge, I generally don't have to charge it all weekend, and that's using it moderately. Has some other cool features like when you pull the phone out of your pocket to look at it, you don't need to press any buttons to for the home screen to come on, and some other random stuff.

It took me a little while to get used to the size, mainly because it's harder to use with 1 hand. The lack of Aux jack is annoying, but there's ways around it, and anymore with bluetooth aux cords are almost obsolete anyway (bluetooth earbuds are cheap).

[Jesda]

For battery life:
Asus

For the keyboard:
Blackberry KeyOne

For the CPU, camera, and display:
Samsung Galaxy S8

For the camera and overall polish and smoothness:
iPhone 7+

For durability and performance bang for the buck:
Anything Motorola/Lenovo

Wildcard:
Any Google-branded phone for use with Project Fi



I want the KeyOne but my BlackBerry Priv has, thus far, been super durable if not exactly blazing fast. I've used it by the pool and gotten it wet (it's not designed to be water resistant), dropped it a dozen times, and it just keeps ticking.

The Pixel is nice but overrated. It isn't even a truly stock Android experience.

If Apple ever gave the iPhone a built-in keyboard as well-integrated, useful, and seamless as Blackberry's, I'd buy it. In terms of reliability and seamlessness, Android is still inferior to iOS.

[float_6969]

I have a Microsoft Lumia 950. I love it. Camera is great, screen is great, size is great, battery is great, pretty stable, etc. It has one major downfall. The app store is anemic. I don't have apps for ANYTHING. And the apps I do have generally seem to be 2 versions behind the iOS and Android apps. My Spotify app hasn't been updated in like 2 years. My FB messenger app is a solid 3 revisions behind my wife's iOS version. I can't get snapchat. The list goes on. I wholeheartedly believe that if there were apps for this phone, it would be WAY more popular than it is. It's also starting to get to be old, but I haven't seen anything about a replacement.

[MinisterofDOOM]

Windows Phone is the mobile OS equivalent of Mitsubishi.
It's terrible, lazy, archaic, does nothing well, and even its own parent company has abandoned it. The hardware is ancient, terrible, and unsupported. The software is objectively the worst in existence. The build quality is garbage. Every single thing it does is done better by absolutely everyone else. The user experience is horrendous: unpolished, inconsistent, and the GUI makes terrible use of available screen real estate.


The only reason to buy a Windows phone is if someone has a gun to your head, and even then you should think really hard about how much you value your life.

[Kompresshun]

I've been using a Samsung Galaxy Note 5 for the past 6 months and it's been nothing but solid. It's actually the second one i've had. The wife has my old Galaxy S7 and again, nothing but solid the whole time. We switched to iPhone's at one point but during the year and a half we had iPhones, Android became leaps and bounds better than it already was. We're both already planning on both of our next phones to be Android as well and most likely Samsung again, but I will probably have a hard look at Motorola and Google's phones first.

That being said, I would just go look at phones at Best Buy and tinker around with them. I can sit here and tell you all day that Android phones are the best because of A, B, C, D, ect and someone else can give you the exact same reasons why an iPhone is a billion times better. It all comes down to which works best for you. The only advice I would truly give you is if you want a phone that lasts for 2+ years, get an iPhone or something higher end Android like Samsung or a Google phone that will be supported for quite a while after you buy it. I usually get a new phone every 1-1.5 yrs, so I typically don't worry about that stuff as much.

[float_6969]

Windows Phone is the mobile OS equivalent of Mitsubishi.
It's terrible, lazy, archaic, does nothing well, and even its own parent company has abandoned it. The hardware is ancient, terrible, and unsupported. The software is objectively the worst in existence. The build quality is garbage. Every single thing it does is done better by absolutely everyone else. The user experience is horrendous: unpolished, inconsistent, and the GUI makes terrible use of available screen real estate.


The only reason to buy a Windows phone is if someone has a gun to your head, and even then you should think really hard about how much you value your life.

Tell me how you REALLY feel about it.

[BusyBadger]

OnePlus 5

[MinisterofDOOM]

OnePlus 5

You could land a C5 on those bezels, and they STILL don't have front-facing stereo speakers. Almost as bad as the Pixel (at least the OnePlus has an unnecessarily large, stupidly-located fingerprint scanner occupying its bottom bezel).

How EVERYONE manages to screw these things up is beyond me. Fortunately, Pixel 2 renderings are showing smaller bezels with dual front-facing speakers. There's hope yet for phone design.

It's pretty simple to not screw up a phone's design:
Build a phone with as near a 1:1 screen:surface area ratio as possible
Add speakers at both ends of the screen, filling what bezel remains, facing THE USER and not anyone else
Put your fingerprint scanner where your finger actually goes, not on the bottom of the front of the phone where even a thumb is awkward to use
Don't copy Apple; their physical design has NEVER been any good, it's the software that sells people
Make the volume and power buttons easily discernible by touch alone
Make your screen OLED with 400 PPI minimum and no effing PenTile

That's it. That's all you have to do. All of that can be done in one phone, but it has NEVER been done in this history of the smart phone. Not once. Someone ALWAYS screws up at least one bullet point. Most are lucky to HIT one of those points.

I also don't understand the dual camera gimmick. I'd happily trade one (even both) cameras for features I actually need.

[BusyBadger]

I'm glad you put the ZTE up there, it's a solid phone for not a lot money and it saves me the trouble of doing it.

However, my OnePlus instead recommendation stems from two specific things Ray mentions...

- Long battery life
- Multi task. I like to run Waze and Pandora/streaming music at the same time.

All the other stuff is pretty even across the board; decent browser, internet speed, OS, 3.5mm jack, but the two I actually quoted set the OnePlus Five a bit ahead. Both phones have solid batteries (the Five has a 3300mAh and the Axon has a 3250mAh), but it's the processor that's the difference here. The Snapdragon 835 on the Five is more efficient than the 820 in the Axon. That same processor, and the extra 2-4 GB of RAM also addresses the other request - good multitasking.

Good Bluetooth is also mentioned, the Five uses Bluetooth 5 while the Axon uses 4.2. Bluetooth 5 is faster (2 Mbps vs 1 Mbps), longer range (200 m LOS vs 50 m) all while using less power. Bluetooth 5 also supports IoT devices while 4.2 does not. If you're an interactive house owner the choice is clear here, though they're an entirely different strata of phone user altogether.

The price on the Axon (and the Five to a lesser extent) is hard to beat, but I think it comes up a little short here because of what has been specifically requested.

Of any dings on the spec sheet for the Five the two that, I would think, would be most off putting to the average user it would be the USB-C charging (though I'm a big fan and it's the way it's all going anyway) and having to replace a bunch of cables and/or chargers. Though, of someone is switching ecosystems that's something that was going to be happening anyway. Then there's the lack of any dust or water resistance. I'm easy on my phones, haven't run a screen protector in years (I only use a slim profile case to add some grip) and the farthest drop my phone has had is when it gets knocked off the couch. But even I think that it's a pretty egregious thing to skip out on providing any resistance at all.

[Buzzman]

Maybe I'm a little late to the party, but one thing I hate about Apple vs. Android, is that I can't just plug the iPhone into my USB port on my laptop and drag pictures to my desktop.
Being in the handyman/contractor business, I use my camera feature a lot for my work.
With my Android phone, I just plug it into my laptop at the end of the day, and drag and drop my pics to my desktop.
I cannot do that with my wife's iPhone. I'm not a big fan of IOS in general. My wife has an iPad, and I rarely if ever touch it.
FYI, I have a two year old HTC M one 9, and other than so so battery life, it has performed flawlessly.
It also updated itself to the latest Android version, so I'm up to date.

[MinisterofDOOM]

Google's new Pixels are looking to be solid contenders if the leaks are accurate (which they always are).

They check most of the items on my list, will get good software support going forward, and will be as compatible as any Android device can be (e.g. no weird proprietary nonsense like you get from Samsung, LG, ZTE, OnePlus, etc.).

The little Pixel will have an abysmally low-res 1080p screen, but otherwise they should be great. Release date is supposed to be early October. I miss having flexibility and hackability without losing my warranty, which is the one real complaint I have about the Axon 7. I should be able to unlock my bootloader without voiding coverage for physical damage (ZTE's warranty is unusual in that it covers user negligence with a deductible, but that coverage is lost if you unlock your bootloader).

The XL should give the Galaxy S8 a run for its money: slightly better hardware and vastly better software (which is always Samsung's weakest point...Hell, it's ALL Android partner manufacturers' weakest point). It's supposed to have a 5.99'' screen, which sounds marvelous to me (5.5 is just a little too small for my tastes). If the XL doesn't have a horrid speaker arrangement, I will likely get one and retire the Axon 7 to backup duties (maybe work phone duties, since it plays nice with Verizon).

Oh, and as far as "multi-tasking", even the most budgety of budget Android phones will handle a nav app and a music app at the same time without a hiccup. Even the cheapest chinese knockoff processors are multi-core and few phones have fewer than 3GB of RAM (which is plenty). So don't stress too much about that one. Android's memory management has come a long way since the early days (when it was basically nonexistent). You never need to worry about closing apps or task killers or any of that crap. As with other Unix-likes (Linux, OSX, BSD, etc.) and modern Windows unused memory is wasted memory and the OS knows how to dedicate it to the things that matter and cache the things that don't for snappy performance and seamless multitasking.

Really, what you should look for is a form-factor that feels nice in-hand, a screen that looks nice to your eyes, and an OS implementation that seems sane to you. Everything else is kind of default in any phone running either iOS or Android these days.

Just seriously don't touch Windows Phone. My rant above wasn't a joke. It's trash, the ecosystem is trash, and there's no reason to buy one over either of the competitors, even if you're saving money (you won't be saving sanity). It should say all that needs to be said that Nadella (MS CEO) shut down (as in money-lost write-off) their mobile hardware division because he saw no future in Windows Phone and the lost investment was easier to justify than further attempts to salvage it. The last several major progressions for the Windows Phone program came from Steve Ballmer's blind groping in the dark, trying to find the door to the 21st century. The hardware and the software were all directionless garbage, and it shows.

[Kompresshun]

I just pre-ordered the Note 8, but only because Samsung gave me an insane discount because I suffered through the Note 7 mess. By the time was all said and done I paid the same for it as I would a OnePlus 5 or comparable phone. I was highly considering the OnePlus 5, but it would have been the same price in the end.

[BusyBadger]

I'm looking further a new phone currently The battery is fuxored and the phone itself likes to power down when the battery gets down to 60 percent or so (once had it power down at 70%), maybe that makes it double fuxored?

Anyway, I'd have already snagged a OnePlus but I'm on Verizon, so that's straight out the window (same as the ZTE). How OnePlus neglected the biggest LTE band from the largest carrier is puzzling to say the least. I'm wavering between an S8 Plus or other current Samsung (but I dislike TouchWiz) or dealing with my crap battery until the Pixel 2 releases (October 5th? ) and dealing with the whole "no 3.5mm jack" thing. It's a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist and no one has ever complained about.

To side with MoD here, I'm totally tired of producers trying to tell us what we need (no 3.5mm jack) while simultaneously not giving us what we do want (smaller bezels, better battery life, front facing speakers, rear mounted fingerprint scanner).

And I'm utterly surprised that Andy Rubin & Co. could disappoint so many with the Essential phone. I'm still shaking my head at the delayed release, no dust/water resistance and a dodgy camera.

[MinisterofDOOM]

The Axon 7 doesn't have official Verizon support, but it does work. I have T-mo and Verizon SIMs in mine. Plenty of other people on the ZTE forums are reporting success with Verizon as well.

[Jesda]

I wish I had larger bezels. With the curved glass on my Blackberry I keep accidentally tapping things with my fat palms.

[MinisterofDOOM]

I hate bezels, but there are certainly better and worse ways to implement them. Samsung's gimmicky curved edges are stupid functionally and add nothing desirable aesthetically. The S8 is better, but older models were pure, 10,000% underbody coating horsesh@t gimmick. Even the software functions they added to highlight the stupid design were gimmicky.

My Pixel 2 XL has glass curved at all four edges, but it curves back into a slightly protruding metal frame. This has the advantage of making the face of the phone look and feel seamless while still giving you something to grip, as well as giving (if you want such things) cases something to hook firmly onto. The curve is also almost entirely outside the area occupied by the screen, so there's no image distortion unless viewing from odd angles.
The big downside to the curved screen, particularly on the Pixel (versus the S8 and others that only curve the left and right sides and still have normal chassis at top and bottom) is that the entire front third of the phone, thickness-wise, is glass. That means there's NO POSSIBLE WAY you're going to drop this phone and not hit glass. Even most aggressively-built cases don't protrude far enough past the screen to offer much protection (though the DBrand Grip will fix that issue whenever it actually comes out). But then I have only ever dropped a smartphone once (disastrously, from a tall pickup) so I don't tend to worry about such things too much. I never use screen protectors or cases.

Apple's implementation in the iPhone X is really interesting to me, because it just seems so...lazy. The phone chassis looks like a 2nd gen iPhone...round and shiny and characterless. The way the bottom of the screen blends with the chassis looks thoroughly unsexy, but the screen itself filling out the face looks nice.

I'm still definitely not sold on rounded-off screen corners (like iPhone X, S8, V30, Pixel 2 XL). It's bad enough on the iPhone X, where you've already lost 75% of your status bar to that stupid notch, but on Android you're really just removing visibility of still-being-rendered corners. Screenshots taken on my Pixel 2 XL still show 90-degree corners, but Android's GUI keeps everything just inside those arcs so you don't miss anything. Except when you're--you know--watching fullscreen content. But then there's the whole 18:9 aspect ratio to keep most 16:9 content within the uncurved portion of the screen. It's all just...a lot of extra crap that accomplishes very little in order to check boxes on a feature list. And regardless, I'm not sure how taking screen real-estate away is supposed to improve the experience unless it lets you cram more screen into less chassis without sharp corners (which is obviously silly). I remember seeing an app on the Google Play Store a year or so ago that would simulate rounded screen corners by overlaying black curves on them and I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen. It's still dumb when it's just black glass covering my screen instead of an app.

I miss my Nexus 6's true 6'' 16:9 screen. The bezels were perfectly acceptable, especially considering that they housed speakers. It felt more usable than the 18:9 phones we have now, too. I do like that software nav keys are less intrusive on most apps with the extra height, but it's such a trivial thing, and I always tune my DPI settings in Android (a stock, non-root option now) to more true values, so my nav keys are already miniscule anyway. (Most android phones declare a much lower-than-actual DPI in order to make icons big and shiny which wastes tons of space and negates the benefit of a larger screen, so I always change mine to something closer to actual screen ppi. )

Oh, and I'm not at all surprised that Essential or any of the other crowdsourced phones have turned out to be turds. Crowdsourcing is a broken model, and most of the time what people think they want is stupid (how else would Toyota sell bajizillions of Camrys?). You end up with a product that's composed of whatever survives the collision of unfulfilled promises and consumer feedback bullet points, which generally means compromising where it counts to deliver what doesn't.
The modular build-it-yourself phones are the ones that really blow me away. There's no way in hell those products will ever be anything remotely resembling usable.

[float_6969]

I ended up with a Pixel 2 XL. I came from the last Windows Phone. There are things I miss, but things that are better. The app store and the development of the apps are so much better than what was being offered on WP, that anything they were doing better, is easily overshadowed by what Android is doing better.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the phone.

[numbnuts240]

i'm currently using a pixel 2, after many years with a galaxy s5. i'm happy.

[RicerX]

I'm considering Android again next go-round for my phone, but I'm so assimilated into the Apple ecosystem after the last several years of owning one I don't know if I can leave. I do think they need to step it up with regards to evolving the feature-set, and they need to crank up their quality control with regards to their OS updates, because there's a lot of little things that are starting to slip. Those things combined with how pretty the new Samsungs are have me curious.

In the cybersecurity landscape of things, I'm seeing far more vulnerabilities in the Android builds than iOS, so that always has me wary. Apple has the OS and its app store locked down pretty tight, and even this week there are malicious apps that seem to make their way into the play store with relative ease.

[MinisterofDOOM]

It's the old open vs closed ecosystem and both sides have their ups and downs. I, personally, would prefer to educate myself and act wisely in an open ecosystem than be denied choice in the name of safety in a closed one. It's how I feel about life in general, but it's also how I prefer my computers, regardless of form-factor.

Encountering malware on the Play Store or any other marketplace is no different than encountering it in your email or in a download on your desktop PC. Sure, very clever stuff can fool the smartest of us, but that's not where the targets are usually set. Malware developers target the broad end of the pool, knowing that even a small percentage of bites will lead to lots of results. Stuff like fake whatsapp updaters, "free" versions of paid games...stuff anyone with a brain would avoid. If you're smart enough to make an informed decision about which phone best suits your needs, you're smart enough to be equally safe on either side of the walled garden fence.

It's like the old rumor that Mac and Linux don't get viruses. Sure they do. But they're either too small a target or composed of too narrow a general userbase to be dramatically effected by them. Of course, pretty much everything BUT Windows is Linux now (Mac OSX has at its core Darwin which is a fully Unix-compliant OS) so Linux makes a huge target for exploits, so really that's not even true anymore.

Basically: don't pick your phone based on a fear of malware, because either you're going to get hit or you're not. Might as well be using a device that works well for you when it does (or doesn't) happen.

Plus, in this day of cloud-hosted, interconnected everything, hardware is often the least of the cracks in your digital armor. That company that has your PII and doesn't give two s*** about spending a little more to keep it secure is the problem.