My phone’s just bitten the dust and now I need to look for a new one again.
Thought I’d test the waters and see what kinds of phones people on here are using nowadays and what for, what features set them apart if any etc
Bonus points if anyone’s managed to get mainline linux running on them either via KVM or bare metal
Edit: Thanks for everyone who talked about their choices of phone, I am now writing this on a fairphone 4 and am quite happy with it so far.
Poco X3 Pro.
It was very cheap (€188) with a powerful SoC. Though it does come with a caveat: reliability. I knew about this issue since I decided to buy it. It already had motherboard replaced in-warranty not once, but twice. But since I knew about this, I had backups already, so I lost just moderate amount of data. The biggest one was Termux stuff which I forgot to backup since I explicitly excluded the Android folder. Then all the apps, since there’s no way to back it up without root.
I mean, the software is also quite buggy, but oh well, I can work around it.
Hardware wise, the mentioned SoC (Snapdragon 860), FM radio, headphone jack, IR blaster, 120Hz IPS LCD (I do not want *LED due to permanent burn-ins.), 5200mAh battery, easy to open (the back cover is soft plastic, so you can just rip it off without breaking anything, then glue it back).
Though now I am also looking at the idea of PinePhone.
Next time I’ll probably take something with MediaTek SoC instead, due to MTK engineer mode (
*#*#3646633#*#*
) due to changes by my carrier. Specifically, I am looking at the band-lock feature.188€ for a brand new Snapdragon 855 is a crazy good deal.
That was nearly 2 years ago when I got it.