My venerable Moto G5 has developed multiple independent problems. Thus I’m in the marked for a new phone and I’m looking for suggestions.
I don’t have many requirements, but those are non-negotiable:
- Must have a headphone jack
- Must have expandable storage (AFAIK that still means an SD card slot)
Bonus points for:
3) a large battery
4) not being from a chinese company
5) not having that ridiculous array of cameras on the back that seems to be common nowadays (I do want to be able take photos, but they don’t have to be good)
6) not having a selfie camera that is built into the screen
7) being a rugged / outdoors phone (which seems to correlate with point 3)
8) allows for an alternative OS, or maybe even comes with one preinstalled.
Price doesn’t really matter beyond me not wanting to get ripped off.
I already looked around a bit and found a couple of options:
a) Volla Phone X23: German company, comes with the option of their Android spin-off or Ubuntu Touch. Even has a replaceable battery. But the screenshot of the spin-off don’t look like it would be for me and Ubuntu Touch doesn’t seem to be quite there yet
b) AGM H5 Pro: from Portugal, a rugged phone, but only comes with Android 12 and I found no information on which version it can updated to. Also since it’s kinda niche, I guess I can’t put a non-google Android on it.
c) Moto G56: upgrade from what I have now. Back then I chose a Motorola because I was told I comes with the least amount of garbage pre-installed, is this still true?
I couldn’t find it in the list of models LineageOS supports, but since a lot of other models are listed I attribute that to the G56 being new, right?
d) hopefully you can give me some better options
Thank you!
Three of our family’s five previous phones would like to disagree, as they all began struggling with unreliable USB-C connections (also during charging 😒) already after one or two years of use.
And two of those weren’t even used with a USB-headphone adapter…
Never had any similar problems with 3.5mm headphone jacks in the 10 years of smartphone usage preceding that. Just clean them once in a while from dust motes and you are fine.