Hello, am looking for a recommendation for a semi burner phone for travel. Features I would like to have are: decent vendor support (that is, software updates), relatively inexpensive (cheap enough so that if it gets stolen or confiscated by porcine law enforcement I won’t be too sad) but nice enough to keep as a daily driver, physical SIM card, ok camera for travel photos. I am currently leaning towards the Pixel 9a but at $499 USD that is pushing a bit against affordability. Any suggestions?
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Check phones from 2018-2020, they’re all perfectly serviceable and should be cheap to buy used from someone else
id say pixel 8a its my daily driver and you can get them used for around $200 and has support for custom roms (for now)
Yep, got one arriving today
Thanks!
Burner phone = replace it every time anything private touches it. $499 phone is ridiculous for that. Also, daily driver = not a burner since it will see private data.
I’d say go to qvc.com and search for “tracfone”. It will bring up some incredibly cheap phones, some of them decent. They are sim locked to Verizon for 6 months, but the offered plans aren’t bad if you don’t need much data. Otherwise you can switch to another plan after 6 months. You could even just activate them and let them sit in a drawer for 6 months, so you can then swap sims when the time comes to take the phone on a trip. Depending on how much you travel, you could go through multiple of these annually and it’s still fairly affordable. (Don’t make e-waste, but repurpose them afterwards, give them to friends, etc.)
At this point I wouldn’t travel with anything resembling a daily driver phone. I’d bring a phone (like the above) that has essentially never been used.
Not sure about using any type of phone for travel photos, since that gives Big Brother access to the photos. There’s an app called Cryptocam on F-droid that encrypts the photos before saving them, but maybe that would attract attention in its own right.
I can’t use US sim locked models because I will be using it internationally. So it also has to be unlockable/unlocked and support international LTE/5G bands.
Note I said semi burner. I’m not looking for a true burner phone, just one that if lost/confiscated it would not be devastating. $499 is the top end of what I am willing to risk since I deem the risk of it happening as low but nonzero.
Also: Unlocked Moto G 5g 2024 is around $140 (so that you can skip the whole “wait 60 days for unlock” thing), the unlocked version supports bootloader unlocking (you need a code from the moto website) so you can use Lineage OS and Calyx OS
Eh, you can get a tracfone on Amazon that includes an free plan as promotion. Anywhere from $20 to $80.
I think there’s like a Samsung Galaxy A15 or a Moto G 5G 2024 for less than $80 that you can get with a promotion, you just go to the website, type in imei (the SIM should already inside the phone and its tied to the imei), activate, wait 60 days and it should auto unlock.
You might have to be inside the US for the activation and perhaps for the auto-unlock too.
You don’t need a 60 day plan, just 30 days (which if you have a promotion, they include a free 30 day plan), then let it expire and wait another 30 days.
You’d have to check the phone specs for band coverage. The interesting thing about Verizon sim locking is that as a condition of an acquisition they made a while back, they have to unlock the phone 6 months after activation. So depending on your requirements, you could potentially buy and activate it now, then wait 6 months and you have an unlocked phone. The Motorola G’s are also imho pretty good deals even at normal new unlocked prices.
Buy a second hand hand phone off craigslist and pay in cash. It will be way less traceable to you.
Sure but I still need a recommendation for a model 😂
Some more clarification - I plan to spend significant time overseas in a country to remain unnamed. This phone will be my daily driver in that country with a local number. I will likely get a prepaid US number for this phone as well. But I will also be traveling back and forth. I do not expect to have any important info on this phone but I am not looking for a bottom of the barrel true throwaway burner. Looking for a decent midrange phone. My risk tolerance tops out at $500 hence thinking about the pixel 9a but there may be better suggestions cheaper and/or used.
I consider my Moto G 5G 2023 model which was $250 new at the time to be a perfectly good midrange phone. One nice aspect is it has a microsd slot, so it might be possible to store your photos on a card instead of in the internal flash. You then have to worry about copies somehow getting to the internal flash, but other than that, you can remove the card before returning home. You then have to transport the card somehow, but it’s tiny and you can easily stash it without making it look like you’re hiding it, or mail it home to yourself with reasonable chance of it not being intercepted and read, or maybe just run something that writes encrypted copy into internal flash, then throw away the card.
