I love how much you love phones, I thought I was enthusiastic about the advancement of mobile tech.
I am about to buy a new phone, in the past I always bought second hand 2-3 year old flagships, then recently I have been buying brand new entry level phones. I have owned the Wileyfox Swift 2 Plus, and you know what for £140 it has been amazing. But I have smashed it too fuck, I am thinking about buying the Motorola G5 just because Wileyfox has gone bust, or looks like it will soon so I don’t want to buy another one of their phones.
Anyways any recommendations about what to buy next, something cheap preferably. But for the first time in my life I might buy an expensive brand new phone and just buy phone insurance at the same time because I always break them…
PS: I like that you follow MKBHD, he is such a fucking don.
I really do! I’ve followed Android since way before it even launched, so to see the heights it’s climbed to today, and what different companies do with it, is really interesting. It helps that I have family and friends who work at Google so I get a little bit of an inside track. Every time I think things are stagnating a bit, different companies bring something completely new to the table. What Google have done with the Pixel 2 image processing, for example, feels like the start of a whole new era in mobile photography.
I honestly think at this point it is definitely worth buying a high-end device or upper mid-range, and if you are prone to breaking them then find some decent insurance.
If you’re gonna go with a high-end, then right now I’d say either the Pixel 2/XL, S9+, or this one. S9+ or P20 Pro have newer processors than the Pixel 2/XL (since Pixel 2 is halfway through it’s lifecycle at this point) but Pixel 2 has the advantage of it’s insane camera and direct Android updates straight from Google.
Either that or I’d say wait a month or so and see what OnePlus bring to the table with the OnePlus 6.
And definitely, MKBHD is one of the few YouTubers where I’ll watch most of his videos. Consistently great! And hilarious how, every now and then, one of his super old videos surfaces as a recommendation, from when he was a little kid with a terrible webcam
I like the gradient on the back of this phone. It usually wouldn’t be to my taste at all and I don’t know how I’d feel if I was using this day to day, but it’s different.
The camera looks like a beast as well.
I hope Apple steps back up in the camera game (not that it isn’t great already) with the next iPhone
Yeah I’m also a big fan of MKBHD. He comes across very well informed and has a good review style.
I’m personally rocking the Pixel 2XL and it has been my first jump into Android. v happy with it! I’m a Google services user rather than iCloud so dunno why I didn’t make the jump sooner
I would personally never buy another Huawei device. The software update rollout is ridiculously slow.
I bought my (unlocked) P9 in Jan 2017, and many sites at the time mentioned Android 7 Nougat would be available “soon”. Roll on 14 months, and my device has only just received that update. Throughout this time, customer service has been as useless as a chocolate teapot, continually saying that “updates are rolled out in batches” and expect to all devices to be updated by June. And then September… And so on.
Android 8 Oreo was released quite a few months ago now but there’s no sign of that yet, and I very much doubt I’ll ever see it on this device.
But that’s not unique to Huawei, is it? It’s a general problem with android. I love android, and I don’t think I’ll switch, but this is the thing that absolutely frustrates me about android. Even flagship devices are being shipped with already out of date software
My galaxy s6 got its nougat update over a year late, too, I think…
Project Treble is supposed to fix the update problem.
All phones that ship with Oreo or later have the OEM UI as a separate layer to the base Android OS layer. The idea is that you ought to be able to push the OS update without it affecting the OEM changes/customisations too much.
It’ll be interesting to see how it works in practice.
Sadly, I have 0 confidence that this will change anything in practice
Also, given how android works, its going to take roughly a millennium and a half for a significant proportion of android devices to actually ship with android 8.1…