To celebrate a particular movie’s nominations for the Golden Globes next Monday, Jan 7, we are hosting our very own Golden Lemmy award for Best Android Device on !android@lemmy.world.
Rules are simple, tell us about your favorite Android phone from 2023 in the top level comment, and the device with the most up votes wins the esteemed and coveted Golden Lemmy Award, along with 1 Lemmy Silver.
Our regular discussion will resume in 2 weeks.
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Nice initiative
I HATE my Samsung S22+ - it is literally the only phone I have ever regretted purchasing.
Probably most of that is b/c I refuse to make a Samsung account:-P.
I really hope anti-S22+ wins it all
Hisense A9 with full root + microG
A minimalist eink anti addictive machine that brings smartphones back to an actually useful tool removing literally all the bullshits.
I love my Zenfone 10. An amazing package.
Pixel 7a
There’s not really any innovation going on at this point. Pixel A series will get my vote every year for a few basic reasons:
- relatively affordable
- runs GrapheneOS
- Many years of software support received very early.
- Bonus: best smartphone camera money can buy
I have my pixel 7 and it has been great except the speakers kind of suck compared to the 6 pro and 6a
The plastic back feels pretty bad (cheap and flexes inwards) and it’s way too thick and heavy (also too large, but so is almost every phone these days). Still, a great phone if those aspects don’t bother you.
OnePlus 6
I know it’s from 2018 but it’s still the most modern smartphone with an almost perfect linux mainline support, hence the very good support by alternative mobile operating systems (not only LineageOS, but also PostMarketOS or even mobile NixOS!).
It still is powerful enough for all usages, it has a good enough camera, great battery and the design still looks quite modern.
Hear me out:
Samsung Galaxy S5
Pros:
- User replaceable battery
- water resistant and dust resistant
- Custom OSes available, easily flashable*
- Headphone jack
- IR blaster
- Heart rate monitor
*Flashing will vlow the eFuse and disable Knox. It will also make it a bit more difficult to use some apps.
Negatives:
- Its old hardware is prob gonna struggle to run most things these days.
(I’m half kidding. My S23 Ultra is hot garbage for features. Fuckers even stripped the SD card support out so my storage just got cut significantly unless I pay for a subscription instead of a single payment on an SD card that I can access in a Faraday Cage if I wanted to. Idk why they care so much about camera quality - especially when they’ve just made it more difficult and expensive to store images in bulk. If you want pro pictures, get an SLR and take pro pictures. You don’t expect that from a laptop, why do we expect it from a pocket computer?)
The best camera is the one you have on you. It’s one of the basics of photography. I don’t carry an slr with me all the time for good reason, but I do have my phone, and it being able to take good pictures is important to me.
I also often carry an APS-C mirrorless with me when carrying stuff is less of an issue, and it certainly takes way better photos, most of the time.
I went from a Motorola Pure to a Galaxy after Motorola’s acquisition by Lenovo, and I really miss the Pure.
It’s absolutely baffling how many useless programs Samsung loads on these things, as is their weird insistence on having their own custom settings that are just a downgrade from basic Android. I’ve gone looking for a setting or a feature dozens of times just to find that Samsung decided it wasn’t needed.
Why?
Why the fuck would you take away features like a notification history?
The specs are fine in terms of running whatever you feel like even several years after purchase but it’s hard to think it’s worth it when you keep running into basic design incompetence.
Tl;Dr Galaxies had decent hardware and terrible software, so when they start going after hardware features it’s time to bail.
I don’t remember ever not having notification history - you’d just have to dig a bit to get there. I think Nova used to even let you make a custom shortcut right to it.
The problem with hardware is that they were one of the last (and possibly the last of the heavy hitters) to ditch the SD cards.
But one ui does have notification history
It’s present in some models and not others. The good news is they did get complained at enough times to add it back in.
Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact.
The very last true compact phone with a 3.5mm jack, FM radio, in-device noise cancelling (only with proprietry 5-pole earphones) and hardware camera shutter button.
Oh, not to forget tool-less sim tray removal. This phone had it all.
Pixel 8 Pro. Google’s current flagship device, arguably the most secure device on the market, and is first to include Memory Tagging Extension (MTE). As such, it is supported by GrapheneOS, which I highly recommend due to the increased security and control over your own phone (starting with sandboxing the Play Store if you use it, and not giving Google full system privileges like stock/OEM OS does).
When fully integrated into the compiler and each heap allocator, MTE enforces a form of memory safety. It detects memory corruption as it happens. 4 bit tags limit it to probabilistic detection for the general case, but deterministic guarantees are possible via reserving tags.
In hardened_malloc, we deterministically prevent sequential overflows by excluding adjacent tags. We exclude a tag reserved for free tag and the previous tag used for the previous allocation in the slot to help with use-after-free detection alongside FIFO and random quarantines.
Fairphone 4
I’m really happy about my ZenFone 9. It’s small, fast, has headphone jack. A mini flagship.
