Hey folks, looking at getting a new phone. My current one is a Pixel 3a XL. Love the phone but it's starting to show its age and most importantly, has not had a security update for a long time.
My priorities:
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Long software support. I want to get as long as possible out of this next one.
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Decent cameras. Mainly for landscape shots when hiking or whatever. The astrophotography mode on my pixel is also pretty neat and is like to have that option.
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Price. Ideally I don't want to spend much over $600 US. I'm fine getting a return or even used in hood condition phone off eBay, but I can't stomach paying over $1000 for a phone.
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I'm interested in running a custom ROM. Graphene, Lineage, /e/is, anything. Not a deal breaker if I can't.
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Finally, probably the hardest one to find with am of the above; a headphone jack. I greatly value the ability to plug into any car, speaker system, etc without dongles or bluetooth (ew).
My candidates so far:
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Asus Zenfone 11: Meets most of my desires except Asus software support is reportedly awful, and of promise feature updates for 2 years and security updates for 4. Being a year old already that greatly reduces an already short window. Also probably has a locked bootloader and limited support with ROMs. Has a headphone jack and a decent set of cameras, and I've seen refurbs on eBay for $600.
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Pixel 9(pro?) Has everything I want (updates, cameras, grapheneos, price is ok) except no headphone jack. Might be able to DIY a case with an adapter built in so I can charge and use the jack at the same time? If anyone has experience with that I'm super interested in hearing about it. Have a 3d printer.
I know some of the budget Samsung phones have jacks, and the Moto G power, but I'm leery of getting something too budget when I want to use it for years to come.
I've seen Sony phones mentioned. Very expensive. How's the software on those? Cameras good?
Anyways, thanks for you're time if you read this. Going to be doing more reading. Really wish Asus had better software policies, otherwise that would be an easy pick.
Edit: Thanks for the thoughts, folks! I'm leaning heavily towards getting a newer pixel, either the 9a or 9 pro XL (refurbished). Probably will wait until after this year's is announced for any price drops or whatever.
Honestly, I'm shocked that anyone plays games on their phones...
Not sure if you are really serious, AFAIK mobile gaming is like the one that takes the biggest slice of the cake.
Yes, not everyone will be playing Cyberpunk 2077 on their phones, but the gaming industry has adapted a lot of games to be played for mobiles.
And yes, the touchscreen argument is still strong, but this is easily fixable for me, and lots of people with a telescopic controller.
I am not even the most mobile gamer myself, (I don't play GaaS with it) I play a lot of more casual games there (touchscreen friendly games) but for emulation with a telescopic controller you are kinda in heaven.
No need to pay for extra hardware (aside the telescopic controller) because most of our phones are already powerful enough to support a good bunch of emulators, no need to un-dust my PS1 or PS2 just to get some retro gaming, and a very personal one: no need to fight with PSPs that die on me so I can finally finish Persona 3 Portable on the go with my own hardware this time (all PSPs I own end up dying if they are not used, mostly battery issues, but my 3000 unit died because the freaking CMOS battery and I can't fix it and don't trust repair men here).
On a second thought, this could be a personal or regional experience, for example, I am shocked people use SMS on a phone in 2025 lol, where I live it is WhatsApp (or meta apps) or nothing, not even iMessage is used among iPhone users generally, the only use we have for SMS are confirmation messages and such, nobody knows what RCS is, and just thinking about SMS takes you back to early 2000s lol.
I know that people do it, but it's still shocking. The experience is horrendous, the hardware is completely underpowered, the display is absolutely tiny, the display resolution is too high, the battery is tiny, you're constantly taken out of the game by annoying interruptions, going in and out is a pain because the system will kill the app, and worst of all, pretty much every mobile app I've ever seen, as well as the stores that provide them, are absolutely riddled with ads and microtransactions. Back in the day we had Angry Birds, and it was legitimately a fun, excellent, and simple game that I really enjoyed, but that game, and the entire industry as a whole, has been absolutely ruined by exploitation. Is there another store that exists that isn't like that where you can find actually fun games to play?
It depends, compared with a gaming rig? Yes, it has been more powerful than a Nintendo Switch since ages ago and although this is not a biggest achievement, remember Switch 1 has a decent lineup almost since its conception (oh, and some even emulate Switch games there).
It depends on the phone model, I have been doing fine with my Poco F2 Pro with a 6,67 inches screen, destiny has taken me to a Samsung Galaxy S20 with 6,2 inches and I have been doing just fine, I still prefer the Poco as it didn't have any notch or camera hole whatsoever.
Not sure if I am following this correctly, but AFAIK you can tweak that from settings or developer settings.
For smaller devices yeah, it tends to be the norm, but batteries are becoming bigger, so I expect more 3D gaming time if games are optimized.
I mean, this is easily fixable with 3rd party or system inbuilt apps... Both of my devices have a gaming mode and it can enable do not disturb any time I open a game, now if you really can't allow to use that feature I understand, I could care less about somebody not been able to reach me by a phone call lol.
This depends a lot of the phone, again, and that is correct for my case with the F2 Pro as it only had 6 GB of RAM, the S20 has 8 GB of RAM and I haven't noticed this in a while, and nowadays phones are been shipped with crazy amounts of RAM so yeah...
This is no secret for anyone, and this only happened because people allowed it and that's why mobile gaming is so popular, for good and bad reasons alike.
That's why in my previous comment I said some companies have been putting games for mobile with quality.
Not sure if it counts as a store, but both Android and Apple offer a subscription tier model which let's you play lots of games without ads or dark patterns, there is also the Netflix subscription games which operate similarly...
Now talking about stores I heard there are some interesting games in Fdroid, and we now have the Epic Game Store, both on Android.
Like I said, I don't really game that much on the phone, but I keep good games in my radar from time to time, and we have some good ones like Balatro, Vampire Survivors, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, etc, I still prefer emulation on Android.
I hop in some Android subreddits on Reddit and you can get a lot of recommendations there (or ask here in Lemmy I guess), gaming on mobile shouldn't be just plain bad, we the users have the last decision whether or not engage with it, some decide no, and some decide to dive in a little just to see what they can find, but just going to the official stores will not help you as the games with the dark patterns proliferate there.
Lots of people only have a phone and still want to play games
I play things like solitaire, Spades, etc.
The most intense thing I'll play is something like Ticket to Ride. I don't enjoy action games on these screens with the on-screen controls.
Those games are playable on hardware several times slower than Tensor. Its only in medium graphics to high graphics and CPU intensive games like genshin impact, and others where you should feel the heat on tensor.
But, I haven't tested this so make sure to check in person before pulling the trigger to verify it won't have heat issues on basic games you play.
I can assure you that any Pixel device is perfectly capable of running Solitaire.