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I feel like I am among the few who is on Neocities that actually likes the concept of the smartphone, lmao. I like the idea of the smartphone, and I like the smartphone too much to switch to a dumbphone, and I also depend on a lot of apps that do not run on dumbphones. Anyways, I been looking for a new smartphone recently, since it seems the economic situation is smoothing out, and now I am starting to have slightly more disposable income now, I think.

why replace my phone?

My current phone, the Oneplus Nord N10, was never a phone that I liked. It had a lot of issues that I am still dealing with today: for starters, it isn’t a powerful phone, if you install a custom ROM on it, your fast charging gets obliterated1, it also has this one and off issue where the phone would randomly soft reboot out of nowhere, there is also the fact the custom ROM scene for this phone is woefully sad. I also feel that the LineageOS build for this phone is pretty undercooked, with some features just not working at all. For example, the phone does not recognize the three other cameras on the device, fast charging just doesn’t work on this ROM, and I keep getting tons of “app name is not responding” notifications when an app slightly misbehaves, and that keeps showing up every 5 seconds until I kill the offending app.

Meanwhile, on the hardware side, the headphone jack no longer secures the jack in place that well, which means even the tension of the cable itself can make it disconnect and interrupt your music. I shattered the display a couple months ago, and I got a dodgy replacement screen that seems to be having touch issues in this very specific spot where the letters O and P, as well as L (and Ñ, if you use a Spanish keyboard layout like me) are, its like the screen has trouble with sensing my finger, but strangely enough, touch works just fine everywhere else on the display. There is also some small display defects, where some parts of the display look lighter in comparison, not to mention the holepunch for the camera being slightly larger, which covers some small parts of the display… There is also the dodgy battery replacement I did, which I don’t particularly trust it with like 30 W of fast charging shoved into it (if it worked, LMAO). And sure, none of these are dealbreakers, but I am honestly tired of this damn phone, and I would like something better that I would have less issues with honestly. Also getting a phone that is powerful would be a fun thing to have, it would allow me to play emulated games on the go, browse websites without issues (because some heavy ass websites do not like the Nord for this lmao), multitasking (kinda, lmao), who knows.

Another reason why I’d like to get a new phone now, is because I been seeing the whole RAM crisis unravel, and I am realizing that this will not just last a couple months, or a year, this is for the long haul and until the market stabilizes, pretty much everything that has RAM in it (anything electronics, lmao) will have that price jacked up. As of this time, the market here has not gone to shit yet (aside from SSDs), however I think it is only a matter of time until this changes. So I kinda want to get a new phone that will last me a decent long while before shit hits the fan, and not be at the mercy of a dodgy screen replacement and an AliExpress battery.

This post is kinda a continuation of this earlier post from last year, but instead of moping and being sad, I decided to research my options, and I did found a couple phones at a somewhat decent price, I guess.

on phones sold here

In the region I live, you have a number of brands that you can choose from, brands such as Oppo, Realme, Xiaomi and Huawei had success with carving out a pretty large slice of the smartphone market here. I remember back in 2016 when Xiaomi was nothing but a curiosity, that one phone brand that nerds would buy because nothing on the market here was catering to the low and mid range as Xiaomi was back then, and the other brands haven’t really established themselves at all yet at this time. A lot of smartphones sold here during this time were often utter garbage, with terrible cameras, terrible build quality, too expensive for the hardware that you got, and often lacked updates. I personally had a STF Aerial during this time, a supposedly locally manufactured phone (which was nothing but a rebranded Doogee phone) that sucked ass and had terrible performance, it was so bad it didn’t had 4G in 20-fucking-16, and the thing would heat up so much that it made me wonder if my device was faulty, or would it explode. I remember the day I switched that phone out to a Motorola Moto G4 Play, and that was so much better in every way.

If you were okay with buying used, you will quickly find out that were so many options to chose from. Being this close to the US, there are a steady stream of grey market phones getting imported here, and I remember back then, you were able to get a Samsung Galaxy S7 at a decent price if you knew where to look. This basically involves going into Facebook Marketplace, and just hunting for deals. I remember so many Samsung S5’s and S6’s littering the marketplace, as well as the many Motorola and LG phones on there too. I remember pretty well I was wanting to get my hands on a Samsung S5 or S7, and I had plans to unlock the bootloader and install LineageOS. However, I never ended up getting one, because I was worried I would end up with a Snapdragon model (which all of them had locked bootloaders) instead of the far moddable Exynos models, which would force me to use TouchWiz (god forbid).

Eventually Xiaomi would arrive here and was like “yeah here is this phone with good cameras, good performance, and a semi-decent price” and that shit started selling like hotcakes. This, together with the other Chinese brands establishing themselves here, really forced the more traditional phone manufacturers to focus on the lower end market, like it made Samsung diversify its smartphone catalogue by creating the A series of smartphones, and even Apple was half-assing it by selling last years iPhone as an affordable alternative. Motorola basically went all in with the low and mid end market, with its many E and G series of smartphones.

the requirements

You’d think I would have so many damn options then, but of course, I have some requirements that any phone I want would need to have. So, here are the following requirements:

other (lesser) important considerations

I have more considerations to keep in mind. First of all, would be the benchmarks. The Nord N10 has like a benchmark score of like 279579 on AnTuTu, which isn’t really representative on the real life performance, but with that number I am able to get a rough idea on how performant any device I would buy would be3. For example, I once had a Motorola Moto G5 Plus that had a score of 85000~, afterwards I got an HTC 10 that had a score of around 180000~. I fully know this is a pointless number, but it is the one number that lets me get an idea of how powerful a phone could be, lmao. Anyways, any devices that I would be buying would need to have a higher number than the Nord N10’s 279579 score, which at this point, would be pretty easy ngl. I guess the tl;dr of this section is just, I want a phone that isn’t just a side grade to the phone I already have. Low to midrange phones like the Moto G84 would be a great pick, but it has a Snapdragon 695 inside that thing, which is basically the same thing as the 690 that is inside the Nord N10, but refried and baked into a new chip so it can last 4 more years on the market.

Second of all, any phone worth my purchase would need to have a large battery. Having a phone with a 4200mah battery is such a gamechanger, and thankfully, it seems that most of the market agrees, and nowadays it is pretty difficult trying to find a phone with less than 4000mah, lmao.

Third of all, a high refresh rate screen would be a nice to have. The Nord N10’s display is 90hz, and it is very hard when you switch back to 60Hz, it feels miserable lmao. I would put this in the requirements above, but most phones nowadays at least have a 90Hz display or better, so yeah.

Finally, I prefer phones with Snapdragon SoCs, mostly because these tend to have better performance (traditionally, I mean) and tend to have bootloader unlocking available, however I have seen some very good phones with Mediatek inside of them, which I may consider, ngl.

So these are my requirements. As to be expected, It really cuts down my options to a limited few. Motorola has some phones that pass the requirements, there is also Xiaomi (with some caveats of course), and maybe the newer Google phones that finally released here officially. However, aside from those options, most of the choices left have dealbreakers: no headphone jacks, no SD card slots, they often don’t have any bootloader unlocking, or it’s too expensive in my region, stuff like this really.

behold, the phones…

motorola in general

If you are wondering why I am not mentioning any specific phone models, it is because Motorola phones tend to be very same-y, if that makes sense. Motorola now is just a mess of boring, iterative phones that makes it pretty hard to find the specific ones that are supported by LineageOS. I did try to find some of them listed on the wiki, however those attempts were thwarted because it seems Motorola never really keeps phones on sale for that long, and often brings out the next one to market as fast as possible. Occasionally, there are some phones that have different tiers among them, like the Edge series of smartphones, which sometimes have a “Neo”, or a “Ultra” tier that make it pretty tricky to find the specific model that is supported by LineageOS. Certain regions get worse versions of the same phone, such as the Moto G5 Plus getting a crappy 2GB RAM version of the same phone, meanwhile the rest of the world had the regular 3 or 4 GB edition.

Anyways, I don’t really know if I want a Motorola phone anyways. They often make use of plastic builds on their phones, which is fine, but plastic just doesn’t have the same heft like aluminum body phones (god I miss the HTC 10 so badly man). They have been limiting bootloader unlocking to certain models, and the general design of Moto phones nowadays feel so iterative and sad to look at. But hey, at least the Moto actions are neat to look at, I think.

Also Motorola seems to be selected by the GrapheneOS team to be that one OEM they were partnering with, and I really hope that they do manage to get a phone or something that isn’t priced an arm and a leg. And since we are talking about Motorola here, there is actually a slight chance this would be sold here. Anyways, they plan to have some sort of device in 2027, and while I could wait another year, the impending RAM shortages make me think twice.

Also fucking imagine if that GrapheneOS Motorola phone has a headphone jack and SD card. I would actually pay good fucking money for that shit, istg.

fairphone 5 or 6

The Fairphone 5 or 6 are supposedly repairable devices made by Fairphone. It is a phone that has a pretty decent sized battery (like 4415mah), has fast charging (30 W of it) and has plenty of RAM for a phone. This phone in theory would be the perfect phone for me. Its repairable, it has expandable storage, however it misses the headphone jack sadly (on the FP6). Fairphone promises something like 10 years of updates which is something unheard of in the Android space. They also allow bootloader unlocking, so you can install LineageOS on it (at least on the 5). The catch? The price. The Fairphone is insanely expensive, with the new 6 model costing a fucking insane $1100~ dollars here. Meanwhile in the US, the price is closer to $650 or so for the same model. How is it this much? I genuinely do not understand. And the fact I am paying for hardware a couple years out of date is pretty aggravating really.

clicks communicator

I remember seeing this phone announced in like some video by Michael Fisher (aka MrMobile), aka the least awful phone reviewer that still is around in 2026. Basically it is a Android phone with a keyboard strapped to it, and it is marketed as a secondary phone, however there is nothing really stopping you from going all in to using this little phone. I think the concept is neat, and it has a lot of potential really.

Immediately this phone ticks 2 of the 4 boxes. It has a headphone jack, and it also has expandible storage, it also has a smallish battery of like 4000mah4, but I think it would be enough for a device that has a 4” screen, and apparently has wireless charging and I think fast charging too? I feel that Fisher would be smart enough to make it so this phone has an unlockable bootloader, if not, it would be the most biggest fucking misstep of all time. Like, it would be so close to perfection it hurts. It is the kinda phone that would attract nerds and weirdos like myself that like the idea of like, keyboards on phones in the big ’26, and those who value having expandible storage and headphone jacks, and I think the audience that this phone would be intended for would also like to try custom ROMs for whatever reason, and in my opinion, not including bootloader unlocking would be such a misstep, got to admit. This phone is like 9 days away (at the time of writing) from fully releasing, so we will have to see what happens.

Another thing that should be pointed out is the fact that nothing is really designed with 4” displays in mind anymore. I remember back when I used a iPhone SE, and that small 4” screen often got in the way very often. Discord was near unusable on that phone, so was Twitter, and navigating websites was such a tiring chore. Sure, the physical keyboard would help a lot (since you won’t have half your screen taken up by a software keyboard, and I would like to think typing in Obsidian or messaging people on Discord with that keyboard would be oh so great), but I feel the whole keyboard novelty would wear off. Still, very tempting really. Also not a fan of the usual “digital detox” (god i fucking hate that word) kinda marketing this phone has, and the website is not clear what the intent of this phone is, like is it a secondary device intended to be used with a regular phone? Or a device that can be used standalone? I also think the marketing of like, having a secondary phone is pointless, or mayhaps I am not getting it. Who knows.

pixel fold

I know most likely owning a folding phone would be a very bad idea. But I always had an interest in the idea of the folding phone, because having a single device that can transform from a regular slab phone to a tablet in a single folding action would be awesome. However, there always been a downside of the folding phone, and that is that it is very, very fragile. The inner display is plastic, and plastic scratches. Plastic fatigues and tears. Plastic melts when it is hot. Plastic does not like wear at all. Trying to repair a folding phone is a very expensive affair, and most technicians here would probably not have any idea how to repair it. I don’t even want to think about battery repairs, or how long would the display last when being folded, all that jazz. But the novelty is so cool, and the idea of being able to get LineageOS or GrapheneOS running on a folding display phone sounds something that would be fun lmao.

Anyways, this phone has a pretty large battery, with a capacity of 4821mah, and it apparently charges at 30W, which is pretty okay, it also has no headphone jack, which is to be expected sadly, and has no expandible storage, so if I were to get a Fold, it would probably have to be a larger storage model or something along those lines. It does have bootloader unlocking, as well as custom ROM support, which is very neat tbh.

oneplus nord 5

I did say I wasn’t willing to compromise with getting a phone with 512GB and no expandible storage, but at least this phone offers that amount of storage at a surprisingly decent price, and knowing Oneplus, they tend to follow the standard procedure to unlock the bootloader. Also knowing Oneplus, they got some proprietary bullshit going on with their fast charging standard, which is an 80W charging standard called SuperVOOC™™™™™, as well as using some custom shit for DT2W5, which means most likely these won’t work in custom ROMs (unless the ROM maintainers put in the work), and I cannot imagine how long charging a 6800mah battery would take at 8W, lmao.

Anyways I don’t really have many strong opinions about this phone, from the little reviews I’ve read, it is just an okay phone. It does what it supposed to. It has more RAM than most peoples’ PCs now (with a 12GB model available) and an AnTuTu score of like 1512943 (goddamn, lmao) which means it would blow my current phone right out of the water. This phone really is a long cry from the Oneplus from old, however. This phone really is nothing but just another rebranded Oppo thing, just with slightly less bloatware, not that it matters however, since I do plan to ditch the stock ROM, warranty be damned. Anyways, this phone seems to have an slightly active custom ROM community, with it even having an official build of LineageOS. Other then that, yeah i guess it is a decent device, and I am really considering getting this phone, really.

I guess something neat that OnePlus phones tend to have is like, their resistance to getting bricked. A lot of these phones allow you access to EDL mode, which is a way to get software flashed back in case of a hard brick or if you want to return to the stock OS. Sadly, according to the XDA forums, there is no MSM flashing tool6 available for this phone, which kinda makes it sketchy if I were to switch to LineageOS, and then need to go back to stock for whatever reason.

lg v60

Ever since LG died, it seems that the internet has been flooded with unwanted stock of older LG phones. Apparently, if you search around on AliExpress, you can find a lot of LG G and V series of phones, especially the V60. The prices for these, are very low, especially considering how much phone you get. It also has an official port of LineageOS, which I could install too. It has all the features I want, it has a headphone jack that has a high quality DAC in it, it also has expandible storage, custom ROM support, a decently sized battery at like 5000mah, 8GB of RAM, all that good shit. The catch? Essentially these phones are not supported anymore. These phones are no longer updated, and LG also killed off the online bootloader unlocking service they offered. I heard there is some ways to get the bootloader unlocked on these after LG stopped making phones, apparently it makes use of EDL mode, aka the “fuck around and find out” mode. Essentially you’re doing some very low level flashing to the phone, basically getting an engineering bootloader flashed onto the thing, and praying this doesn’t turn your phone from a usable phone to essentially a brick. To be honest, I don’t really trust a phone that just has some sort of weird ass leaked bootloader, because there is a non-zero chance of this phone dying out of nowhere, yet at the same time, this phone is pretty cheap, and offers some really good specs for those who care about that sorta thing.

Another issue however, is that I live in a country that puts loads of taxes on anything electronics. It may not be as bad as Brazil is, but still, you almost never find any new electronics at MSRP. Usually, they often have a $50 to $150 dollar markup. This also applies to imports too. It fucking sucks, and it also is pretty hard to get out of paying import duties, so most likely the phone that i would be buying would get a $50 import duty slapped on to it. Which makes it much less appealing. Also to keep in mind, AliExpress tends to be very scummy, and I don’t particularly trust them at fucking all, so yeah, there’s that.

a conclusion of sorts

the list of shame motorola FP5/6 Communicator P. Fold Nord 5 LG V60
headphone jack depends no yes no no yes
unlockable bootloader yes yes ??? yes yes kinda?
expandible storage depends yes yes no no yes
custom ROM support yes yes ??? yes yes yes

Welp, here it is, I narrowed down my search to like, 6 devices. And while sorting these out, I noticed how little devices still have a headphone jack. Even rarer, is the fact there are so few devices that still have bootloader unlocking. I have ranted about the whole Android thing before, and I will spare you the rant again. But it is just sad to see how locked down Android is becoming now, sadly.

Ultimately, it really is past the golden age of custom ROMs now, isn’t it. The page for LineageOS builds really is barren now, and trying to find specific models that are still on the market is really difficult. I guess if I had to choose a phone to go with, I guess it would probably be the Nord 5, because I already know how it is to own a OnePlus phone, and the other options either are too expensive (looking at you, Fairphone), would probably break pretty fast (Pixel Fold), import costs would make it hard to justify (that Clicks Communicator), or it doesn’t have an official way to get the bootloader unlocked (LG V60). Sure, I will lose the SD card and headphone jack, but I will get a powerful phone that would probably last a long while, especially with LineageOS on it.

updates

  1. apparently there is a build of LineageOS that fixes this, but I haven’t tested it yet + it is not an official build yet.↩︎

  2. aka “generic system images”, builds of Android that can run on many devices, but often lack device specific support.↩︎

  3. kinda sad, but I been using the AnTuTu score as one of the deciding factors on what phone to get for the longest time, lmao.↩︎

  4. i say small, but 4000mah is still quite a lot lmao.↩︎

  5. double tap to wake↩︎

  6. basically a flashing tool that uses EDL mode to get a stock image flashed onto the phone↩︎