Generally, for me it would be Xiaomi and Samsung. Both have decent features at a decent price. I mean, they can run some games without too many problems or open TikTok.
Generally, for me it would be Xiaomi and Samsung. Both have decent features at a decent price. I mean, they can run some games without too many problems or open TikTok.
I’ll probably get flak for this due to being on Lemmy, but I’ll throw out the iPhone 16e. It’s priced really well against competition and you can often get them prepaid and unlocked at a decent discount.
And I’m sure someone will loudly tell me how wrong I am, but I’ve found the build quality to be best-in-show. I’ve dropped it with no case at least half a dozen times and you can’t even tell.
It’s not a power-user device so no, you don’t get all the fancy custom ROMs and such, but for doing all the normal phone things, I’ve not had a single issue.
I was a hardcore Android user for about 10 years, but now there’s so few real advantages over iOS that I just prefer the simplicity of iOS.
most people don’t need custom roms, contrary to good free software apps that don’t steal your and your friends data through you.
for that, literally a dumb phone is enough, and will last longer than any iphone or android. if android enshittified to the level of iphones, I would refuse to buy anything than a dumb phone, maybe not even that.
Not to:
While I would love to be a Luddite and say I don’t need a smartphone, there’s just a swath of convenience that you can’t get any other way.
A refurbished iPhone was going to be my vote.
Flagship performance, about 7 years of updates, but costs what a mid range android phone costs? Yeah it’s a banger of a deal. A similarly priced android phone would have half the performance and MAYBE half the updates.
If you just want a basic but nice phone to do modern phone things it’s hard to go wrong.