Official 2017-19: Which Smartphone Should I Get?
 

Continuing from where we left off...

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...uld-i-get.html

Official 2017: Which Smartphone Should I Get?
 

I'm loving my iPhone 7 Plus. One thing i miss is the notification light i have in android. I thought i would never ever say this, but i like the LCD screen on the iPhone better than the AMOLED on the S6 Edge. The colors are indeed better calibrated.

Currently i have a LG G3, S6 Edge,Note 7 and an iPhone 7 Plus brand new in my stable. The Note 7 i never did use or turn on but here is a photo of both of them before i turned in my Note 7.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/372/31...e8f03b85_z.jpg

The only thing i don't like about the iPhone 7 Plus is that it might be too heavy for me. My hands strain after holding it for a while, but my hands are female and teenage tiny. I like the phone with the bigger screen but i might say that it was too heavy but is fine.

I use the S6 Edge and the 7+ vis a vis, but sometimes find myself seeking for the S6 to chat (whatsapp,bbm) instead of the 7 Plus, because the size is friendlier to my hands.

Built quality wise i compared both Note 7 and iPhone and even if the Note 7 was very high, the iPhone does indeed feel more premium. This coming from an android user, that her last iPhone was the original iPhone in 2007, then when android launched i changed all of my stuff to android. Now switched back to iOS because of the Note 7 fiasco.

What price point do you think a good modern smart phone should be ?

I know iphone 6 - 7s and the top Samsungs are over $500 , but then there are a lot of very nice phones in the $200 range,

I know most people do not buy their phones directly but you still pay a lot for them month to month ,

What do you get extra from a $500+ phone compared to the $200 phones ?

Are you going to turn that time bomb in? Or keeping it as a historical relic?

Note the highlighted sentence.

It really depends on what you want out of the phone.

More expensive phones tend to:
- be thinner, lighter
- use more premium materials (i.e., more metal/glass, less plastic)
- have faster processors
- have more memory
- have higher-resolution displays
- have better cameras
- have more built-in storage at the top end
- unique features like Samsung Edge, LG V20 ticker, Apple jackless headphones (zing!)
- some common high end phone features are not ubiquitous among lower-end phones - fingerprint scanner, NFC, wireless charging, fast charging, etc.
- newest features and innovations first; it usually takes at least a couple of generations for some features to trickle down

That said, you can get a perfectly good phone for $200-$300. You just have to realize you won't have the latest and greatest.

Plenty of higher-priced phones that don't really offer the latest and greatest, and plenty of the "latest and greatest" isn't fully baked.

I don't see any reason to go for a "flagship" phone any more -- even more so the inflated $700+ prices for larger phones. My Nexus 6 died recently, and the best replacement I was able to find was an essentially-same generation (and very closely related) Moto X Pure for $279.

If those weren't available as new-surplus, there are a whole passel of nice "midrange" phones in the $200-$350 range with pretty much everything I'd want. The Moto Z Play looks really nice, but not enough better than the G4 Plus to justify being half again more expensive.

Well if you upgrade more frequently, maybe you don't want to spend top dollar.

But amortized over 2 years vs. 1 year can make a big difference.

That extra $400 over 2 years is like 60 cents a day? If you take a lot of photos, maybe the premium you pay for a better camera module might be worth it.

How many pictures will you take with your phone over a year or two years?

If you care about photo quality that much, I highly recommend carrying a good point-and-shoot; for stills, the quality is vastly better than any camera phone (sensor size matters), plus a real flash, optical zoom, better image stabilization, and more effective manual controls.

Newer ones even have wifi to sync photos to your phone as you go.

If carrying a second device is too inconvenient, in many cases a good new mid-range phone is going to have a better camera than a 2-3 year old flagship. That's especially true for casual users, who don't jump on the flagship model right after release.

A cheaper phone also means insurance is a lot less important, and yes, you can also affordably upgrade sooner. The math may work slightly differently for iOS phones or outside the US, in either case where there is actually a useful secondary market, but Android devices by the time one might actually want to sell them are essentially without resale value, whether high-end or low.

I kept it for a while as a historical relic. I was in Venezuela when the phone arrived the US and was not there to unbox it/turn it on. Ultimately i got refunded $900ish of the Note 7 by samsung.com. After contacting them Several times by phone and email. With the refund i went all in and bought the 7+ in 256GB to compensate for the Note 7 64+256GB storage i was suppose to have.

I never got the chance to power up my Note 7, and when i was finally there face to face with the Note 7, i still didn't feel brave enough/curious enough to power it on. I kept the S-Pen as a memoir of the phone i wanted to have.

Well it all depends, i think now you can get a really good phone for $300 with almost none practical compromise. $200 can work too but it will be felt in the screen quality etc. I think if you're not a fan of technology nor have the need to have the lastest and the greatest a $300 budget will suffice. The phone will do everything you want it to do, and have the same tools as the more expensive one.

You're just paying built quality,processor,features and in some cases brand. For me it's more important processor and ram. A fast phone that i can throw anything at. Camera for me is secondary. I use it a lot because we use our smartphone's camera a lot that is readily available but for that i use a dslr.

I do load very intensive apps,games.. etc. I use the phone as a media consumption..

It is definitely not necessary to spend what i did but i am a fan of gadgets, computers and electronics.

Here is one of the first photos i took with the 7+ ... it does take better night photos than my S6 Edge which will show more noise in the night. I have not edited the pic or added any special setting of the 7+. As i just had it and took the photo with standard setting.

Everyone can note a bit of my finger in the image.I'm sorry... i was not used to the phone size or camera placing that slipped a little bit of human flesh in the photo.

Here is the pic: https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5581/3...ce578b63_h.jpg

I thought it turned nicely :)

I'm now on the "buy every year or so" plan with my service through one of the third-party carriers, h2owireless. I buy during the holidays when some crazy deals get offered. Certainly there are use cases that demand more expensive phones than I buy, but I think most of us are looking for a reasonable internet experience, decent texting capabilities, and sharp photos--with individual exceptions, in about that order. I'm stunned to think that in making a recommendation for a phone that the phone abilities seem almost irrelevant.

For $200-250 every year or so, I'm slightly behind the curve of current technology, but I'm still getting a decent sized screen, a processor that handles the demands I place upon the phone, and plenty of storage space. I don't demand photographic precision out of my phone and agree with nkedel that if photo quality with reasonable portability is important, then get a decent point-and-shoot. They're light, they're cheap, and their specs are better than almost any phone with a camera. I don't demand that much from a phone's camera--although I might like some better specs that go well beyond what any phone might offer--but for the cheap price of a refurbed unit, you can get a phone and a small camera for no more than $300 that will last you more than a year.

In fact, the only reason I bought a camera this past year was because a visit to the Augusta National Golf Club for a practice round in April meant that cell phones were prohibited but not cameras. So I bought a refurbed Nikon that would pass inspection and that's likely to be better for photo quality than any but the most expensive cell phones for several years to come. I'm spending a third the cost of the most expensive phones--likely to replaced every year or two anyway, maintaining independence from carriers, and getting decent technology.

I've been very happy with my current LG G4. Released in 2015 so might be a bit too old for some. But I find I have the most success picking up the flagship phones a year after release when the price is cut in half. Even with the older age, the specs are comparable to (and often better than) newly released mid-range models.

One of the unfortunate things with cameras is that it's very hard to tell photographic quality from specs (unless you're reading things like DXMark); in practice, just about everything has a fairly fast lens these days (at least at the wide end, for P&S cameras with zoom) and the nominal megapixels of the camera -- especially on phones -- greatly exceeds the real resolving power of the sensor in any but the best lighting conditions.

I'm still very happy with a 10MP camera with a large sensor (the Canon S95, from 2010.) In really good lighting conditions, the newer 20+ MP cameras may equal it, but in practice, it's generally much better. The video capabilities of a P&S that old are very limited compared to even a cheapie phone these days, though -- I don't take a lot of video, but for many people that would be a good reason not to just spend $50-$65 on eBay on a used S95, but for pure stills it's very hard to beat.

Are there any decent backup phones (Android) to have really as a spare for when something happens to my phone, lend to a friend, etc. that take nano SIM, support micro SD, and support LTE?