New “Android Go” phones show how much you can get for $100

I completely agree.

I do find it interesting though, as someone who through work has deployed a lot of cell phones for field ops - the situation seems to be kind of, sort of getting better in that respect.

We bought a ton of Moto G4s and G5s in last 18 months, and for the first year, I saw maybe one OS update and a couple security patches?. In the past six months, it's been noticably different (and these phones are only getting older, mind).

I'm writing this on a Moto G5+ which has 7.1.1 and the January security patches, including fix for KRACK vulnerability. G4 models have the same patch level and 7.0. Updates have been deployed fairly regularly lately (if still not quite on a monthly cycle).

This from Lenovo, who have historically been terrible for issuing updates in a timely manner.

I wonder if the message is finally getting to these OEMs that they can't afford to let current models wither on the vine in this IT security climate, even if only for their own selfish ends (e.g. avoiding bad press).

I really hope so. It's way overdue.

Disclaimer: total anecdata, handle with gloves.

You should consider Android One [1] phones. There's plenty of them now, including all the latest Nokia released ones. They have vanilla Android and receive all updates directly from Google.

I personally own a Xiaomi Mi A1[2] that I purchased from Amazon for under CAD$320. Solid phone and overall great specs for this price range. The only thing missing is NFC, but I don't miss it too much since the rollout of Android Pay (Google Pay) in Canada extends only to few financial institutions.

[1] https://android.com/one

[2] https://www.amazon.ca/Xiaomi-Android-Cameras-Unlocked-Versio...

I'd prefer a more classical model of having a group of volunteers work with semi-independent groups of vendors - along the lines of Debian Gnu/Linux. Rather than some semi-closed Linux + Google+hw-vendor Android.

I like the direction Google one + lineage Os seem to be taking us; even if the baseband are still a problem / back-door.

That's why I only get google/nexus devices now, as they get fast updates (I assume the pixel is the same). I've given up on Samsung.

Distribution (eg LineageOS) -> you.

If the option of installing your own OS isn't available, eg due to insufficient community interest or DRM-based fraud, then don't buy the brick in the first place.

Okay. If you only have $100 to spend, what other option exists?

Even compared to a $5 Android Tracfone you can get at any Safeway, these are pretty underwhelming. Why would I pay 12x more and only get double the RAM & LTE compared to a $5 Alcatel Android phone?

Essentially the only reason is for modern Android, but its not as though any of these Android phones (except the Nokia) will ever see multiple years of software updates.

You won't get a 4x for that price, but you can get a 5A for under $100. For that price you'll get a Snapdragon 425, 2GB of RAM, a surprisingly bright 720p display and a non-awful camera. I can only assume that these devices will sell for vastly below the listed price in their target markets, otherwise they're going to flop miserably.

https://www.banggood.com/Xiaomi-Redmi-5A-Global-Edition-5_0-...

Isn't Xiaomi subsidized by the government? Hard to compete against that in price.

Every American phone is underwhelming compared to what Chinese manufacturers are doing.

They make all of the phones, actually. You have to pay hella licensing to get a cell chip that works in the west. Then, they sell that phone to the company wholesale. Then the American company upcharges for retail.

You can get a Samsung S whatever for 1/3 the price if you don't want to connect to a cell network and don't mind waiting 3 months for it to ship.

Or just what Motorola has done with their E series

The difference isn't just the price. It's that all of these phones are also running an optimized version of Android that is going to run on the lower specs better than anything else. It doesn't matter if the specs seem the same between devices, if the vendor adds a bunch of crap or just drops aosp without optimizing for the hardware, the phone is going to run terribly. This is the current state of most low end android phone's which they appear to be addressing with Android Go phones.

I'm pretty much through buying "flagship" devices due to the pathetically short software support lifetime they have, I bought a second hand Xperia Z5 Compact for £150 about 6 months ago and loaded Lineage OS onto it.

Even my old Xperia Z3 has a port of Oreo available, and its perfectly functional.

I've been a Moto G fan since the first one, but the current one I have (3rd Generation, falcon) does not have replacable batteries. But instead it has space for a sd-card. I was not sure which one was best to have, but after having the phone for a while and the battery loosing it's juice, I would definitely be happier with a replaceable battery compared to upgradable storage.

There's an open bug in Chrome to put it in Go mode on regular hardware (crbug.com/747143).

Not sure if that would help though. The performance constraints on low-end hardware are different than on others. For instance, you want as many layers as possible on regular hardware (so transitions are smooth). However, those layers eat up RAM that low-end hardware can't afford.

Doubtful, this seems to just be another soon to be orphaned Android variant (like Android One). Uninstalling Google Play Newsstand and most of the other Google Crapware should get you close, perhaps replace Google Play Services Framework with microG to save a few hundred megs of space?

> I break phones too often

Could you stop doing that? Or get insurance that covers accidental damage. The premium will cost less than £150 every 6 months.

That is the idea, but with only 8GB of internal storage, using Progressive Web Apps for things like Reddit would be best.

Yes of course any modern smart phone can do this by just not installing apps. But there is absolutely a need for a minimal or 'dumb' smart phone. Just having Google Play with everything available is enough to get you distracted enough to go into a never ending pool of distractions and wasted time. Yes, I should certainly have the control to stop myself and I even do an application detox occasionally when I get the will power. But if I couldn't get into that useless stuff in the first place, I wouldn't need to worry about it.

I have seriously considered going straight to a dumb phone and had one much longer than most of my friends, but then I need to carry a GPS, MP3 player, and a not shitty camera. I just want a phone that actually fits in my hand with email, a light weight web browser, Spotify/Pandora, Maps, maybe some health/fitness trackers, and a half decent camera. And of course the actual phone functions to text and call when needed.

How about not installing dumb apps

It is too bad it was a private conversation, I would love to be able to point to a published form, but I discussed with one of the Googlers in charge of optimizing Android.

He did not exactly have nice things to say about how OEMs are optimizing their phones.

Basically they optimize in order to get higher benchmark score but it very often goes against general smoothness.

In the end he published a detailed article detailing how his team had optimized the pixel phone rendering pipeline so OEMs could try to do it correctly as well.

And that's for a high end phone.

However, I have got to say that after using iOS phones recently, I have not exactly been impressed with their smoothness either. Even system apps miss frames.

That's not shocking in itself, mobile computing is pretty hard, you can't even table on a stable cpu frequency (thermal throttle) but not what I expected due to the reputation of apple phones.