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Comment by nfriedly | Hacker News Reader

Man, HTC made some of my favorite phones. I wish they were still doing it.

Some of Motorola's mid-range phones are actually pretty good these days - the moto g100 has performance roughly on par with a flagship from a couple of years ago, a huge battery, a microSD slot, a headphones jack, USB-C video output with "Ready For" which is arguably better than Samsung Dex (aside from the name), and official LineageOS support. I got mine for ~$270 on ebay, and if it broke, I'd probably buy the same phone again.

The Sony Xperia 1 IV and 5 IV are also interesting, with many of those same features, but the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 CPU is hot garbage and Sony didn't provide sufficient cooling (or tuning) to keep it from overheating and thermally throttling after a few minutes of usage.

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HTC devices were great.

I too have had pretty good experiences with motorola lately. In early '21 I wanted a decent and metaphorically disposable phone so I got an unlocked moto G play from the local Target. I expected it to, like seemingly all others, have a locked bootloader and/or completely prevent root access. But I was pleasantly surprised! With a visit to motorola's website IMEI in hand and a couple hours of pulling up XDA pages (like the good old days) I had my device the way I wanted it.

It would be nice if mine didn't ship with the amount of bloatware that it did given that I couldn't find a replacement ROM at the time. But after some filesystem scouring and ADB commands it was cleaned up enough for me.

When I end up needing another new phone I'll likely hunt down another motorola, and probably the g100 given your positive experience; thanks for sharing it

I've had HTC phones since the HTC XDa IIs(Blue Angel/Harrier) Windows 2003 phone. It had Wifi and Bluetooth and a 400MHz processor. It was one of the most versatile phones of its time and helped spawn XDA developers. There were so many ROMs for this phone, even Android. I had a HTC Diamond after that and it was pretty amazing, lasting me over 6 years and i had a ton of maps downloaded to it and wikipedia. It helped a lot in Japan when wifi was just barely starting up and you need to get around with maps and train schedules.

Now Google Pixel has taken over most of the original HTC phone division, so you will have to look there for the spiritual successors.

I had a pixel previously. In general I liked it, especially the software, but I frequently missed the headphone jack and microSD slot.

Also, while mine initially had an unlockable bootloader, I sent it in for a repair of a broken USB-C port and they sent me back a phone with a permanently locked bootloader, essentially cutting it's usable lifespan in half.

I miss HTC.

My first Android was the HTC Desire-Z (T-Mobile G2 in the US), it was a great phone, I miss full keyboard phones.

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