Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Why I love my cheap phone: not sponsored, just truth." video.

  1. As someone who uses smartphones very differently to how Louis do, I agree with a whole ton of what he's saying... xD I just don't get it. Smartphones got into this plateau of lack of useful innovation for a while, and then they ramped up the price absurdly for no good reason and people still keeps paying for it. And currently, it seems the tendency is for high end flagships to have LESS features and be LESS useful than mid rangers... plus all the beta testing stuff at the cost of people with too money to spend on it - foldables, dual screens and whatnot. It's all design centric to the detriment of usability. Curved everything, all glass, no headphone jack and it seems to be heading to no ports at all... it's all these obvious moves to force people to pay for more and more accessories and no one bats an eye. Even the extremely expensive and experimental stuff... if only they were useful for something, I'd understand. But all these foldable devices, that ridiculous Microsoft Surface phone thing, the dual panel phones... what is the point of having those if Android doesn't work well for them at all? All I heard from people trying to use these multi panel devices for productivity is that the experience is just crap because Android has shit support for multitasking, multiple screens, and weirdly shapped panels. And then Google went on another level of abuse selling a smartphone branded as flagship with a mid ranger SoC. Dafuk is wrong with these people? SoC has always been the one single differentiator between phone categories. Comes the f*cking brand behind Android that made the Pixel line to serve as a model for other brands to follow, and releases a new Pixel 5 with a mid ranger SoC. What the hell? And people keeps trying to justify the move. Come the f on Dunno how we got here, but man, it's just surreal. And I was again just commenting in a recent IFixIt video that, yes, if smartphone brands wanted to make a phone with removable battery and good repairability it'd be more than possible... Here's a bit of curiosity that most people probably don't know about - Samsung has a relatively modern IP68 smartphone WITH removable battery, mid ranger specs, no one talks about it in the tech rounds. It's called Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro. Launched in January 2020. Look it up. I think reviewers and tech bloggers in general are just ashamed about their constant claims and gullibility on the advertisement campaigns that batteries needed to be sealed in because of water resistance. A myth that persists to this day. We had IP68 phones with removable battery before the sealed battery trend settled in, and we still have phones like that to this day, and yet you still keep hearing people say that you can't have removable battery AND water resistance on phones together. Yes. You. Can. Anyways... I'm very brand agnostic... went from Sony to OnePlus to Xiaomi and now I'm on Samsung, but contrary to Louis' experience, my Samsung has been perfect for me.... but it's not a flagship, it's a Galaxy S10e. Bit more expensive than the Motorola, but it basically hit everything I needed on a phone - mind you, hit MORE than all of Samsung's recent flagships. First of all, totally agreed with the curved display bs. Not that it matters much to me because I always stuff my smartphone into a wallet style case, so it really doesn't make any sense to me for phones to have curved displays. I do it because instead of carrying a wallet and a smartphone, I just carry the phone inside a wallet style case. :P Also, I have broken a few phone screens in the past, the wallet style case helps protect it... oh well. Punch hole camera, notch, under display camera... also, whatever. I never cared if the phone has a chin and forehead anyways, and in fact, because I use wallet style cases, a front facing fingerprint scanner matters more than some 98.9% display coverage crap. It's one of the reasons why it took me a very long time to switch from my OnePlus 3 - for a while, all you could find was phones with the fingerprint scanner in the back of the phone, because of this bezel less f*cking trend. Can't put a button/fingerprint reader right bellow the panel anymore, it's not fashionable. ugh Galaxy S10E has - headphone jack, a side mounted fingerprint scanner doubling as the power button, dual speakers (the earpiece and a bottom firing one) that are reasonably loud, DeX support (because I wanted to try it), two cameras out of the three on the flagship S10 same quality no crippling, a flagship SoC (same SoC of the Galaxy S10), 128Gb internal storage, SD card support or dual SIM, 6Gb RAM, Bluetooth 5, smaller and lighter than my previous OnePlus 3 which always felt a bit too heavy and bulky to me. I got really used to my first Android smartphone - a Sony Xperia Z3. The display isn't curved. It has all the wireless stuff, but I don't really use it... wireless charging, power share, etc. All of this, I paid the equivalent (considering currency exchange rates and importation taxes), something like 250 dollars new. I think it's still a bit more expensive than that in the US, but here it was a pretty good deal all in all. But all of this is mostly because I use the smartphone a lot... I play a few games, have tons of apps, and I like tinkering with the thing. It's my computer outside home, and I've been spending lots of time at relatives' these days. And it's also a matter of availability too I guess... easier to find parts, support, and places selling it. I didn't have any of the problems Louis mentioned, but this is probably kind of a crapshoot. I modify my phones quite a lot on the software side... I don't mod them, but do almost everything else in the books around it - replace most brand apps with F-Droid FOSS apps, block everything, uninstall or deactivate all shovelware, and the stuff that I can't, I force them to go through Orbot... it's a process.
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