I am going to hold out for a Pixel 7. My Pixel 3 is still kicking ass amazingly.
Thanks for posting that. It’s a useful survey of alternatives to the flagship phones.
I’m currently using a Samsung Galaxy S6 which is getting long in the tooth. My uses are primarily, email, calendar, camera, GPS and web browsing. Yeah, using it as an actual phone is just incidental. I would be forking out $1,000+ CAD for Samsung’s top end phones so I’m considering the Samsung A53. Anybody have any experience with it?
It is pretty great by all accounts.
I would miss the headphone jack* (are there adapter solutions as on the iPhone?). Also there’s no fingerprint reader on the back. It’s changed to on-screen.
*I still use mine occasionally with my 5a and with the 3a before that. It’s nice if you’re streaming at night in bed and don’t want to use Airpods or whatever. You just unplug your earbuds and go to sleep, without having to futz with the wireless headphone case.
I still count the Pixel 3 as my all time favorite phone.
But I have to admit, I’m pretty darn happy with my Pixel 6 Pro. The camera is amazing, even better than Pixel 3 by a lot. And more importantly, the screen is amazing. 1440p OLED screen. When I bought the phone, I didn’t know how much my young son would start hogging the TV. So more and more of my viewing has been switching to the phone, and it turns out, this screen is a really great one for TV and movies, especially when coupled with the Pixel Bud headphones. When Only Murders in the Building’s crisp sounds and visuals are in your head and right in your face, I actually don’t miss my big screen TV.
Canuck
3759
Omg isn’t that like a 7 year old phone? I’m pretty proud of normally going about 3 years between changes.
My OnePlus5 was around 5years old when I replaced it last year. I don’t game on my phone, so I see no need to replace it every 2-3 years. It was able to pay videos and surf the net just fine.
The battery was giving up a bit faster, but that’s about it.
Somewhat. It’s 6 years for me i think. I got it discounted at a Samsung experience store when their next phone came out.
Ditto for me plus I am a bit of a cheap bastard.
So I just got back from a trip to Costco. I wasn’t intending to buy a phone there, but they just happened to have the Samsung S20 on sale for $579 CAD which is about the same price as the Samsung A53 I was considering so SOLD!
I have that. It’s a great phone for me, but mostly I use mine for Snapchat/selfies/discord to post selfies/music
Good comparison between the Pixel 6s:
It says a lot about Google’s impressive image processing tech when you see how close pictures taken with the 6a get to the full 6 models.
It’s good enough I could certainly see getting the 6a for my daughter who wants too switch away from her iPhone SE.
Hmmm… not my use case. I am just trying to get it set up now and transfer all the stuff from my old phone. One thing though… Damn you Samsung for not putting little pull tabs on your protective plastic! I got most of it off, but annoyingly could not remove the plastic covering the sim card tray. I eventually had to score the area around the tray before I could pop it out.
Non techy wife problem!
I’m trying to get my wife onto a new phone (Galaxy Note 8 from an even older Galaxy) and she wants all her old text messages. Years worth, and she didn’t have any kind of auto-backup on. All the manual backup and restore approaches we’ve tried (Samsung Cloud, Google Drive, SD Card) get us a complaint that the old phone doesn’t have enough space to do the backup and the process fails…
Anyone else ever seen this and dealt with it…? We’ve removed everything we can think of on the old phone.
Samsung has a transfer app called Samsung Smartswitch for phone and tablet upgrades that copies stuff over including text messages. I don’t know how much free space it needs to do its work though.
There’s an app called SMS Backup & Restore that lets you back up to Dropbox.
Have you looked in settings to see what is eating up all the space?
Unfortunately, last time I used SMS Backup & Restore, it needed enough space locally to make a local copy before it backed up to Google Drive or Dropbox, etc. So I always needed many, many gigs free before it would allow me to do a backup. Hopefully they allow you to do it without a local backup now?
I had the same experience, but the simple workaround was to connect the old phone to a computer and dump all photos/videos out of local storage and onto the PC. Once the photos/videos were removed from the phone there was plenty of free space for SMS Backup & Restore to do its thing.
That sounds like an option, thanks.
On my Google Fi “shop” page, I’m now seeing pre-orders for the Galaxy Z Flip 4 for $600 (it says $400 off) and Galaxy Z Fold 4 for $1300 (it says $500 off). The Flip is a flip phone, folding up and down, and the Fold folds in half left and right half, like a book. So it’s got a whole half a phone on one side, and after you fold it out, I guess a tablet-like phone on the other side. No wonder it’s so expensive. It’s like a phone that unfolds into a tablet. Kind of. Maybe.
I should look this up, instead of speculating based on a picture.
Oh here we go:
Here’s the Flip 4:
I honestly love and miss flip phones so if I hadn’t recently gotten an S21 I’d likely be getting a Flip 4.
Crusis
3773
I was an Apple guy for about a decade. Whenever the iPhone 4 came out. I LOVE my apple phones, but…
Last year I got a Fold 3. I absolutely love it. I’ve been carrying it for a year and it has replaced having a phone and tablet. My poor ipad hadn’t been powered up in months. It’s heavy and the battery life sucks, but I’m holding onto this phone. I’m sure I’ll jump back to Apple the minute they put out a folding phone. For now, this thing is awesome.
I pre-ordered a Fold 4. I really liked the Fold 3 but I didn’t like the battery life. It appears that is improved this time around (one test had it lasting longer then an S22 Ultra). Samsung pre-order deals are quite generous (I was able to pre-order a 512 GB, buds 2 pro, watch pro, and a travel wireless charger for $900 with an S22 Ultra and Tab S7+ trade-in plus the pre-order credits).
Edit: Somebody purchased this same combo for like $540 (minus the travel charger). I am obviously doing something wrong, hehe.
