Android - what's in your pocket?

Yeah, total bummer, I really love my Essential, but I guess my next phone will be whatever the next Pixel is.

I’ll join that club/sentiment. This is hands-down the best phone I’ve ever owned. It’s Beta over VHS all over again…

My four year old LG G3 finally gave up the ghost, and stopped turning on at all. Have zero need for a current flagship (obviously, if my 4-year old phone was still sufficient) so went with the Moto Z2 Play. All around, it seems to be the closest thing to my beloved G3 so I’m pretty happy with it so far.

My biggest “gripe” has nothing to do with the phone itself - the G3 was rooted, so I could use AdAway. Losing that is tough. But voiding my warranty 1 day in with the new phone is probably not wise.

The screen protector for the Moto X4 I ended up trying is:

So far it seems good. It fits the phone nicely with the holes lining up. The adhesive seems to be working after a couple days. The screen is just as responsive. The screen may be just a tad less bright. So far it seems like a decent thing to give me a little piece of mind. My new phone looked like it had a little scratch already before I put this on even though I’ve been careful with it.

Anyone use an LG V10 or V20? I currently have the V20 and have dropped the thing (without a case or screen protector) something like twice a week since I’ve had it 1.5 years and it is still in great shape except for a small scuff on one of the corners and a couple of very fine, barely visible scratches on its screen. It’s amazing. Too bad the V30 went to a glass back. This removable metal cover can take a beating.

My wife dropped her Samsung S6 a week after she bought it and the back conpletely shattered.

I have a v20 and love it. Even though it’s over 2 years old, I still have people asking me “what phone is that” at least once a month.

EDIT: I should have added that I bought two of my sons this on eBay just this Christmas for $260 new in box, which I think is a steal.

Man trying to figure out what android phone to get is a pain in the butt, especially when on a time crunch.

Was at the beach, my Iphone 6s fell off the chair and got swallowed by a wave. Didn’t have rice or anything to put it in but it worked perfectly fine all day. Woke up in the morning to find it stuck in a boot loop and now won’t even show the apple logo anymore.

I have known for a while that once that phone died I was going to go back to budget Androids (cause phones are not worth $500+ to me imo). Trying to find a good one to buy was annoying between trying to figure out what specs will make it work ok, which ones are on a somewhat recent OS version, which ones have potential to be updated, etc…

I almost pulled the trigger on the Blu Vivo XL3 for $130 as it was on Oreo, seemed to have decent specs for $130 but then read it’s stuck on the buggy version of Oreo (8.0 not 8.1), and while I’ve had good experiences with BLU phones before I do remember they never get updates.

Ended up going to a Best Buy and buying a Moto G6. I have heard a lot of good first hand experiences about the G5 phones so I figured that was the safest bet, even though I was hoping to spend under $200 but oh well.

Edit: Apparently I was wrong and G6 is also on 8.0 with slim chances of an upgrade anytime soon. oh well.

Can anyone recommend an app that shows missed calls, messages using big icons on my home screen? The accordion menu is not doing it for me. I need something more dummy proof, like on Windows Phone.

Some home screen launchers can append the number of unseen notifications an app has to the app icon itself, including Nova, which I use.

Are there any specific android apk sites with a clean reputation? Yamaha’s app for controlling my receiver got broken and I don’t see any sign that they’re in a hurry to fix it. I’d like to try going back to an earlier version.

AndroidPolice runs APKMirror

This works for text messages, but does nothing for my phone app. I have a Moto E4 if that helps.

[edit]

I use Android Messages for texts, but the phone uses a custom Motorola app for voicemail apparently.

It works with HulloMail.

Bleh. My N5X seems like it’s getting slower by the day, and I could trade it in and pay $100 on a 0% loan over a year to get a Moto G6, but it just doesn’t seem to be much of an upgrade.

My vague understanding is that Qualcomm’s next gen - what’s going into the current flagships - makes a noticeable difference, but that hasn’t trickled down into midranges like the G6 yet. @stusser or @wumpus have any insight?

In any case, I think I’m waiting for a Pixel refresh or something else.

The 845 benchmarks much faster, but the impact that has on normal use is basically nil. $200 android phones have been “fast enough” for years now.

That doesn’t mean I’d buy anything but the best myself, but that depends on your price-sensitivity.

Hey by the way, is anyone experiencing this phenomenon in Chrome? Namely, when I’m responding to a thread on this forum, sometimes the touch screen will lose track of where the onscreen buttons are. So I’ll hit the reply button when done with my post, but Chrome or possibly my phone thinks I’m putting my fingertip a half inch further up the screen, so it doesn’t close out my post. Closing Chrome and starting it up again fixes things.

Yeah I get this in Android Chrome too.

Glad to hear it’s not just my phone. It just started happening within the last few days for me.

The big issue seems to be memory access. It’s super noticeable when an app has to be relaunched from storage - maps for example can take 5-10 seconds to load, though some of that may also be network latency.

Yeah, that’s happened to me a bunch in the past (although not, I think, on my current phone). I think that what happens is that it registers clicks as though the keyboard is still there, even though it’s not (or vice versa), so touches are offset by the height of the keyboard.

I considered reporting it in the Discourse thread, but I think it’s a chrome issue, not a Discourse issue.