I've been a Sprint customer for 20+ years, partially because I used to work for them, and now mostly because of inertia (generally not having enough issue with them to switch), and still having a few friends that work there and some stock left over from my employee days that make me moderately biased toward their continued success. Now that they've formally been absorbed by T-Mobile, I have been getting emails asking me to come to a store to switch out my SIM to "take advantage of the new combined T-Mobile network", which I did... or at least tried to do, today.
My daughter's LG G7 Fit, which I bought unlocked from woot for cheap, swapped SIMs no problem. My nicer, purchased directly from Sprint, G7 Thinq was declared ineligible for said SIM swap "due to device". After talking to someone with a technical clue in one of the repair stores, it's apparently being blamed on antennas and bands, i.e. Sprint's specified cocktail of bands and CDMA support for their SKU of the G7 apparently makes it not completely compatible with the long-term network/band layout TMO is using. So while my phone isn't exactly going to stop working tomorrow, I am not gaining what is arguably the primary benefit for the merger - better coverage, and quite likely my coverage via the legacy Sprint network will get worse the longer we go post-merger, eventually terminating in a message that I need to upgrade or risk losing service when they want to turn the lights out on the old stuff at (I'm guessing) the 12-18 months post-merger mark. I'm sure TMO doesn't want to keep CDMA around any longer than absolutely necessary, and Verizon has already announced (but delayed, or else it'd already be gone) the sunset of their 3G network too, so the writing is on the wall.
So suddenly I am realizing I'm in the market for a new phone. I looked, and I've owned this for 2.5 years. My typical dwell time per phone is about 2.5-3 years, mostly because I tend to not trash them and I keep using them until there's a real reason to upgrade, so this is maybe a few months early in the upgrade cycle, but not too terrible I guess, since it's been paid off for 6 months.
At this point, I'd be stupid to buy a new phone that isn't 5G, and I still want Android, but I'm finding that this is tweaking a few recurring annoyances in the phone market that might be worth writing about briefly.
There are a few features that I care about on a phone beyond the obvious table stakes that define it as a smartphone. These may not be interesting to anyone but me, and are admittedly somewhat specific to my use case, but either way:
My phone and my laptop both have a reader built in, and now that I have set it up so that 1password and some other apps can use it in addition to basic login/unlock, I would never buy another phone without it. I've actually considered getting an external one for my desktop because I miss it when I'm using that. The dedicated hardware reader on the back side of the phone makes so much sense on account of the way you hold it anyway, so I have a strong preference for that, since that's my muscle memory now. Even before the current phone with the reader, the LG G4 had the power button back there, so I'm going on 5 years of turning on my phone that way.
This has been a problem for Android since the beginning, because Google didn't have enough market power to exert direct control over updates, and was left beholden to both the device manufacturers and the carriers, both of whom have their own development cycle where they add/update/break their own software and UI skin, and test cycle before they actually release updates to the end user. Google addressed this to some extent by making more and more of the OS carrier and device independent so that more bits could be updated directly via the Play Store, and moving to a monthly security release so they could patch holes in the rest of it in a way that could be deployed more rapidly without the extensive dev and test cycle that comes with a major feature release. My experience is that is still hit and miss, and I'm not sure whether the carrier or the device manufacturer or both is to blame for that. I was getting monthly security updates about quarterly (i.e. 3-ish months behind current) on this phone, but that dried up when the merger closed, so I'm currently stuck on May 2020.
- Expandable storage (microSD slot)
No matter how much storage you spring for when you buy the phone, it's probably not going to be enough, especially given the arms race that seems to be happening with camera sensors and their megapixel counts and support for 4K and even 8K video. Granted, with the accelerating transition to cloud services, streaming audio, etc, maybe that's not as important as it was a few years ago, but I'd rather just take advantage of how cheap ridiculous amounts of storage have gotten, slap a microSD chip in my phone (current one is 256GB) and not have to think about storage use, ever, even if I put a large portion of my entire music collection on it, and keep every photo and video I've ever taken with a smartphone, and back up all of my SMS weekly, and, and, and...
- Wireless charging support
I have several wireless chargers now. They're not a complete substitute for USB-C charging, but they're useful, and I'd be annoyed if I couldn't charge my phone by setting it in the built-in phone holder in the Tesla.
I have Bluetooth headphones, and a bluetooth speaker, and a bluetooth adapter to let my phone talk to my home stereo, and even in the old pickup with the aux jack, I got a little bluetooth to aux adapter so a real headphone jack is more of a nice to have anymore, but having the ability to put the big wired over-ear cans on for noise reduction and feed them from my phone is still helpful.
In the US Android market, with basically 3 carriers, there are a few main brands that pretty much everyone considers because they're consistently offered and supported by the big 3 as the flagship devices. There are others that are considered budget offerings, but that's not really my focus, nor is how much "better off" I'd be with an iPhone. This is specifically about the tradeoffs for my options in Android. Pros and cons to switching to Apple is, as Alton Brown says, another show.
Samsung makes pretty good hardware, but it is increasingly hamstrung by their insistence on forcing you to use their (usually inferior) versions of apps and features that already come with Android, most notably their voice assistant Bixby, along with their heavy-handed UI reskin of Android. And they're simply not good enough at software to justify this. I can't find the story to link to it, but I remember reading some really impressive horror stories around their development practices that made me pretty leery of ever owning another Samsung device. Between that and the lack of an MicroSD card slot [edited to add 4/5] (apparently this resurfaced briefly on the S20 but is gone again on the 21) and often a headphone jack, I left Samsung behind after the Galaxy S4 and mostly haven't regretted it. Part of why I use Android is that I like the app ecosystem. Google has a good keyboard, voice command features, tap and pay app, photo app, and OS UI. I don't want to have to fight with my device to use those things.
I haven't been paying a lot of attention to OnePlus. Brief glance through shows generally solid hardware, though it depends on the specific phone model whether it has wireless charging, none of them have microSD, and they're mostly using the under-display fingerprint reader. I had hoped they were pure Android as well, but it looks like if they were, they've become infected by the need to "improve" it with their own touches. To be fair, it seems fairly well reviewed, and the 8Pro is a reasonable competitor to the LG V60 from a spec and pricing perspective though it doesn't seem to be offered through TMO as some of the others are.
[Edited to add 4/5] The Oneplus 9 has been released since I wrote this, and initial reviews all say it is a very solid phone, a good flagship offering capable of competing with Samsung, and generally better hardware than the current Pixels, though the above concerns still exist.
Google has their Pixels, and the main selling point for those is that you're getting a pure Android experience. This is about as close to the Apple direct software upgrade cycle as you get in Android, for better or for worse. One assumes that the hardware and software integration means that they work well together and bug escape is minimal, but Google is a pretty siloed company, and seems to be getting increasingly dysfunctional, so I'm not sure how valid that assumption is anymore. Google also gives you access to the newest Android features here first, and their camera/photos app has been doing well competing with Apple for impressive quality in poor conditions. The current gen has a hardware fingerprint reader in the back where I like it, but no provision for external storage unless you count plugging something into the USB-C port. Google assumes that the only thing you needed all that storage for was pictures, and gives you unlimited storage on Google Photos, but at "high quality" which is not original quality. Also, Amazon's included photo storage for Prime members is better as a photo backup solution, as it has no such restrictions. Google really wants you to subscribe to one or more of their services to address this. I'm also sad that they have gone away from the Nexus name, because I enjoyed the hat tip to Blade Runner, but since ultimately I'm going to have to compromise somewhere, I'm considering the Pixel 5 more seriously than I have considered previous Google phones.
I've had 2 LG phones, the G4 and the G7. Been very happy with both, as LG has gotten pretty good about mostly leaving Android stock (my phone has a Google button to invoke Google's assistant), and the hardware was quite good, with one or two exceptions. LG had fairly good speakers in the phone as far as those go, and they also had a real headphone jack with a fairly decent quality DAC such that it could drive a good set of headphones surprisingly well.
The exceptions? As it ages, my fingerprint reader is getting flaky, which is kind of annoying but not bad enough to be an issue yet. Really, the big issue is that LG sucks at software updates. My phone, released in mid-2018, has already been abandoned on Android 9, despite Android 10 coming out roughly a year after the phone's initial release. Some flavors of G7 (looks like Korean and EU versions, and possibly the TMO version) got Android 10, but neither mine nor my daughter's appear to be among the chosen ones. And there are now
rumors flying [edited 4/5 to add] confirmations that they might be interested in
exiting the phone business entirely, which makes
me at least a little leery of buying another LG and potentially ending up with a truly orphaned device [edited 4/5 to add] a complete no op, since they're still coming from the factory with Android 10, despite us being on to Android 11 already. LG has also brought out their own payment app to compete with Google Pay and Samsung Pay, so it seems they're losing the plot on not substituting their own apps again.
Setting all that aside for a moment, LG has a weird collection of what might be considered their flagship devices right now. The V60 is probably the closest analog to the G series, supports 5G and has a microSD slot, but unfortunately has moved to using the under-display (and thus front-mounted) fingerprint reader that apparently doesn't work as consistently as the hardware ones, so it's on the short list, but I'd have to relearn my muscle memory of reaching for the phone and unlocking it with my index finger that is already in the right position on the back of the phone based on how I hold it. But they've also been chasing the gimmicky - they have 2 different varieties of multiscreen phones, the Wing, which has a screen that rotates 90° while leaving the lower half of the vertical screen available for simultaneous use, and a second screen case for the V60, which opens like a book to reveal 2 screens. Moving parts to break, more screens to use battery and get broken, limited case options, and generally thicker to accommodate all of this for questionable benefit. It all seems a bit "shark jumpy" to me in light of the above mentioned rumor.
I don't think this set of wants and needs is that unique to me, but maybe it is. Fortunately I have time to do some more research and not rush to make a decision since my current phone is functional.
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