For me it’s Motorola G72. It’s excellent for the price. The phone is super lightweight despite having a 5,000 milliamper battery. The UI is very snappy and animations are very smooth (high refresh rate). It supports double tap on the back plus all other neat Motorola gestures. The under display fingerprint scanner works extremely well.
The android community, especially on /r/android is/was intensely hostile towards Motorola for no good reason. It’s basically just a Pixel/Samsung circlejerk, anything less than a flagship from those line is spit on.
Motorola’s lines have been very solid midrange phones, shipping with near-stock android, unlockable bootloaders, and just all around respectable specs for their price. They were also shipping aux ports/SD card slots for way, way longer than the others until very recently.
And before someone says “update speed”, not everyone cares. Most just want something stable.
There’s pretty good reason to avoid Motorola. It’s just not great value. Getting a 6th gen Pixel a-series will give you a device with a 5-year software lifespan. Moto on the other hand abandons their devices as soon as they can. The Pixel might not be the same price but when on sale it could be pretty close. I used to recommend Moto to people who couldn’t or didn’t want to spend much on a smartphone. These days I tell them to find a cheap Pixel a-series instead.
The Pixel a series I don’t see in public much. Usually comes months after the main Pixels come out, but the specs you get for the price point is insane. Also the fact you have top tier custom ROM support. This is the part where I shill that you should run GrapheneOS or CalyxOS.
In Canada I’ve seen a massive uptick in seeing Pixel’s in public in the last year or two
Samsung Galaxy XCover 6Pro
Headphone jack, micro SD slot, dual sim, user removable battery, notification led, ip68, 120hz display and the rubber/plastic back and sides feels great in hand. Also costs around $600
I think the ASUS Zenfone has been pretty decent. Great battery, good form factor and has a headphone jack.
The pixel 3. In Shenzhen can buy a completely new one (unsold units sent back from western stores) for $70 and it’s very good. Perfect size, great screen, fast, lightweight. Newer phones are too big and heavy. Shame that Google decided to stop making updates so you need to use a custom ROM - just need to make sure that it was not destined to Verizon stores otherwise the bootloader is locked. Luckily the seller kept separate “from Europe” and “from USA” labels on the table. Thinking to buy one for all of my relatives
Sadly the Pixel 3 is no longer getting security updates. Which custom ROMs mitigate a bit. But graphene OS has stopped supporting it. So if you’re very security sensitive you probably want to stick with a phone that’s still getting updates. That being said I love my Pixel 3A. Just sad it’s not " safe anymore "
The e-waste treadmill of phones is really disappointing. I would love for a legislator to come along perhaps the EU, and say if you stop releasing security updates you must open source the drivers. So the community can take over
