Hmm. Again without 3.5mm jack. I love my A52s and really have no idea what I’ll get next since this makes the A5x series phone effectively 100 € (or 20 %) more expensive for me. But what other is there to choose in this price range than some Chinese phones…
Motorola still makes decent budget phones with jack, radio, sd support. Even the OS is pretty light on bloatware. But the camers on them are pretty meh. Or you could get a Xiaomi, root it and flash a more private rom.
Motorolas are basically the best bang for your buck. Especially for enthusiasts. They usually come with decent battery size, 3.5mm jack, and even LED notification.
Xperia 10 series(crappy but has headphone jack, sd slot), nokias(by hmd(might be chinease, not sure) and permanently locked bootloader)
That’s the thing. Samsung is already quite bad with price/performance ratio against Chinese brands. But Sony is whole another level. If headphone jack & no China were my only requirements, I’d buy some low-end Samsung. But I also want some performance, decent camera with OIS… Sony for the price around 400 € doesn’t even record 60 fps video and also I’m not sure I could tolerate 60 Hz display again. HMD is Chinese, of course.
Current situation is I’ll just use A52s until it dies (I have it over 2 years now, recently got latest Android and battery still generally lasts 2 days of light use and a whole day of geocaching I like to do)… And then I’ll have to probably get a BT headphones with a next phone…
Well, you can install custom roms on chinease phones(xiaomi only those before hyperos) then you still have some privacy.
ITT: “I don’t want a Chinese phone and want a decent camera and performance.” “Get the Chinese phone and install this unstable ROM which makes the camera awful and randomly drains battery in a few hours, because ‘Known bugs? You tell me!’.”
Maybe the experience with custom ROMs is better now than 15 to 5 years ago when I did that kind of thing, but I still won’t be wilfully giving the Chinese more money than I have to.
