In Today's landscape new phones are mostly terrible, especially if you are into custom roms and customization, rooting and similar things. What options do I even have?
Thanks to my internship the opportunity to actually buy a good phone is actually at hand. The problem is, there doesn’t seem to be any good phones that actually have the stuff I really want…
Look, I still love to play around with custom roms and rooting, I know a lot of people have accepted reality and stuck with whatever comes by default on their phones, maybe disabling google services and other things like that.
Others have gone with a Pixel, and I’ve even seen FOSS advocates and Linux users, going for the iPhone and calling it a day, its a very sad, yet common ocurrence.
The options
What I want is very simple:
Under 400 USD
Excellent battery
Dual SIM
Micro SD sard slot
Rooting and custom roms
Good performance
That’s it. I don’t care about the camera, a small size would be nice but I don’t care too much, I don’t particularly mind if rooting is annoying or difficult as long as its possible. I have asked in some places and have noted down some of my options.
The Pixel 6 or 6A is the easy choice when it comes to rooting and custom roms, but I give up my sd card slot, it probably have to be used so the battery may not be best and I would also lose a physical SIM. Besides, the Pixel is not easily available in Mexico and signal issues are common with them, which is pretty sad, still I would love to try the huge ROM catalog available for this.
Another one that has been in my list is the Nothing Phone, it would be a fun one, but I would lose my SD card slot, still everything else seems to be there and the design would be super unique, the only problem is that it is over my budget, but I can save for a bit more without trouble. I would love to have this fun just because I would be the only one with it, but still, it does not have everything I want.
Then there’s Xiaomi, be it the Poco F5, or the Redmi Note 12 Pro or something like that, their phones are cheap, and they have everything except maybe the SD card slot in some options, also the amount of roms is not as big when the phone’s new, or maybe they’re only limited to MIUI variants. Its also a bit more annoying to root, you have to wait around a week to unlock the bootloader, but it is posible. I quite like their phones, and since I would be using roms their buggyness and adware would not affect me that much.
Final thoughts
Still, there are tons of other options to consider, maybe an older flagship device could be better, or a last gen Xiaomi phone too. Regardless, I am honestly not happy with anything. I think the only thing that would make this fun for me is if I go with the Pixel, give up on expansion storage and just enjoy the amount of personalization I will get out of it. Some people say they can have buggy updates, but I will be using my own roms and updating at my own pace anyways. If you have any phone suggestions please let me know!
Am I not supposed to have what I want? what I need?
